Unloved Watches

Walp, I broke one

2011-12-10T09:00:00.001-08:00

I got to work on my second Unloved Watch today, and it did not go as planned. Perhaps I got cocky from the great success I had with my first one.

This one is a real working man's watch from the 1950's or, perhaps, 1960's. Rather handsome stainless-steel case, AS 1130 "Wehrmachtswerk" movement with sub-seconds, relatively plain dial and hands. Some oxidation on the hands, and someone else had been practicing on the movement because it was pretty scratched up. It did run, however.

Disassembly was easy, a bit easier even than the Citizen since it's a bit bigger. The order was different than on the Citizen, though; the mainspring wheel came off first, the train bridge second, the barrel bridge and mainspring barrel next. On the other hand, the antishock was Incabloc, which was a good deal easier to deal with than the one on the Citizen, and there weren't any redundant cap jewels.

Curious detail: the pallet jewels were clear rather than the usual pink.

Cleaning and oiling went just as with the Citizen. I managed to open the mainspring barrel on this one, and dropped a couple of very small drops of Microgliss there, before reassembling. The movement was pretty dirty; had to use Rodico a lot to get stains out.

Then I assembled it. The clutch wheel assembly gave me a bit of grief, as the stem is sandwiched between the barrel bridge and the pillar plate, and it was a bit tricky to get everything to stay put. Nowhere near as hard as the date jumper spring on the Citizen though. Eventually everything was back in.

It didn't run.

I looked at it again, and discovered that the escapement wheel wasn't properly seated. Disassemble and try to get it seated. It won't go. Examine under a loupe.

Blast it.

Turns out I had broken the pivot on it somewhere along the line, presumably during reassembly. It's also conceivable that it was somewhat damaged to start with and I just finished it off; as stated, the movement looked a bit dinged-up and scratched. In any case, that staff is kaputt.

It was a learning experience though, and fortunately the movement is a pretty common one. I figure I'll come across a broken one sooner or later, and can grab the escapement wheel from that.

Live and learn, as they say. And back to the drawing board.

My First Clean and Oil

2011-11-26T11:07:00.001-08:00

Gears soaking in isopropanol after being ultrasound washed.

My first Unloved Watch—that 1971 Citizen with the 21-jewel movement I now know is named the ~~0200~~ 1802—is now cleaned, oiled, reassembled, cased, and running, and a handsome watch it is. Well, in my eyes, anyway. Whether it actually keeps time I don't know yet; it has been running for an hour or so and seems to be doing fine so far, which means it hasn't gone completely berserk, I guess.

It felt like a completely different watch when and after reassembling it after cleaning; the balance moves way, way more freely, and in fact it started ticking away for a few seconds just by handling the case, after I cased it. Before cleaning, it was sort of barely running, the balance did move but "heavily," and had clear trouble running when I held it different positions. No more, now it's like it wants to run, and springs to life at the first excuse.

That's a way-cool feeling. Like a kind of magic!

It's also much, much easier to set the time—everything moves freely; before there was so much friction I unscrewed the crown trying to do that. I put a drop of Loc-Tite there to get it to stay put.

As an aside, the crown on this watch is too small for a handwound. It's like they used the same case and crown for automatics and handwounds, and winding this is not all that much fun.

My "workbench"—my desk, really. Clockwise from the movement in the center: pin vise, #2 and #5 tweezers, screwdrivers, brass tweezers, loupe, toy microscope, tea strainer, basket with case waiting to be washed, ultrasound washer, rinsing bowl with water, little tray with isopropanol, pegwood, Pec-Pads, Rodico, pithwood, oil well, finger cots, Moebius 8000 oil, Moebius Microgliss oil, Loc-Tite, cleaning brush, parts tray with dial, hands, and movement spacer ring, movement holder.

It's been a quite a trek to get to this point. I have bought more and better tools—Dumoxel #2 tweezers and a set of Bergeon screwdrivers, sizes from 0.5 to 1.2 mm—, more supplies—pithwood, Rodico (a funky blue putty that picks up oil like magic, and is useful for other things too), another kind of oil, a couple of new crystals.

And a book: The Watch Repairer's Manual by H. B. Fried. I bought a used 1961 edition, because the new edition from 1986 costs £164 at Amazon UK, which is a bit rich for my blood. Anyway I figured watches can't have changed all that much since then, at least at the book's basic level—it's about simple handwound movements with no complications. And it's very, very good indeed.

I also bought a gadget: a small ultrasound washer. Sounds high-tech and expensive but isn't, really. It's about the size and cost of a toaster, and it washes things with ultrasound. Ultrasound washers aren't strictly required for watch repair (after all, watchmakers somehow managed to survive for about 300 years before they were invented), but it has one major advantage—it pretty much gets rid of the requirement to use naphtha, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, or other really nasty organic solvents. Instead, plain water and detergent plus ultrasound get the job done at least as well, if not better. I have studied chemistry back in the day, and have a healthy respect for that stuff. I do not want to get anywhere near them if I don't have industrial-grade ventilation in place, which I don't. So I bought the ultrasound.

All ready to go into the wash. Also my tweezers, 'cuz, why not?

Thus armed and armored I set forth, with the help of that book and the good folks at Global Horology Forum. Here's what I did.

Washing: I used a dilute solution of ordinary, un-perfumed alkaline household detergent, with anionic and synthetic tensides, something to bring the pH up, and not much else, in the ultrasound. I followed that with a rinse in clean water, and finished off with a dip in purified isopropyl alcohol, very quick to stop it from attacking the shellac. I dried the components on PecPads (lint-free pads used for cleaning optics and camera equipment), which I have from my photography hobby, and in fact dabbed the plates and bridges dry with them right away, again to reduce the danger that the shellac would go soft. I did not ultrasonic-clean the screws; instead, I soaked them in the alcohol. The same for the date jumper and yoke springs. I did not wash the balance assembly, nor the mainspring assembly, nor the pallet fork.
Cleaning: I pegged the jewels—that is, I took a sharpened piece of pegwood and carefully twirled it in them—, and used Rodico wherever I saw visible dirt left over from the wash. I did not remove the cap jewels from anywhere other than the balance. I cleaned the pallet fork carefully with Rodico and pithwood, and all the pivots and gear teeth in pithwood. I cleaned the pallet fork with Rodico and pithwood; no wash.
Oiling: I used Moebius 8000 for the jewels and pivots, and Microgliss for the cannon pinion, hour wheel, date wheels, and clutch. I tried to do as explained on the Net and in Fried, although it was rather hard to tell how well I succeeded since everything is so small and I have no stereo microscope. I do have a plastic toy microscope and a loupe, and did my best to verify everything I did.

Giggle.

I kept everything under drinking glasses while they were drying, to protect them from dust. I put the components into a tea strainer when in the ultrasound cleaner. We now have an extremely clean tea strainer, but Joanna doesn't want to use it for tea anymore, for some reason.

When assembling the watch, I used finger cots, and avoided handling the parts as much as possible. Finger cots look like condoms for hobbits. They're very funny.

The disassembly and reassembly went very well; so much it felt almost routine. I kept easily track of the parts even though I had put them in the wash all together, did not have to refer to my reference photos much, and didn't lose anything (nor did I have anything left over). I kept the screws organized just by grouping them both in the alcohol soak and when drying on a Pec-Pad.

I had no screwdriver slips worth mentioning, no parts flying around (my nice new tweezers helped with that!), and I even got the date jumper spring back in without too much difficulty by holding it down with a flat piece of pegwood, as Rob suggested in a comment on my previous post. My cheap toolkit includes a pin vise, which made removing and reinserting the cannon pinion pretty easy, I just had to realize what it was for. I put the hands in while resting the movement on a piece of glass so I wouldn't break the center jewel.

I used this to clean the pivots of the balance wheel.

The most harrowing bit was cleaning the balance wheel assembly. I did this by carefully lifting the balance wheel out of the way, and pegging out the jewel. Then I put a pinhead-sized blob of Rodico on the pegwood, and cleaned the pivot with that. I don't think I damaged anything, but it was tricky. The cap jewel was easy because it has an antishock spring that's made to be released and put back. Not as easy as Incabloc, though, but still totally manageable.

One thing that I've found interesting about this watchmaking thing is that everything has so many uses. Glass can be used as a work surface, or to help buff things. Rodico is intended primarily for cleaning things, but it's also very handy to hold small parts when oiling them, or get them to stay put when assembling. Pegwood can be used for all kinds of things; to hold things down, to move them out of the way, to clean them, and so on. Oil pins are for oiling, but they're also very handy to nudge things into place; the pallet fork, for example. I'm sure there's a vast repertoire of tips and tricks to be learned out there, from others, or just by experimentation.

Parts drying on Pec-Pads, under drinking glasses to protect them from dust. And the cat.

All in all, this exercise exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. I fully expected to wreck my first watch, and whatever problems may still appear, I haven't wrecked it. I haven't even made it much uglier; if you look closely enough, you can see some marks from my inept handling of the screwdrivers, especially the first time I took the movement apart, but nothing that stands out.

This took most of today, with relatively frequent breaks.

This has been an enormous learning experience, and I've loved every minute of it (except the one where I stupidly lost a screw a few days ago—not through a tweezers incident, but by just leaving them on my work surface instead of putting them on the parts tray.)

So thanks for the help, everyone. Suggestions are most welcome, and corrections to procedure are even more welcome.

My next project is a Wehrmachtswerk. It'll be a few weeks before I get to it, though, since I'll be traveling next weekend, and I don't want to do this on weekdays when I'm tired and impatient.

Correction: The movement is actually the 1802, not the 0800. Thanks to Stephen of Sweephand's Vintage Citizen Watch Blog for setting me straight.

Watching

2011-11-24T11:20:00.001-08:00

Time for clocks
to come out and play,
to dance while I sleep
cartwheeling on tiny hands,
round faces open, confiding.
In the morning whether
I watched or not
I’m one day
older.

Ignore the digital display
so professionally alarming.
It’s a temporary
robot, does nothing artfully
but reorders lifeless circuits
shuffling a shiny LED deck
into green numeric
corpselight by
the bed.

A good watch dances, has
swisselled movements ever
fluid, cogs clogging, no slippage
on time’s sleet, off its bracelet leash
downstreet as it caracoles
with mechanical ferity
a mime most entertaining
to watch if I could
watch the watch

watching me
but I’m asleep
somewhere beyond
the concept of time.
Out boxed in blue forever

precise stars move across
immaculate stage, en pointe
in cyclopean ellipses cog on cog,
engagements too infinite
for the eye to follow
telling me I'm an hour
which is the sum
of a set of minutes
all dancing.

Please visit Joy's blog at Verse Escape.

Getting my Bearings

2011-11-19T23:56:00.001-08:00

I've been doing some intensive exploration of the horology web over the past few weeks. There's a whole world out there that I had no idea even existed. There are communities of people, information databases, specialty suppliers, markets, the works. I've been especially happy about the people. It almost seems like there's an international brotherhood of watch nerds, and they have been very welcoming. Special thanks to Max—mars-red of Global Horology and WatchUSeek—who's really gone out of his way to help me get started.

I've also been learning to know my tools. As I mentioned previously, I have a cheap Indian all-around kit. When it comes to tools, I believe strongly in "buy cheap, buy twice." As in, if you don't have a bleeping clue about what you're doing, first buy cheap. Then as soon as you have some idea of what you want, buy professional-grade stuff.

Bad tools are really annoying to work with, and ironically handicap novices more than experts who have the skills to work around the limitations. On the other hand, if you have no clue about what's what, you can easily make expensive mistakes—for example, buying some very pricey specialist tool that you don't actually need, or buying some very expensive tool that you ruin because you don't know how to use it.

Another way things get expensive is if you get into an upgrade cycle. That is, you start out with something cheap, then buy something that's a little better, then a little better than that, then even better, until eventually you end up buying the really good tools anyway.

So I buy twice. First cheap, then good.

At this point, I have figured out what the most critical tools are. Namely, a set of screwdrivers between 0.5 and 1.2 mm, and a pair of #2 tweezers. So I bit the bullet and ordered a set of the former from Bergeon, and the latter from Dumont. Won't need to be upgrading either of those in a hurry. I bought them from a supplier in the UK, which required me to tick a box saying that I'm not buying them as a consumer, since they're a wholesaler. I'm only too happy not to be a consumer!

I still haven't gotten my cleaning stuff together, so I haven't been able to proceed to cleaning and oiling the Citizen from my previous posting. Instead, I've been playing scales, as it were: I've been practicing disassembling and assembling my broken Swiss movement. It's a Unitas 6300N. The hairspring looks weird, there's a kink in it and it's kind of bunched to one side, and there's some rust coming out of odd places. It's a nicely machined mechanism, though; the components are more precisely cut than in the Citizen. Perhaps eventually I'll find a new hairspring from somewhere and try to change it, see if I can get it to run again.

I'm getting more confident with my tweezer technique. I no longer constantly feel that I'm about to destroy something, and I'm able to reassemble the movement without having to refer to photos on the way. Those tricky bits I mentioned earlier—getting the pallet fork and arbor properly seated, installing the train bridge—don't feel all that tricky anymore. My screwdriver still slips on occasion and puts marks on the movement, but I'm getting better with that too.

I've also acquired a couple more watches.

My mother-in-law (thanks, Aune!) found one knocking around in a drawer and gave it to me. It's from the 1950's or possibly early 1960's, a real working man's tool watch. It has a "Wehrmachtswerk" movement—AS 1300, or very similar—and a rather handsome stainless-steel case. The dial isn't very pretty and the hands are a bit oxidized, and it has suffered some damage at the hands of someone else practicing on it; the case back has some gouges in it from a poorly-fitting tool that has slipped, the movement was dark with fingerprints, the screws don't look all that nice, and the balance cock has some odd-looking scratches on it too. But it still runs.

I really like the case, though. If I could find a nicer dial and hands to fit the movement, it would make a really good-looking watch. As it is, it's a very good practice watch, and very likely the subject of a future article on this blog.

The other watch I bought on the Finnish equivalent of eBay. I bid not really expecting to win it, and got it at a price where I expected it to be broken or at best barely working. "Unfortunately" it turned out to be in excellent condition, and much too nice for me to practice on. The only problem with it that I can see is that it's missing one of the train bridge screws.

The watch is a Certina Waterking 210 with date, from the late 1960's or early 1970's. It's one of the unloved models from that time, much less coveted than the DS or DS-2 lines. It's gold plated, has a cushion case with a brushed finish, and a cream-colored, convex dial. The case is in really good shape, looking almost new; the crown has most of the gold plating worn off, and the dial is pristine.

I've put it in a box, waiting for the time I feel confident enough not to put scratches into the movement, or damage screws, or otherwise degrade it. It'll be very interesting to see if it's as well-made as the beautiful decoration on the visible parts suggests. It really is a very pretty mechanism; looking at it side by side with the NOMOS Club Datum I have—it has a glass back—I'd say the Certina looks more carefully finished. Which is a bit mortifying really, considering what I paid for the NOMOS.

While waiting for those tools and consumables—I've also ordered Rodico, pithwood, two kinds of oil, and finger cots—I've been working out the basics of dealing with cases. Lots of stuff to explore there, too.

I'm now familiar with the basic types of plastic crystals, know how to measure one, and am able to remove and install a tension-ring or pressure-fit plastic crystal. I know—just pop it out from the back with your thumb, press it back in from the front with your fingers. Ridiculously simple; so simple it took me weeks to believe it was that simple, so I actually did it. So I also ordered new crystals for the Citizen and the Wehrmachtsuhr; they have some cracks around the edges. And I'm able to polish a scratched crystal.

I've been less successful in my attempts at polishing the case itself. The Citizen started out with a brushed finish, but was rather badly scratched; I want to turn it into a mirror finish. (Yes, I know that's a no-no when dealing with serious watches, but fortunately the Citizen isn't a serious watch.)

So I sanded it down with some sandpaper between 280 and 1200, then polished using a general-purpose stainless-steel polishing compound with a chamois. It's now sort of shiny and looks OK from a distance, but not quite what I want yet. I think the problem may be that neither the polish nor the sandpapers are quite good enough for the job; stainless steel is hard, and the sandpaper loses its grit pretty quick. More research needed there too, clearly.

I like being a complete newbie. There's a freedom to it, like arriving on an unexplored continent.

And now, I'm going to find out if shellac is soluble in alcohol.

Edit: It is. I thought of dunking the parts into isopropanol after cleaning them in the ultrasonic cleaner, so they'll dry quicker and without leaving residue. Bad idea. The jewels would fall out.

My First Teardown

2011-11-15T08:34:00.001-08:00

My very first Unloved Watch is a hand-wound Citizen about as old as I am. Going by the information I found about Citizen serial numbers here, it was manufactured in August, 1971. It has a stainless-steel cushion case, blue enameled dial with a subtle sunburst, lumed sword hands and dots for the hour markers, with some yellow accents. I bought it at a flea market. It ran, barely, but was really badly abused.

The hour and minute hands didn't line up. When the hour hand was on the hour, the minute hand was around 20 past.
There was a lot of friction when turning the crown. This, in fact, made it very difficult to set, especially because the crown is rather small, more like one from an automatic than a hand-wind watch. Eventually I managed to unscrew the crown when trying to turn the hands forward, and then something got knocked loose and the clutch wouldn't catch at all, which also stopped it from running. I know, shouldn't have twiddled it so much.
The crystal was almost matte with scratches, and there are a few very very small cracks around the edges. The case was very badly scratched as well.
The movement was a little loose in the case. It was possible to hear or feel it rattling around when handling the watch.
The watch ran rather badly. The balance wheel does go back and forth, but at relatively low amplitude, and you have to wind it up a fair bit before it starts.

A perfect candidate for a novice wannabie watch nerd to experiment on, in other words. Or is it?

I would have had it easier if I picked another watch for my first project. For one thing, the movement is pretty small, at around 25 mm across—11 ligne or so, I didn't measure it with calipers. Many cheap Swiss movements are 5 mm bigger, and pocket watch movements much bigger than that. And for another, the date complication hides a quite a few tiny parts, including a J-shaped spring that was a real bastard to get back in.

At this writing, I'm maybe halfway through working with this one. I ordered an ultrasound washer, but it hasn't arrived yet, so I haven't even attempted cleaning or oiling it. That's up next. At this time, I figure the odds of the watch surviving the experience is maybe one out of four. I have successfully disassembled it almost down to the component parts. I did not remove the cannon pinion, nor did I disassemble the balance cock/balance wheel/balance spring mechanism, and the mainspring barrel didn't easily unscrew from the barrel bridge, so I let that sub-assembly alone as well. But I did get down to the pillar plate, on both sides of the watch.

Preparation

I followed the excellent, excellent instructions here, with some more reference to pictures here. They worked to a T, with only a few minor differences in the order in which the watch came apart. Additionally, I thought of taking a photo of every stage of disassembly, which was a real life-saver of an idea. I would have had real trouble getting everything back where it came from without those pictures for reference. I'm publishing most of them here in case someone else embarks on a similar project and finds them useful.

For tools, I used an inexpensive watchmaker's toolkit by Anchor. I figured that since I don't really know what I need, I'll follow my camera buying tactic of first buying something that I expect will get the job done somehow, and then, if and when I know my needs better, I'll complement it with better-quality gear I use frequently. It's getting the job done fine so far. In addition to the tools in the kit, I bought some oil needles and oil, which I haven't used yet, and a movement holder, also from Anchor.

Two other things made my life enormously easier: my Canon S90 digital camera, which is small and easy to use and has enough macro capability to get my reference photos, and a desk lamp designed for this kind of work—I happened upon that completely by chance, although I was looking for a desk lamp. It has a circular fluorescent tube, with a big magnifying glass in the middle. It is absolutely brilliant, makes everything way easier, not least taking those reference photos.

I'm not going to give instructions on how to do the teardown; I couldn't possibly add anything to the page I referenced above. What follow are photos and my impressions of how hard it was, what turned up, and what surprised me.

The Teardown

The first thing to do was to get the movement out of the case. I unscrewed the back with a case opener, pressed the stud next to the crown and stem, and popped out the stem. The movement dropped into my hand when I turned the case over. Then I removed the hour wheel and popped it into the holder.

What a nice-looking movement! Cheap it may be, but the visible parts are beautifully machined, with those rose-colored jewels in their golden bushings winking back like... well, jewels, I suppose.

Then I removed the barrel bridge. The mainspring barrel came right with it. I had to slide it sideways from under one of the train wheels, using those nice sharp tweezers. I also put back the stem to keep the winding pinion and clutch wheel in place.

Next up was the train bridge, revealing the train gears.

The gears lifted out easily enough.

After that, the bit I figured would certainly destroy the watch—removing the balance cock, balance spring, and balance wheel assembly. It turned out not to be all that difficult after all; I just slid half my tweezers under the balance wheel, and picked up the whole thing so that the tweezers held it together. Then turned it around and put it in my parts tray. That's a fancy name for a translucent plastic box with little compartments, I bought it at Clas Ohlson for a euro or two.

Next up was the pallet fork and arbor. Those things are tiny! I was sure I'd never be able to get them back in, but getting them out was easy enough.

The last bits on this side of the watch are the bridge that holds the cannon pinion (cannon bridge?) and the wheel under it, and finally the center wheel. Still easy!

The Date Complication

Then I put everything back together again. It didn't run, which didn't surprise me. I was happy enough to have put everything back more or less in the right place, with no pieces left over. In fact, I was starting to feel a bit cocky, and flipped the movement over, figuring I might as well check out the date complication while I'm at it. Ouch.

There's a reason those guys recommend a plain movement with no complications for starters. A pocket watch movement, preferably, as it's a sight bigger. I don't always take advice well.

The movement doesn't look quite as nice from this side. The plate covering most of the movement isn't machined; it's just stamped and, I think, nickeled. Looks a bit cheap. So I removed it.

This photo isn't the one I took after removing it. See that little J-shaped spring holding up the claw that keeps the date wheel in place, at around 5 o'clock? I only found out about that after I'd placed the plate in the parts tray. Also, the dark-gray gear at 7 o'clock had stuck to its underside, and I only noticed it when it dropped off. I had no clue where that little spring went, at first.

Anyway, the two wheels at bottom left lift right off. Then I removed the bridge covering the winding pinion and clutch.

The last bits to come out where the wheels that set the time, and the clutch itself. I didn't take a photo of the movement after I removed them, but I did get there. There's another nasty little U-shaped spring under the clutch; you can see it in the picture. That helped me figure out where the J-shaped one fit!

Lessons learned

I had to put the movement together three times before it finally ran. There were three hard parts.

The first hard part was getting those little J and U-shaped springs on the face of the movement back where they belong. The clutch spring wasn't too bad; I just held it in place with one hand while screwing in the clutch with the other. I eventually got the date one back too, by placing them like in the photo, then sliding the date wheel over them so that it simultaneously held them down and put it under tension. Took me a few tries, but I eventually succeeded.

The second hard part was the pallet fork and arbor. It was hard to tell when it was properly seated, until it finally went back, at which point it was perfectly obvious. When it wasn't in properly, the entire movement was locked up -- nothing moved at all, even the balance wheel.

The third hard part was the train bridge. It wasn't obvious to get all three staves in their jewels, and the gears to mesh. When things weren't in properly, everything moved rather too well; when I turned the crown, the train spun madly.

And one part that wasn't exactly tricky but a bit puzzling at first was the assembly of the winding pinion and clutch wheel, and how they slot with the clutch. The "finger" of the clutch goes in the groove of the bigger cylindrical gear; the finger moves it back and forth to engage the winding pinion or the setting gears.

I'm pretty satisfied with my tools and my general setup. I think I might eventually buy a better movement holder and screwdrivers; one of mine is magnetized which is really annoying because parts cling to it, and the movement holder isn't really very precisely machined, which makes it unnecessarily tricky to get the movement to stay put in it. Not showstoppers, but annoying enough that if I do take to this hobby, I will probably upgrade somewhere along the line.

Eventually I did get everything back in and discovered that I was able to wind the watch and set the time again. I was quite certain I'd screwed something up, so I was almost shocked when the watch came to life when I wound it up a bit. It doesn't run any better than before, but as far as I can tell it doesn't run any worse either. Who knows, maybe it'll even survive my tender ministrations.

Next up is cleaning and oiling it properly. I figure the biggest risk there is losing some parts—they fly around easily, and I had about three very narrow escapes so far. I may not be so lucky next time, even if everything else goes as well as until now.

Clockwork

2011-11-14T23:53:00.001-08:00

This is a copy of a post from my other blog, which is mostly about politics, Buddhism, social issues, and such. I decided to start a new one about watch-tinkering, since it's probably really boring for most people.

I'm exploring a new hobby. I do that every few years. I'm tinkering with mechanical wristwatches.

My first objective was to take apart a watch movement and then put it back together so that it still runs. I just accomplished that yesterday, and I feel as proud of it as if it's an egg I just laid. I even sorted out a problem it had. It doesn't run very well, but no worse than when I started, and I didn't actually do anything that ought to make it run better. Just disassembled and reassembled it. Three times, actually; I had done something wrong the first two times and it didn't run.

I still need some tools to be able to try my hand at cleaning and oiling it. That's my next objective. I figure the odds of the watch surviving my tender ministrations are about 25%. Yesterday morning I would've said 5%, so that's an improvement. It's a really beat-up looking Citizen about as old as I am, and I picked it up at a fleamarket for not much money, so it's no great loss to humanity even if it gives up its life in the name of science.

I've learned a quite a lot already, about what makes watches tick, and what I'm looking for in watch projects, and even a bit about why bother in the first place.

I like tinkering with stuff. I like solving problems. I'm pretty good at fine detail work; when I was a kid I built lots of model ships and planes and such, and painted D&D miniatures. I've enjoyed tinkering with bicycles, but ever since I built a fixed-gear, there hasn't been much to do there, the damn thing just doesn't need any tinkering. Anyway it's a bit messy to do in an apartment. And I've always liked watches.

Another thing is that I'm getting increasinly pissed off at our throwaway culture. Watches are a perfect example of it, replete with ironies too. The Chinese are making some excellent knock-offs of classic Swiss movements, copies so exact that individual pieces are interchangeable. These movements are designed to be serviced. There are spare parts available. Everything comes apart, down to the last machined component.

Yet it makes no economic sense to service one—simply because at the labor costs we have, you can buy four new ones for the cost of professionally cleaning and oiling one. So they're thrown away. The same applies to just about any mechanical wristwatch that isn't one of the luxury brands—Omega, Rolex, Breitling, and so on. Yet the cheap Citizen I messed with is just as capable of running for just as many generations as the fanciest of Patek Philippes, if somebody just takes care of it.

I figured it might be fun to be that somebody.

I'm not that somebody yet. I'm only just starting. But I proved to myself yesterday that basic watch repair is a skill I can teach myself, and it's something that can be endlessly deepened. And I really enjoyed it.

I've bought three junk watches so far. One of them is the Citizen. One of them is irredeemably broken; I bought it so I could have something to experiment with without having to worry about breaking it. One runs really well and has been pretty well maintained too, but it has a cheap brass case with chrome flaking off and is actually kinda ugly. I think it also has a radium dial, and I'm not sure I want to inhale any of the lume that has flaked off. So I'm not sure what to do with that one.

I'm not going to attempt to mess with anything that's actually valuable at this point. Perhaps later. But if you have an almost-working mechanical wristwatch knocking around in a drawer somewhere—stainless steel case, preferably—drop me a line. I might be interested in taking it off your hands and making it my next project.

And if I get any of them working, I'll send them out into the world again, one way or another.