The timegrapher

[blondfellow]

Wow… Is all I can say. Also a disapointment. I cut my teeth on vintage Seiko wrist watch movement and found or so I thought them to be excellent rugged movement and as they can, take a fair beating before they properly die. Which makes them a cheap movement to learn on rather than the ETA most learners are made to use. Then comes the timegrapher to take all this away from me.
I unpack this machine with great joy and straight away take a photo and show it of to my mates on this site along with the other purchases. Then I take it to my bench of which I have just the weekend before installed power points to the roll top so I can have these electronic gadgets all self contained and to remove the snake work of extension leads, also because the better half kept annoying me for a extension lead as I had them all, she also threatened to increase my insurance as I am colour blind and playing with 240 volts.
Anyway, First I dialled in Youtube for a few videos on how to work this machine, good now I am an expert, I put my best 6309 704 Seiko dive watch on this machine, this is the first successful recon I did, and to my surprise the beat error is at 2.3 ms and the rate at 12, Damn this machine my watch is technically well out of perfect and needs major ajustment. After taking of this watch and putting on another Seiko, this.one a 6119 and what I thought to be mediocre turned out to be only a smidgen out and in better nic than my dive watch. So I grabbed a couple of seiko watches I use to experiment on before I try it on the good ones and do you think I could get the thing to run smooth in the face up let alone face down or dial up or down. So after a hour of what ended up just blowing on the levers because that is all it takes to get 0.1 down in the beat I put on a nice Omega I have been given to clean and this was out a bit and this talled me the diference between quality and the Mass produced.
The omega was so smooth to adjust and stayed fairly on beat in all positions and it is a 1967 made watch.
Sorry people I get carried away when talking watches they all run at work when they see I am going to start. But how can you try to adjust a watch without one of these things just setting the beat will be impossible. Bugger drugs when you have a watch makers bench.
Love my timegrapher 😆

[chris mabbott]

Yep, you said it… It’s like a microscope, the deeper you look the more imperfections you see, which can be good and bad, unless you’re a bio molecular scientist and getting down to the atomic level is part of your needs lol
You can also burnish completely away a pivot if you’re not careful, just because you see every imperfection.

We also have to keep in mind that these watches are anywhere from 150-60 yrs old, and whereas the higher grade watches can be put back to reasonable working standards, they surely will not stay that way for long in the modern world of much electro magnetic interference…

I regularly have to demag a watch that has inadvertently come in contact with my mobile.. Ooops.. Or some other electronic device… Airport scanners really muck em up too, as does altitude because pocket watches were not designed nor adjusted for pressure change, mobile phones, computers etc etc..

So whereas a timing machine is good, especially for modern watches, they can cause you to spend loads of time trying to put and old one in perfect beat, which you may never achieve, unless a person is willing to go through every single detail during servicing, which most won’t do, just because it’s labor/time intensive and customers don’t want to pay that much cash, normally.
And really, after polishing, burnishing, rounding pivots, setting clearances, taking apart the watch at least 5 times…. Well, after 100 watches we tend to say… Argh, to hell with it, Good enough 😆

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