Week 9 Sep. 20-25, 2010

Hello again. After quite a few weeks of travel and adventure I will hopefully be taking it easy for at least few weeks. Although I made promises to see people in Antwerp, Innsbruck and now Paris so it might not last for long!

Anyways back to the watchmaking. Last week I continued working on the regulating arm. I wasn't sure how I was going to set up the regulating pins but after a long debate I decided to use just 2 brass pins. There wont be a bottom cap on them but my teacher said it wouldn't be necessary. I don't have pictures of the pins. They are 1 degree conical and I will have to bend them straight once they are in. I had to drill 2 holes in the regulating arm and you can see them in the picture below. The holes are 0.18mm in diameter and only 0.08mm apart. Also in the picture you can see I have not yet made the straight interior corners. This is still in the just milled state. Later in the week I made nice sharp inside corners. You can kinda see them in the second photo.

I also had to do a bunch of figuring to see how big to open the hole in the middle. The Incabloc jewel will be holding down the regulating arm and stud holder so it has to be a good snug fit. But the regulating arm also has to be movable so not too tight. After a lot of drawing and checking I opened the hole to just the right size. It is on a 20 degree angle to fit the jewel setting I chose.

So after all that I filed the inside corners. I still have to harden and temper the piece, bevel the edges, and flat polish the top. So much more work left!

The other thing I did last week was make a new pallet fork bridge. If you remember from the older post the one I made before had the locating pins pushed into the bridge. Well after inspecting it further I noticed that you could kinda see the pins from the top from certain angles. And since the pin was so close to the edge of the bridge it had cracked the bridge. So my only option was to make another one. But this time I milled the pins out of the full material so I won't have this problem again.

I also worked on finishing this piece a little further than the rest. I made the bevel around the edge and for the screw and jewel. The bevels aren't polished yet but I can do that closer to the completion. I just wanted to get a feel for some bevel and finishing work. All of my bridges have interior angles (except the balance bridge). These are a sign of very high end finishing on watches because it can only be done by hand. Click this link to read more about what the hell I'm even talking about. It is not very easy to achieve. I'm sure I will be spending many hours trying to finish these interior angles. But it definitely looks the best to me. I think I have about 10-15 of these to do, so maybe I'll be decent at it by the end!

Here is the pallet fork bridge so far. Not very easy to see but it is beveled a bit! I will probably increase the bevel a bit and also once it is polished it will look much more obvious.

The balance bridge is coming along nicely. If only I would get the Incabloc jewels I ordered....

I still need to make the swan neck spring for the adjustment of the regulating arm. That has been a little tricky to design and map out for the milling process. I have to compensate for the fact the spring will be in a different position when in use so I have mill it out differently. It's a little bit of guesswork (I'm sure an engineer could figure it out) but nothing that important. Probably with 1 or 2 trial and errors I should be able to get it.

Just a picture of some of the bridges and parts I've made so far. Not everything of course but nice to look at!

And lastly a pic from my bench the other day. The sun has been hitting my bench at just the right angle in the morning for some nice light. I was adjusting the pallet jewels for a Rolex 3055 movement. And if you're interested I've posted pics from my travels on my flickr. They're also on the side of this blog. Cya!