Revisiting an old hobby

[AndyHull]

On 3/13/2021 at 1:09 AM, AndyHull said:

I'll check in the morning, but as far as I recall the tube unscrews to allow you to access the lens.
Let me take a look and confirm that.

OK I admit it isn't the next morning, but I hope this answers the question.

The lens tube unscrews into various bits and the base can be removed from the turret using a set/grub screw.

At least this is the case with the version I have. From what I have seen online, there are quite a few variations with similar designs though.

 

[AndyHull]

Completely unrelated to anything to do with watches or clocks, but as you might observed, there have been a few hints about flying "toys" in this thread.

I picked up a bunch of Eachine E58 drones. I blame covid related lockdown boredom. I wouldn't claim to be actually "dangerously" bored, but I've been sailing pretty close to that level of boredom.

These are not what you might call "real" drones, but none the less they are quite impressive little gadgets. A quadcopter with built in multi-axis gyroscope, barometer, wifi camera and 2.4GHz remote control that has a claimed range of around 100m. You can also control them from your mobile phone, and watch the action on the camera in real time. 

They look a lot like a DJI Mavic Pro, but about  1/4 of the size. They are in fact tiny, as you can see from this picture.

The real DJI Drone has a proper camera with gimbal stabilisation and GPS positioning which the toy lacks. It can also fly for around 3 miles and about 30 minutes on a charge, whereas the E58 manages less than 10 minutes. The E58 on the other hand doesn't cost the best part of a thousand pounds, and will fit in the palm of your hand. It even folds up really tiny to sit snugly in the small zippered travel bag it ships with. 

 

Here it is next to a 9V battery for scale. It doesn't use a 9V battery, I just had one lying around. In fact they uses a proprietary 3.7V LiPo battery in the drone and three AA batteries in the remote)

Naturally, being me, I didn't buy a working drone, but rather a job-lot of four dead ones for around twenty quid. The Eachine E58 retails on Amazon for about £75 each including three custom LiPo batteries (and the bunch I got actually included seven batteries), so I figured if I could make at least one work, then I would have had my money's worth.

As it happens I have three of them working and the fourth one, (which is actually a slightly different design, and claims to have a 4K camera.. I'll bet it 'aint really 4K) is awaiting a motor and some SMD transistors (and some minor brain surgery), so it looks like I've done reasonably well with this particular pile of junk. I'll probably give at leat one, maybe two away to my brother, so his kids can play with it/them.

They are held together with lots of tiny screws, and my watchmakers tools are perfect for performing surgery on them.

Surprisingly, considering they are mass produced toys, there are many sellers on ebay and aliexpress selling the parts for them, and the parts are dirt cheap.

I replaced a couple of motors, a couple of gears, one battery connector, re-fitted a couple of loose motor connectors, and un-mangled the joysticks on one of the remotes. The total cost of all of the spares was probably just under a tenner, shipped from China. Admittedly I had to wait a while for them to ship, but I was in no hurry.

Here is some random Youtuber playing with one.

I also picked up a larger Syma X8 series and a tiny little Syma X12 series quadcopter too. The first for three quid, and the latter for a pound. So if you are looking for a little light amusement during lockdown, you could do worse than pick up a few dead drones to mess about with.

 

Now place your bets ladies and gentlemen.  How long will it will take me to knock some "important" trinket from one of the bookshelves and get myself relegated to the dog house. Maybe I am "Dangerously Bored" after all.

Edited March 17, 2021 by AndyHull

[AndyHull]

Testing dive watches the Finnish way.  If anybody makes fun of your Bostok. just point them in the direction of this video.

Oh... and the oil filled cheap Pulsar is pretty impressive too.

[watchweasol]

Hi A trifle agressive but never the less an impressive test for sure.

[FLwatchguy73]

On 1/1/2021 at 6:26 AM, AndyHull said:

Let me introduce the latest 404 club microscope.

This item came up when I was looking for a collimator for my telescope, and since it was described as spares or repair with no bidders I put the lowest bid on it. So for £2.99  plus p+p I now have yet another microscope.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who acquires seemingly random gadgets! I won this old fella from Goodwill's auction site late last year. I've been hoping to acquire an all brass model as they are typically the oldest. This one is from 1916, it's a Spencer Buffalo and I believe it's a model 6. The wooden case is wrapped  in a black leatherette material like typewriter cases of the era were. Sadly, I paid significantly more than the 404 club requirements, lol.

[AndyHull]

Nice, how are the optics faring up after all these years?

Generally if they have managed to avoid any acidic fungus attack, microscopes can be cleaned up to work like new, since there are few moving parts, and little therefore to break.

There is a bit of an art to cleaning optical glass, but if you can fix watches, then you can master mirror, lens and prism cleaning pretty easily. If there is any mineralisation in the local water, then used distilled water for washing optical glass, with a little dish soap. You can also use denatured alcohol and if you are careful, acetone (which makes a good drying agent to use after the final water rinse).

Take care to avoid getting acetone on plastics, take care with alcohol on shellac and avoid getting superglue within 100 yards of lenses as it can cause irreversible fogging on some coatings, just from the fumes.

Superglues (cynoacrylate glues) have some strange characteristics, including risk of spontaneous combustion on some fabrics. Its not quite as impressive as adding concentrated  sulphuric acid to sodium hydoxide in your bath U-bend, but it does make an interesting party trick. Don't spill superglue on your cotton trousers, as you risk gluing smouldering cotton to your leg, which I can tell you, even in small doses, is a rather unpleasant experience. 

[FLwatchguy73]

Everything seems to function OK,  but I think there may be a lense component missing as it seems impossible to get this to focus.  I very carefully and thoroughly  cleaned all the optics. In the large, sliding, central tube that the eyepiece sits, I believe there is a lense missing. I'll take a picture later. I did acquire an older (late 1800's) all brass Spencer that had a handful of missing parts.  It was a gift for my eldest son. It's missing the reflector mirror and the eyepiece. He's going to clean it up and get the missing parts. 

[FLwatchguy73]

38 minutes ago, AndyHull said:

Don't spill superglue on your cotton trousers, as you risk gluing smouldering cotton to your leg, which I can tell you, even in small doses, is a rather unpleasant experience. 

Sage advice!

[AndyHull]

21 minutes ago, FLwatchguy73 said:

but I think there may be a lense component missing as it seems impossible to get this to focus

Perhaps. There is also the possibility that some previous owner has re-assembled the lens elements in the wrong order, or with the wrong spacing. 

How many lenses are there, and what do they look like?

 

[FLwatchguy73]

I'll take photos of it tonight. In detail. I appreciate the help.

[FLwatchguy73]

On 4/13/2021 at 9:30 AM, AndyHull said:

Perhaps. There is also the possibility that some previous owner has re-assembled the lens elements in the wrong order, or with the wrong spacing. 

How many lenses are there, and what do they look like?

 

Please see attached photos...

[FLwatchguy73]

If you look at this photo, you can see the bare, threaded opening at the bottom of the sliding tube. This is where I suspect a lense is missing.

[AndyHull]

Hmmm... I'm not sure about that, you may be correct, but generally these microscopes are pretty rudimentary and consist of a lens at the eyepiece, and a lens or bunch of lenses in the objective.

The critical part is the length of the tube between the lenses. Too long or too short and it will never focus.
Could it be the case that something has altered that length. Maybe some previous owner has jammed something or re-assembled it incorrectly.

Modern microscopes tend to have "standard" tube lengths, but older ones may be pretty much whatever length the manufacturer dreamed up, so over the course of its life, someone may have messed about with the tube to try to "fix" the focus, or they may have tried to use a different objective or eyepiece from the one originally supplied.

This might be worth a read.

https://www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscope-resource/primer/anatomy/tubelength/

If you grab a piece of card and cut it to roughly the current length of the tube (start a little too big and trim it down as you experiment), roll it in to a similar tube, and stick the objective in one end with a little piece of insulation tape or whatever, you should be able to mess about with the position of the eye piece relative to the objective and the distance between the objective and the subject to get an idea if the lenses are ever going to focus.

Edited April 15, 2021 by AndyHull

[AndyHull]

Nothing horological for today, unless a bit of covid lockdown, cabin fever related "time" wasting counts.

Our young mildly dinosaur obsessed nephew in the US asked us to do some "homework". 

"Draw a picture of an Edmontosaurus in stripey pyjamas, asleep under a tree by a river and.. a picture of whatever you can think of."

 

A penguin? I suggested..

"Oh yes please."

Enjoy, and remember, you can't get down off an elephant, but you can get down off a duck.

Edited May 18, 2021 by AndyHull

[AndyHull]

Today I've been fixing a Hubert Herr cuckoo clock circa 1970.

This belongs to some friends of our, who upon learning that I have a slight watch and clock obsession, asked if I would like to take a look at the cuckoo clock they picked up many years ago on their honeymoon in Cologne. 

It had suffered some rather obvious damage, most likely as a result of some curious child pulling on the weights, and dragging the thing from the wall, heavily to the ground. The pendulum rods were bent out of shape, the chains were off their pulleys, the hooks for the weights were twisted, the gong was loose,  crooked and bent, and there was some minor cosmetic damage to the case.

I popped out the mechanism, gave it a rudimentary clean, without doing a full strip down, cleaned off the old oil with some lighter fluid and re-oiled it. I then set about straightening the bent bits and fixing up the rest.

It now appears to be running perfectly. The cuckoo both cucks and coos so both the bellows work, the tick is now even and strong,  and the chime sounds nicely when the cuckoo pops out.

"That should do it", I thought, "no need to go over board and strip it down completely, after all its only a cuckoo clock, and I'm only doing this as a favour". All that is left is to let it run for 24 hours and regulate it. I'm obviously not expecting COSC levels of accuracy, but I suspect it should be possible to get within a minute per day.

I then made the mistake of looking up the price of a modern replacement.

"How Much?!" Now I'm feeling guilty. Maybe I should have stripped it all down completely after all.

At least it wasn't one of these (also a Hubert Herr).

 

I now have a new respect for the humble cuckoo clock.

 

Edited July 3, 2021 by AndyHull

[oldhippy]

It's working fine so the end results proves it didn't need anymore work on it. Those modern ones have plates so thin that re-bushing can be a nightmare.   

[AndyHull]

My wife has a fascination for weights and weighing machines, so when this small set of calibrated gram weights showed up on my ebay feed for a couple of quid, I figured it would be just her kind of thing.

I guess the original supplier qualifies them as watch related too.

[oldhippy]

That is the identical kit we had in the shop I worked in and the same place we got it from. In fact S W C S  were the number 1 in the 70's & 80's . Those little flat pieces are also weights.  

[AndyHull]

Large scale watchmaking in Scotland may have ceased with the demise of Timex in Dundee, but there are still some beautiful pieces being produced. I stumbled upon the Glasgow based anOrdian while looking through some youtube recommendations.

https://anordain.com/collections/model-1-all/products/model-1-blue-fume

There is some spectacular craftsmanship going on here.

 

[AndyHull]

You might all find this interesting.

 

 

[AndyHull]

We are back in India, visiting family, and my wife decided that we needed to modify a quilt for my nephew with some means of hanging it up. For that of course you need a sewing machine.

There are actually three sewing machines in the house here, but they are all somewhat ancient.

I thought I'd tackle the two hand cranked ones first.

Not a problem I thought, how difficult can it be to get an old hand cranked sewing machine working. 

Well as it happens, quite difficult, since they have both been lying for many years having been put away with various ailments. I have them both purring away now like... well like a well oiled sewing machine obviously.

The list of faults included gunked up lower bobbin case, rusted lower tensioner path, rusted upper tensioner, gunked up crank gears, sticky bobbin winder, stuck stitch length adjuster and of course the usual dried up oil we are all so familiar with. 

The two machines are both the archetypal "Merritt" model that you see in tailor's shops everywhere in India, and  are remarkably similar to their Scottish built Singer counterparts. They are also equally bomb proof. 

There is a third machine with a treadle which I may take a crack at later, but I managed to make the hanging tube with one of the ones have fixed, so the third machine will need to wait till I am sufficiently bored by the latest current covid restrictions to be in need of some more ancient mechanical device restoration therapy.

Edited January 2, 2022 by AndyHull

[jdm]

1 hour ago, AndyHull said:

I have them both purring away now like... well like a well oiled sewing machine obviously.

Well done. I have a Necchi, a bespoken model of the 50s, that drove me crazy at the time I tried to repair it. Apparently the lower shaft would almost seize after very little minutes of use, from there the motor overheating, etc, etc.. Then I did some minor damage while taking it apart. I know from what I have been told that the machine never ran good since new, and had too many service calls until grandma and ma finally gave up on it. But I still have hopes and a much better tooling now, so still there are hopes. 

[AndyHull]

35 minutes ago, jdm said:

Well done. I have a Necchi, a bespoken model of the 50s, that drove me crazy at the time I tried to repair it. Apparently the lower shaft would almost seize after very little minutes of use, from there the motor overheating, etc, etc.. Then I did some minor damage while taking it apart. I know from what I have been told that the machine never ran good since new, and had too many service calls until grandma and ma finally gave up on it. But I still have hopes and a much better tooling now, so still there are hopes. 

That's a pretty strange fault. Generally sewing machines have pretty loose tolerances, so I'm surprised it locks up. Is there wear or slop in one of the gears perhaps?

On one of the ones above, it was locking up, but that was down to a great lump of lint floating about inside the hand crank case, and lodging occasionally in the gear teeth.

On the Merritt there is also a tendency to lock up if you wind the crank backwards when the thread is not in the work piece, or not correctly caught from the lower bobbin, as the loose thread loops twice round the bobbin case and catches.  This is easy enough to clear, but if you continue to crank down on the handle without clearing it, you will break the needle.

 

Edited January 2, 2022 by AndyHull

[jdm]

1 hour ago, AndyHull said:

That's a pretty strange fault. Generally sewing machines have pretty loose tolerances, so I'm surprised it locks up. Is there wear or slop in one of the gears perhaps?

That makes sense but I had cleaned and inspected everything, in the end hand rotating the shaft alone in the casting I could feel that something wasn't right. I had even brought it to a machine shop to check, but they said it was OK - not that I have a great opinion of that shop doh. Will have a fresh start on it. 

[AndyHull]

34 minutes ago, jdm said:

That makes sense but I had cleaned and inspected everything, in the end hand rotating the shaft alone in the casting I could feel that something wasn't right. I had even brought it to a machine shop to check, but they said it was OK - not that I have a great opinion of that shop doh. Will have a fresh start on it. 

Could the shaft be bent rather than out of round I wonder?