Stephen sent me this Moeris watch, wanting to know if it’s fixable and wanting a quote…

It’s a slightly unusual watch, with an interesting dial.

The watch has a silver case.

I love these Moeris movements – clean design, well executed. I wiggle the balance with a bit of pegwood, and there is way too much side and end shake. Something is wrong …

The balance staff has a broken pivot.

This is the other side where the roller sits. The pivot is there, but damaged and slightly bent.

Also, the collet is too long for the balance and probably isn’t original.

Dirt on the pallets and escape wheel.

Also, somebody had punched grooves under the balance cock on the main plate to slightly tilt the balance cock inwards to reduce the end shake. A practice I don’t like at all. If you want to try to tilt the balance cock slightly, insert some watch paper under the outside bit. This is reversible and doesn’t damage anything.

Strangely enough, somebody decided later to remove the grooves.

In conclusion, this movement has had a lot of attention, unfortunately the wrong type of attention. Taking into account the overall value of the watch, it can only be saved by finding a donor movement to swap parts with. Anything else isn’t economical…

On a side note, you might notice that I have a new microscope. It’s a brand new stereo microscope with a third ocular for the camera, with a variable 1 – 4x magnification, and 10x and 20x oculars. You can see how the quality of my microscope shots has gone up. Not that the camera does the microscope itself justice. The real stereo image is a lot better than the quality of the camera shots – which isn’t bad either…