Reply To: Waltham Pocket watch

[david pierce]

Clam71,
Thanks for the reply. Ebay has a lot of low cost staking sets for sale. You can usually pick up a set with rusted stakes for a very low cost. The set does not have to be a K&D Inverto to work well. Any american made staking set is good but the G-F stakes are made from a slightly larger size of drill rod (3/16) and will not fit in the K&D or Marshal presses. Rust can be cleaned off by turning the stakes in a small lathe with Scotch Brite and motot oil. This will not change the diameter of the stakes. Inox (Viola) tweezers are excellent and cost far less than Dumont. You will still need Dumont #5 tweezers but almost every other job can be done with less expensive tweezers. A nine piece set of Bergeon watchmaker screwdrivers with rotary stand can be purchased for about $90.00 off of Ebay from Lancaster tool supply. A less expensive set can be made to work well if you replace the cheap slot head screws with tiny set screws. This set can be purchased from Finding King for less than $30.00. Instead of spending a lot of money on expensive loupes I use 3.75X drugstore reading glasses and a $150.00 Chinese binocular microscope (Amscope). This workes far better than any loupe I ever tried. Bausch & Lomb loupes are excellent and cost far less than Swiss designer label loupes. High power loupes (over 10X) are virtually useless anyway and you are much better off using a microscope.
You can have nice tools if you don’t fall into the trap of buying designer label items. Instead buy tools that are suitable to do the job.
David