Watchcraft

During the more lucid hours of the past week's flu I have been enjoying a few books from the library. I particularly enjoyed reading this gem.

While the book shows a date of 1949 the first person to check it out from the library was back in 1962. It then sat on the shelf until 1977. Things picked up in the 80's with three checkouts, two of them in March of 1984. The last checkout was in 1990.

This is back in the days when they wrote the person's name on the card. Thus I can see who checked it out on each date. Sometime between now and 1990 the library changed over to computer records and the checkout history is lost.

I'm not sure about modern horology or chronometry but back in 1949 the watches were full of organs. There's regulating organs, motive organs, along with winding and hand-setting organs. Timekeeping devices seemed more of a living, beating organism than a cold, precise machine.

"In Switzerland the manufacture of watches took root in Geneva towards the middle of the XVIth century and, about one century later, began to spread along the Jura Mountain region which today forms part of Switzerland's western frontier."

"Watchcraft flourished in the Jura region because it provided peasant populations living in remote and unfertile valleys a means of livelihood during the long winter months."

The parts from a Zenith watch:
regulator plain, regulator for conductor, regulator spring, conductor disk, balance cap (endpiece), breguet hairspring, balance staff, double roller, roller jewel (impulse pin), pallet fork, pallet jewels (2), pallet staff, end-piece for cap-jewel, escape wheel, fourth wheel, third wheel, centre wheel, cannon pinion, barrel, mainspring, barrel arbor, ratchet, click, click spring, crown ratchet, crown washer, winding pinion, clutch wheel, winding stem, first setting wheel, second setting wheel, minute wheel and pinion, hour wheel, setting-wheel bridge and jumper spring, yoke spring, yoke, setting lever, escape-lever bridge, jewels (5), bushings (3), and 13 screws.

The book discusses how watches were either made by manufacturers with enough money for the specialized equipment, personel, and precision mechanic shops or were assembled from parts purchased from a number of specialized firms. Modular watchmaking, the components of which arrive from regions specializing in levers, balances, cylinders, jewels, hairsprings, pendant/bow/crown assortments, and even screws.

From the tips section it is clear that the best steps to keeping your mechanical watch in good shape include daily winding and yearly lubrication. And don't go and squirt WD-40 into your watch. Not only should the watch be cleaned before lubrication, but the type of oil differs depending on the various mechanisms.

Generally speaking, fluid oils should be used for high speed wheel trains (balance, escape) and very viscous oils, and even grease, for slow-speed organs (barrel, winding mechanism) which work under high pressure.

As you tick off the final minutes of the year remember; there's 86,400 seconds in a day, 31,536,000 seconds in a year. That's a lot of ticking and spinning organs no matter how many jewels you have.

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