I’ve been busy with my CNC milling machine, and anything flat (minute recorder springs, setting lever springs, etc.) is no problem at all.

The final frontier are of course wheels and pinions. The fourth axis motor that came with the milling machine wasn’t very accurate, so I had to modify it in order to be usable for watch parts.

A good indicator how small you can machine is making a small pinion. The one in the photo measures 2.5mm across, and has 18 teeth, so that’s not bad for a start. Continue reading →

To all our readers who celebrate the season – we wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And for our readers and customers all over the world who celebrate something else, or don’t celebrate at this time of the year, we do of course wish you our finest season’s greetings, and a Happy New Year!

My colleague Frank always turns up to our Guild board meetings with funky self-made watch parts, and I was getting curious. He told me that he had a CNC mill, and I pestered him to let me visit him to have a look.

Frank graciously let me come to his workshop, and this is where my little adventure starts.

We often get water damaged watches sent into the workshop, and usually, it’s game over.

This watch saw water ingress a long time ago, and it was left out “to dry”, or, more like it, left out to rust in peace.

If you don’t act quickly, it’s the end of your watch. A week will do nicely, and you have thrown away thousands or at least hundreds of pounds.

As in many other fields, data is a very important matter. We have to find our spare parts, adjust the timegrapher to the correct lift angle, etc., so it’s very important to have the right data at hand.

So far, Generale Ressorts published a printed catalogue a very long time ago, and that’s still the only source of data when it comes to matching mainsprings with movements. There are some suppliers that have entered some of this data (Cousins, Ofrei, Boley) into their own systems, but a generally available list of mainsprings and where they fit wasn’t available anywhere.

Continue reading →

If you are into Speedmasters, there are some holy grails. An Ed White is a very nice thing to have, and increasingly hard to find if your funds are limited. Even nicer is a 2998-4, and even harder to find, and harder to pay for…

Out of the blue, Angela from the States sent me an email, saying that she had a Speedmaster, and that she didn’t quite know if it was worth repairing. Attached was this photo.

I had a good look at the photo, and told her that it was indeed very much worthwhile to restore the watch, and that she was most likely to have something of considerable value there … Continue reading →