"Lock-Down" Project - 1890's Waltham Pocket Watch (Part 5)

As can be seen here, this old watch's case has seen better days. On the upside, it is made of solid Sterling silver and experience tells me that I might be surprised at how nice I can get this looking with a little time on the polishing machine.

... And, sure enough, 20 minutes of careful polishing accomplished this..

After some serious rooting about in my various parts drawers.. I found a bag..

We are almost ready to put the dial and hands onto the pocket watch but before that can happen we need to clean the dial and install the "Motion Works". 

Examining the back of the dial reminds us, once again, of the general quality of components used here.

All of the major functioning parts of this pocket watch's movement are now in place and functional. It's time to see if the old girl has life in her. The project pretty much ends here if there is a major issue with the balance or the mainspring (still un-inspected internally for reasons stated back in part 3). There is almost no chance of finding replacement parts for this piece so it could get consigned back to the spares drawer if this doesn't go well..

A careful wind of the mainspring (feels solid and free-moving - click is working well). And....

With the train of wheels now installed and working, we can turn our attention to the Pallet Fork and its bridge and screws. Here they are..

With the barrel and winding system now in place, we would normally secure them with a bridge. In this case, though, it looks like the main bridge has to go on after the rest of the gear train is assembled. So, for now will just make sure that the centre wheel is properly secured into the bridge and test fit the whole thing.

Having inspected the main bridge and centre wheel.. I've found out where that little pinion gear referenced in part 3 lives..

Now that we have everything clean and checked over, its time to starting putting the 130 year-old movement back together again. Honestly, anything could happen here and, on a job like this one, I won't even bother to start thinking about the watches' case, dial and so on until I know that I can get the movement ticking again. The good news is, it wont take long. An old pocket watch like this is quite a simple mechanism in comparison to modern wrist watches. For one thing, we have less parts to worry about (no calendar, no "keyless works", no automatic winding mechanism...).

We'll start, as with most watches, with the barrel which houses the mainspring and the associated "click" mechanism (the ratchet that stops the barrel and mainspring from un-winding under tension and the thing that you hear when you wind a watch). Here are the components for this part of the build..

One benefit of buying a "bag of bits" is that I can skip the initial strip down of the watch. Of course, the downside here is that I really don't know if anything is missing or broken. So, the first thing to do is clean everything up and get 100 years worth of grime off of the components and then inspect everything carefully.. In particular the hairspring, gear teeth, mainspring & jewel settings..

The hairspring is by far the most sensitive watch part. This one looks very dirty but it has a good spiral shape to it, with no parts of that spiral touching other parts of it (which is a common cause of "fast running"). The Waltham spring also has a "Breguet Overcoil" design. This is a specific hairspring design invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet (important watch dude) waaaaay back in the 1700's and, essentially, allows for better performance of the hairspring through varying mainspring tensions (watches tend to slow down as a mainspring loses power and go faster when it is fully wound).

I'm going to clean this movement using my ultra-sonic cleaner and, to do that, I like to mount the balance and hairspring in the main plate to keep it safe during cleaning..

Well, my last little side-project got completed and we are still in "semi" lockdown in the UK so I thought i'd turn my attention to something else that I've been meaning to get to in the workshop.

As a watchmaker, one thing that you will certainly accumulate in time is PARTS. They come from watches that never got repaired, over-ordering when you only need one of something and a seller will only sell you 10 and, frankly.....Well, I don't know where many of them come from... but come they do. Here's a sneaky peak at ONE of my many "parts drawers"..