Week 15 Nov. 1-6, 2010

This week I worked on my power reserve system. First I made the new barrel arbor. It isn't an overly complicated piece but it has a lot of surfaces that need burnishing so it took a while to complete. And there was also the problem of not having a big enough Jacot tool for burnishing pivots that big. So I had to use the lathe to do it which took longer. But I think it came out looking ok.

Here is the original plan I made on the CAD program. The one half will be the same as the original arbor because that part is staying the same. But the other half will have to accommodate the power reserve system and all the parts. There is another square part I had to make for the wheel that is fixed to the arbor.

Here it is out of the lathe:

Here I am just testing the wheel that fits on the square part of the arbor for the power reserve. I have to adjust the height of the wheel to fit.

Not sure if you can see the square, but it's there...

Here is a comparison between the original arbor (left) and the new one for my watch (right). As you can see it is much bigger which means my watch will need to be thicker.

At this stage the burnishing was only partially done. The surfaces are still not quite good enough. The barrel arbor is a part that gets a lot of use so it needs to have a good burnished surface to prolong it's life. From this picture you can see the surface on the far right is quite good, but the others still have marks from the lathe on them. All these surfaces have a rotating part that touches them so they need to be burnished well.

I also made the two intermediate wheels for the power reserve system. These are basically to reverse the direction of the barrel to another wheel which carries the satellite wheel for the power reserve. It needs to operate in the opposite direction of the barrel so these two wheels are what reverses it. Since the barrel and the wheel for the satellite are the same diameter, these wheels have to be set up at different heights but still interact with each other. Again hard to explain without showing in person or with good pictures so just trust me. I am using the center wheel pinions and making them into the shape I want because they already work with the barrel. Here is the drawing for them:

And then I turned this:

Into this:

Obviously that's just one side of one of them but you get the point I hope.

And lastly I made a new screw for the ratchet wheel. It's kind of a weird screw because it has a huge diameter head (3.30mm) but is very very thin (0.35mm). So you can imagine the slot is very shallow and you have to be very careful when tightening it so you don't slip with your screwdriver. If you're wondering why the hell am I polishing screws already for a watch that isn't even close to completed (Rob), well luckily for me I chose a very common movement and I can use almost all the original parts like screws and undecorated wheels to do all the testing for it so I won't need to touch any of this stuff until the final assembly!

Lastly, I just wanted to show a few more drawings for other parts. The first one is for the barrel bridge that will go on the dial side. I need this because of the power reserve system. The bridge will also have jewels for the two intermediate wheels I talked about and also for the rack that holds the power reserve indicator. I had to change the position of a screw and locating pin but nothing big.

And here is the plan I used for the numerous times I milled out the swan neck. As you can see, lots of different milling spots and locations to center so it was not the most simple of pieces.