Frank R
Great post, and quite interesting to watch (pardon the pun). The art of repairing mechanical watches and similar mechanical/small mechanisms is a vanishing art. So much of what was, up until recently, mechanical is now done digitally. Motion picture cameras, projectors, and still cameras all had fine mechanisms. Now, the word is that it does not pay to fix them if they cease to work properly. Digital watches made owning a watch commonplace, and watches are often considered as "throwaways". Even the common alarm clock was a mechanism, and it took a legion of people to work in the factories where the mechanical clocks were made.
I still wear a mechanical pocket watch on my person. These are Hamilton 992B railroad watches- I have two of them. Back in 2007, I was cleaned off my Harley one night by a couple of deer. I did a good slide on the pavement and was unhurt beyond a small broken bone in my left hand- resulting in a "busted knuckle". My Hamilton pocket watch did not fare so well, sustaining a broken staff and two very small dents in the back of its case. A local watchmaker who was "Bulova Trained" repaired the watch, and it ran until 2015. One morning, my wife took my jeans off the bedroom floor to do the laundry and succeeded in dropping the Hamilton pocket watch on the ceramic tile floor of the laundry room. The Hamilton watch bit the dust. I took it back to the local watchmaker who had repaired it in 2007. He said he could no longer get parts and was too old to make them. Thanks to this 'board, I was referred to Historic Timekeepers, Inc in Glen Arm, Maryland. Dewey Clark, the founder, is a horologist and has a complete machine shop much like the one in this thread. He took my Hamilton watch and disassembled it, inspected it and let me know the situation. Aside from a broken staff and broken hairspring, Dewey Clark discovered that the repair done in 2007 had included "cementing in the wrong size jewel". He set the watch to rights, having to make a staff, make a new hairspring, and made a new mainspring from what he now uses, a better material than was used in the 1920's. Historic Timekeepers has a website, and The shop is quite impressive.
While HTI repairs mainly timepieces such as mechanical watches and chronometers, they also repair vintage aircraft clocks, ship's clocks, and other fine mechanical instruments. I do not think Mr. Clark goes into the repair of automatons or animated clocks such as the Antique Horologist in this thread does. The youtube in this thread takes things to a new level, when having to "bring a mechanical bird back to life" occurs.
I marvel at the small size of the parts in a mechanical watch movement. I marvel even more at the older watches and clocks made in the era before there were such things as ready-made small taps and dies, or even a ready supply of good steel or tool steel to make the tools from.
I note in this thread that the shop has a "draw bench". This is used for drawing down wire to required diameters. When I look at something like a pocket watch, I mentally compare the size of the parts against what I consider to be a very small and fine thread- something like 2-56. Tapping a 2-56 hole causes me to hold my breath and kind of focus my whole body into my fingertips on the tap wrench. A 2-56 thread would be comparatively huge for a watch. How the horologists and toolmakers in the 1700s' made taps and dies to cut the fine watch threads is one of those things that lurks in my mind and causes me to marvel when I happen to think of it. This thread stirred that dusty file in my mind up.
