Without naming names, I just removed a balance with hairspring from a watch a client has sent in. This one beats everything I’ve seen so far.
Please don’t open up your watch, bend all sorts of things, and kill the hairspring. Keep it closed.
Watch Guy
Watch repair blog
Mea Culpa. A classic, but dangerous mix of curiosity, a screwdriver and the internet. Thanks for the triple bypass surgery on my watch, and I’ll try not to be a paramedic again when any others stop ticking!
Trevor
I guess it depends on the value of the watch; I have many that I pick up from car-boot sales and the like that essentially have no value and which I am quite happy to investigate and tinker with, but I wouldn’t dream of doing so to some of my watches – and especially not to anyone else’s – so I have the utmost respect and admiration for people like Christian who can do both!
The low monetary value of so many old watches results in them never being serviced / repaired (unless they are of sentimental value or of particular interest to the owner) and then being sold for pennies, and I think that is a great shame.
Even worse are those watches with the misfortune to have half an ounce or so of gold in their construction and which end up naked on eBay because someone decided to weight the case in for scrap; that kind of short-sighted vandalism really annoys me ;(
Yes, those gold scrappers really annoy me. Often, they overestimate the value of the gold and only find out after they have destroyed a perfectly good watch.
If that’s mine, it was like that when I found it! The hammer for the alarm was beating against the spring at some point I think 😉
No, that’s not yours – I managed to reshape that. Don’t think I’d give reshaping that a go. Well, if you pay me a couple of £100s maybe 😉