Horological journey

A bit of a departure from the typical contents of this blog...

I saw a blurb in my clock related activities for a class in pocket watch "disassembly, lubrication and reassembly" with the NAWCC. Two full days, hands on in the classroom at the NAWCC School of Horology. 

Regardless of now having a reasonable grasp of horology and clock repair, and being an admirer of pocket watches, I have long been intimidated by the notion of working at the dramatically smaller scale of mechanical watch movements.

Well here was certainly a way to test / exorcise those demons. And have some fun!

Kathleen and I planned a trip out east and over the weekend of April 22-23 I spent two highly enjoyable days here:

More specifically Kathleen and I stayed at the charming Railroad House Inn in nearby Marietta and I was enjoying a 9-5 schedule on a Saturday and Sunday in a NAWCC classroom in Columbia PA.

As expected the school has all the right tools for teaching horology.

AND well equipped classrooms.

There's our instructor and master watchmaker, Dave Gorrell. The classroom was well appointed with equipment and Dave was a patient and effective teacher.

I have a couple pocket watches I'm rather sentimental about and I didn't want to start my learning on one of them so I bought a couple inexpensive ones on eBay to use for the classroom.

I ended up using the Waltham as it had a more "modern" (read easier to work on) movement (circa 1907) vs. the Elgin (1889). Also the Waltham was not running at all so I couldn't make things much worse.

Here are their movements:

I also came to understand that the older Elgin was a more valuable and well-built movement as well. Much better to learn surgery with the Waltham.

Here's me getting started.

First steps are letting down the mainspring and getting the movement out of the case. That part was pretty easy.

Then removing the hands and separating the dial from the movement. Yeah that movement is about the width of two of my fingers.

In clock work you typically don't need screwdrivers smaller than about 2mm in width. The set here goes down to 0.6mm.

That's one of my more beloved pocket watches at the top of the table.

One leg up I did have in this class was my reasonably developed understanding and experience in the works of mechanical clocks. 

For example. 

Once you remove a dial the next thing to disassemble is the motion works (the parts that run the hands of the clock). Most clocks motion works will include a cannon pinion, an essential component of a movement for setting the time/turning the hands of the clock (or a watch). It's a tube shape (sometimes compressed) with some gearing and it slips/fits over the center wheel arbor. The hour wheel has an even larger tube shape and it sits over the cannon pinion.

Here's me removing an hour wheel a few years ago from an American Ingraham clock that is about 100 years old. That hour wheel was seated over the now exposed cannon pinion (gray center tube, gear at its base).

Here is a Vienna regulator movement. Once again I'm pulling off the hour wheel exposing the cannon pinion sitting over the center wheel arbor. This cannon pinion has been rather severely pinched in the middle to help it friction fit firmly to the center wheel arbor which is protruding up from the top.

Here I'm pulling the cannon pinion off the center arbor of the Waltham watch. It's friction fit onto the arbor and requires leverage to remove. The right tweezers did the trick.

Same key function. Just really, really small. This one about 1/8 of an inch in height.

Whew.

Flipping the movement over we get to the more complex stuff.

And there is something truly fundamental to watches that I only really came to understand in this class. 

I'll explain.

Clock movements can look somewhat different from one another but largely the basic components for timekeeping, wheels and arbors and such, work the same way. So while the basic mechanics of timekeeping are very similar from clock to clock, the design of the movements and and related components that drive a clock can be very different from each other.

Clock movements can be powered by springs or large hanging weights. They can be enormously different in size. Their timekeeping components can utilize swinging pendulums or spinning balance wheels driving the time train. Variations in movement designs abound.

Broadly speaking, mechanical watch movements are more similar to one another. Principally this is driven by the fact that they must be built to such small scale and must function reliably under motion. Thus as the wearer moves (walking, at sea, etc.) they still keep good time vs. a more traditional pendulum driven movement which would not do well on a ship. 

While there have been many innovations over the last 200-300 years of watchmaking, in some ways remarkably little has changed. The basic structure and layout of watch movements, their powertrain and their timekeeping components are quite similar from watch to watch. 

Whether it's a 120 year old Waltham pocket watch or a Rolex, most mechanical wristwatches have movements that look and are built to operate a lot like this:

If you revisit the previous photo of the Waltham movement above you will see that layout of the plates, barrel, wheels, balance wheel, balance spring... virtually all of it is just the same as this generic watch movement diagram.

For an absolutely mind-blowing animated 3D representation of the workings of a mechanical watch check out:

https://animagraffs.com/mechanical-watch/

Somewhere around this point in the class a whole lot of fog about watch works lifted for me. I could sense my anxiety dissipating. I may still be a watch noob but a lot of what I was doing at that point and how this all worked was starting to click in my head.

Let's continue.

Here's a few steps along and I've just removed ratchet wheel and the mainspring bridge revealing the mainspring barrel below it. 

The barrel is effectively a canister under a gear/cap. In this next photo it's there on the right. 

In these last two images you can see again how the layout of the movement of this watch is basically just like the diagram above, just turned 180 degrees.

Taking the cap off the barrel you can see mainspring is coiled inside.

Here's Dave demonstrating a tool that measures the dimensions of watch mainsprings. This one is about 0.16mm thick.

And then back at my workstation an apparently-not-uncommon thing occurred when I was removing the mainspring...

The tip of one end of my mainspring broke as I was trying to adjust it. There it is broken off in the barrel. That slot in the broken tip catches the spring to the arbor and... it's delicate.

Here's the other end of the spring and how an intact end should look.

Even when the watch is fully unwound the mainsprings still maintain a huge amount of pressure when sitting in the barrel. Another student's barrel shot across the room as he removed his mainspring. 

This didn't end the class for me. Mainsprings are just one component of the watch and are easily replaceable. Of the 8 students in the class two of us broke our mainsprings. Others had other mishaps. 

Dave was very reassuring.

Moving onward!

Removing the balance wheel was next. 

Coming soon to a blog near you!