Week 26 & 27 Jan. 17-29, 2011

Hello again. Little slow with the update here. Kinda busy with working at Panerai and going back to school after. Pretty difficult not to be super lazy when I actually get home. But anyways, I got a few things done the last couple weeks so here they are.

Well the last update I had milled the barrel bridge and balance bridge out. The next Monday I got working on the barrel bridge recesses. By 8 that night I had ruined the barrel bridge. It wasn't an execution problem but a design one. The spot I recessed for the click was too deep and I milled into the spot for the reverser wheel. Needless to say I had to make another one. It has become clear to me that I need to make every part 2 times before I get it right. Knowing and accepting this has helped me not lose my sanity after things go wrong.

So anyways, here is the bridge from the top side.

In the next 2 pictures you can see the recess for the click and also the click spring. I didn't really want it to be visible so it will be underneath the click. You can also see beside the post of the click, the jewel that holds one of the reverser wheels. I put it there to have easy access and movability. 

Another thing I was doing was trying to get the bearings for the barrel in and functional. The bearings are made of bronze and will provide a bit more strength than jewels or brass would. This also allows for some adjustment of endshakes on the barrel. As of now they are working but I think they don't have enough side shake so it is a little tight. I'll have to work on that this week. Here you can see the bearings in bronze on the dial side barrel bridge.

As you can also see in the previous I made the holes for the jewels of the reversing wheels. These wheels are part of the power reserve system. I needed to reverse the direction of the barrel to the intermediate wheel on the other side. That intermediate wheel will carry the satellite wheel which is the heart of the power reserve. When the barrel is turning (during normal watch function) the satellite and intermediate wheel will turn around the barrel arbor, which will (through another wheel and rack) turn the power reserve indicator in one direction. When the arbor turns (during the winding of the watch) the intermediate wheel will be blocked by the barrel, but the satellite wheel will turn on the spot. This will turn the gears in the opposite direction, moving the power reserve indicator the opposite way. 

So if that doesn't confuse the entire shit out of you well you are smarter than most. It really isn't easy to depict what I'm talking about in pictures because when it is assembled you can't see all the parts to make an explanation. But I will try my best to show the parts. Here you can see the reversing wheels without the barrel and intermediate wheel. The wheel on the right connects with the barrel teeth (see poorly drawn red teeth). the two reverser wheels connect together, and then the one on the right connects to the intermediate wheel (see poorly drawn blue teeth)

Hopefully this makes sense to someone. If not well I guess ask some questions and I'll try to answer. You might be asking where all the other parts are for the power reserve. Well I didn't have them set up yet so you'll have to wait. Here are a couple more photos of the reversing wheels from the dial and bridge side.

The sad thing about all of this is I had another design flaw. I had set the position of the two reversing wheels too close to each other so when I originally put the jewels in the gears were meshing too much and would not turn smoothly. So after I moved one over (only 0.15mm) I had them working just fine. Heres a video of the system, sorry for the extremely poor quality video. Maybe I'll have to look into a video cam...

Kind of a confusing explanation I'm aware. Oh well.

That's it for now. One other thing is that I noticed I had set my blog for comments from registered users only. Well I changed that so any and all comments are welcome!

Week 2 August 2-7, 2010

This last week I started working on the bridges for the watch. I designed 3 bridges of which I will make from scratch. Hopefully I will use the stock barrel bridge but not quite sure about the balance bridge. I think I will end up making a new one since the stock one is a bit lower than the other bridges and probably won't work out, but I'll deal with that later.

First thing I did was mill out the new shape for the barrel bridge. This wasn't very difficult or time consuming. I just found the correct radius and milled it on the M1.

The next bridge I decided to do was the 3rd and center wheel bridge. It is the biggest so I thought it would be good to get out of the way first. I spent the first day trying to figure out how to actually go about making it. I ended up having to plug 2 holes on the mainplate so that I could make new ones in the spots I wanted. after that I glued a flattened piece of brass onto the mainplate and located where I needed to put the new screw holes and locating pins. Then I drilled the holes and tapped the screw holes.

Here you can see the rough piece after the screw head sink holes were done. The bridge is still way too high but this allows lots of room for milling the rough shape on top.

Now that I had the 2 screw holes in the correct spots, I could just screw the bridge on to do the rough milling. I didn't put the locating pins in at this point because this bridge had two screws and didn't need them.

Here I am just milling out one of the sides on the M1. Because of the shape of the bridge I couldn't mill everything out on here so I had to mill a rough image of the final dimensions. This made it much easier to file the rest of the bridge out by hand.

Here is the bridge design I made. I think it looks pretty cool! Just for a reference, this is the original bridge design so you can see how much different it will be. You can see I only milled the two right hand edges. The rest I just milled on top so I would have a guide for filing. The reason I didn't mill it out was cause the milling cutter likes to catch sometimes if you don't control it properly and I didn't want to risk it slipping and ruining the whole bridge.

I had also milled the shape for the balance bridge (even if I don't use it). It was a quick job so not a big deal.

Above is the start of the filing process. Had to do a LOT of filing! I basically spent all of Friday (about 7 hours) filing this part to the shape I designed. Filing isn't the most fun activity but it's nice to see something actually taking shape!

So after many hours of filing I was pretty close. The dimensions aren't exact or anything yet. After that I milled the top down to about the same height as the original bridges. I still have to mill out the recesses for the wheels underneath. Then after that I will have to make the holes for the jewels.

Here is the piece being milled on the top:

After getting the top milled out I made some pins out of german silver to push into the underside of the bridge for locating pins. These pins and their location are very important because it will ensure the bridge is always screwed down to the same position every time. This maybe has more importance on a bridge with only 1 screw, but it still makes a difference on any bridge. So after all of that, here is the bridge on the mainplate with the other 2 bridges I finished, looks pretty good so far I think!

And this is the cluster-cuss that is my bench when working on this project! Not easy to keep clean when you are using so many tools at once....

See ya next week!

Week 1 July 26-30, 2010

The first week was not a full week. I was technically still on holidays so I didn't come in every day or stay very long. It's not easy getting started on a project this big when there are many unanswered questions about what I am going to be doing at each step. So I figured I would just start by refinishing a few parts. All of the parts are from the setting/winding mechanism. These parts are just chrome plated on the original watch which just looks plain ugly. On the flip side of that, the finish on these parts has absolutely no impact on the look of the watch because all of these parts will be hidden under the dial. Nonetheless this is a part of fine watchmaking and is important.

All of the parts on the left are the originals, and the refinished ones on the right. Hopefully you can see that the ones on the right are much nicer. The are straight grained and the edges are beveled and polished by hand using files and special paper.

The part with the pins was the most difficult. There was no way to make the straight graining without first cutting off the pin. Then I had to drill a new hole in the same place the old one was. Next I had to make a new pin. The diameter of this pin is 0.50mm and the length is 1.00mm. I then had to make the nice straight graining on the top of the piece and also bevel and polish the edges. Then the last step was to push the new pin in place. The pin was 0.02mm bigger than the hole so that it is friction fitted and will hold when pushed in. I also had to be careful not to touch the finish or the piece would be ruined. The whole process took about 3-4 hours.

Unfortunately for me I had to do it twice because I used the wrong piece! There is also a mirrored version of the 6498 called the 6497. Basically all of the setting/winding mechanism parts are the exact opposite. So I was dumb and didn't check which one I was using. But on the plus side, the same part will be used in the WOSTEP school watch so it wasn't a total waste as I can use it in that watch.

So that was the first week.