Vintage Watch Cleaning Machine

[Pip]

This arrived today! How old must a cleaning machine be to be valve powered? 60's? 70's?

   

I plugged it in via a travel adaptor (it seems to be french) and surprisingly it seemed to power up. I have no idea how it works yet, my only previous US was a cheapo Argos £30 job (although I did have a cheapo £70 chinese one for a while that gave up the ghost pretty quickly. What I'm saying is that I don't have the experience of a decent watch cleaner to base any ideas on. As you can see, it has three glass baths and each seems to have a transducer or something (although these are all loose and I'm not sure how to go about plugging them in and controlling each one individually as there only appears to be one socket) and the round bit is a 'spinner' that rotates when I fire it up. For drying watches? The top dial when turned left/right (how cool are those dials?!!!) lights up either the orange square light or the red square light. The bottom dial is a clockwork countdown timer. The leftmost button seems to be a stop button. The second button on left I guess starts the US as it's labelled 'operate' according to translate. The other three seem to fire up the Essoreuse (spin dryer according to translate) and are marked 'operate' 'timer' and 'stop' although I've not investigated them properly yet as only just translated that but I can guess how they should work.

I found a label on the inside which says it was made by a Parisian company called Sepmis, I couldn't see all the label as there was a big coil in the way so will try and access it a bit more tomorrow. There is a big coil and some valves. Scary stuff! 

If anyone has any ideas on he best way to set it up and then test it and then use it please do let me know; and if you know where I could find a manual I'll probably love you forever!

Cheers,

Pip

[wls1971]

It looks to me just to be a ultrasonic cleaner from the 1960's with each bath having its own transducer if there is only one socket I suspect each one would have to be in turn unplugged and plugged in, I cant see it being much of a watch cleaning machine as there is no agitation on any of the baths . And I certainly would not want to put watch cleaning solvents into a 50 plus year old electrical device such as this without having it looked at by a qualified electrician first, and by the look of the baths they have no covers to them so would require emptying and filling at every use.

I think it may prove to be as much use as a chocolate teapot.

[Pip]

You may well be right of course, but there again who'd buy an old watch that I have to correct every day or so and waind when I put it on when my iphone tells me the time with no bother? Sometimes I have things just because it's nice to have them. 

You are 100% though as there is no agitation device that I can see. The baths do have covers, just not shown in the pics by the way. They're made of laminated wood and will need re-laminating. The three baths are made of quite thick glass so any fluids I put in won't be going anywhere in a hurry. I was more wondering why three separate baths if you can only use one at a time? 

[ro63rto]

Careful that thing doesn't put out a massive EMP blast and knock out the entire blocks electricity you live on [emoji12]

[wls1971]

51 minutes ago, Pip said:

The three baths are made of quite thick glass so any fluids I put in won't be going anywhere in a hurry

It's not the fluids that would go anywhere it is the quite volatile fumes from them that could I think they are ideally stored in the screw top lidded jars found on most watch cleaning machines.

 

51 minutes ago, Pip said:

Sometimes I have things just because it's nice to have them

Well yes I can relate to that having a attic and cellar full of such nice things I often visit my collection of curios, and stare at them with the thought running through my mind "what on earth was I thinking"  the name they like to give it now a days is compulsive hoarding my better half having suffered my collection for a long time prefers to call it useless junk, things came to a head quite recently when she suddenly declared " I want my living room back" which to be fair did resemble Steptoes junk yard.

 

Edited October 27, 2017 by wls1971

[vinn3]

much like the first watch timing machine,  it had 7 vacuum tubes and weighed about 80 pounds [ there's one in the cellar]. vin

[oldhippy]

Made in the year dot.

[Pip]

13 minutes ago, oldhippy said:

Made in the year dot.

Well, so was I so we should be good! I'm sure this won't be perfection, but I am hoping to get it working and see what it can do. It can't be any worse than my current US, although that does take up slightly less room.