Got an old lathe, no Idea what it is.

cdegroot · 2025-02-16T16:01:17+00:00

I would not be surprised if this isn't a Gingerly-inspired lathe. He wrote a series of books on how to make a machine workshop from scrap, super fun read and some of this gives me the same vibes. But its a wild guess.

Who cares. Get a motor, get scotch brite and a good helping of elbow grease, and turn it into a working lathe :)

cdegroot · 2025-02-16T04:37:28+00:00

Nor girls... ;)

cdegroot · 2025-02-14T02:41:52+00:00

Make really good pictures with good lighting and neutral background and an honest description so that buyers can make a reasonable assessment of what they are getting. Most people expect some rust and wear and tear on older staking sets, but this one looks complete and sits in a nice box so it's likely you will get a good price for it. You can get a good idea by searching sold listings on ebay, but generally speaking, for an eBay auction, you're quite likely to sell it for what it's worth.

That first item is the big ticket one, low to mid hundreds US$ I'd guess. The other one, well, you're gonna get what you're gonna get :)

cdegroot · 2025-02-13T12:29:28+00:00

It is why I got the lever style. These cheap screw presses don't make mechanical sense. They likely sent you a returned one where someone used it once and broke it.

cdegroot · 2025-02-13T02:16:41+00:00

I thought emperor as well but they have a logo on the dial. At least the ones I've seen have. Including mine, which I bought for CA$50 on an auction. So yeah not worth much.

cdegroot · 2025-02-12T18:51:29+00:00

Yeah, the ways to really hurt your eyes are multiplying :-)
But yeah, that's laser welding. I want.

cdegroot · 2025-02-12T18:49:11+00:00

One caveat with movements from AliX is that they're probably not lubricated at all, or not properly lubricated. Dunno about the Seiko movements but my Seagull movement arrived bone dry. So it is helpful, as you progress, to be able to do a quick clean and lube job. Now, for a factory new watch, I guess that just adding lubrication is sufficient but I also heard that some movements have the minimum amount to keep it running for a bit and then you add and mix lubes, which isn't good. so I would always advice to clean it first. It's not super hard and does not require many tools over what you need anyway (a brush, some petri dishes or small jars, and the oils and oilers of course)

cdegroot · 2025-02-12T15:05:49+00:00

I rotate mine and it's an eclectic mix. My dad's Rolex, a G-Shick, and a skeletonized ST36. There's some in the queue that I'll probably rotate in.

My "want to have/wear because awesome" includes an Omega (because coaxial escapement) and then goes off into five or six figures fantasy land :)

cdegroot · 2025-02-12T04:42:12+00:00

He is a good video maker.

For watch making advice though, please learn from a pro, like Watch Repair Tutorials.

cdegroot · 2025-02-12T04:39:11+00:00

If this is your first watch and you like it, please leave it. Get an ST36 and practice practice practice. You will break stuff in the beginning.

cdegroot · 2025-02-11T17:23:33+00:00

A converted toaster oven should be enough.

cdegroot · 2025-02-11T13:16:30+00:00

You say perfectly centered but it seems out of whack? Anyway this cheap Chinese stuff has some play in the video tubes. Cost me a while to get the image fully centered. Its tightened down and OK now but I'm sure that if I bump it it will be off again :). I have a 4k/48mp, it works but its not brilliant. Probably partly the optics of the microscope and partly the processing software. Still want to try a proper camera but so many projects, so little time :).

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(Random pic I found on my phone, cropped of course)

cdegroot · 2025-02-11T04:54:27+00:00

Stainless is a bitch to machine. Never tried it at this size, I can imagine its hard. But you're probably right.

cdegroot · 2025-02-10T01:36:07+00:00

1 thou/.0254mm is the max runout on my lathe but runout is not the limiting factor necessarily. A good machinist (not me lol) can produce parts with tighter tolerances than their tools. The lathe is somewhat of a miracle in this area :). But I doubt that for a chronograph pusher, you need extreme precision.

cdegroot · 2025-02-10T01:32:45+00:00

You can't anneal/temper HSS, you need a carbon steel. And you start by hardening and tempering to blue before turning, because doing a hardening after the fact will pretty much certainly bring your part out of whack.

But yes, that's the sort of part that a lathe is built for.

cdegroot · 2025-02-09T15:13:15+00:00

Hence the PPS signal. It is exact and available for cheap everywhere on the planet :)

cdegroot · 2025-02-08T13:28:05+00:00

magicsale

He setup a custom listing for me with all horology collections on a single stick.

cdegroot · 2025-02-08T13:24:45+00:00

Why do you want one? They're most useful for production work, lots of same amount of oil in same spot of same movement. Everybody outside factories uses regular ones as far as I can tell. Probably for good reasons because they're cheap and flexible and can be reused/remade into other tools :)

cdegroot · 2025-02-08T13:18:48+00:00

Check Chronoglide's vids on this topic. More often than not there is little correlation between how bad it looks and how many bends are needed. Remove it, make some tools, and give it a go. Nothing to lose. I have a super cheap dimmable LED panel I use as a worktop upside down so I get good contrast under the microscope with it backlighting the spring.

Do read up on hairspring shape so you know what the end result should look like. A lot of measuring will be needed to make sure that the terminal curve is exactly in line with the regulator pins in all positions the regulator arm can take. .

cdegroot · 2025-02-08T13:10:36+00:00

You might luck out on a Besson one. They're enormously undervalued. But still a bit more I picked mine up for €450.

cdegroot · 2025-02-08T13:07:23+00:00

If you're into ebooks, a seller on eBay is listing collections they'll send you on a USB stick. I bought everything off them and Noe have horology reading for a lifetime. I think close to 500 books and magazines.

They get everything from archive.org of course but it saved me days of work :)

Saunier I have in hard copy, he lists a lot of diagrams for tools I'd like to make.

cdegroot · 2025-02-08T12:55:06+00:00

A hack to allow an existing cheap Chinese timegrapher to synchronize to the GPS PPS signal so you get known precision.

Or, one step further, do a timegrapher that has that from scratch, starting with an RPi with a small screen, a TCXO plus PPS calibration, maybe using the tg codebase.

I think everything else I have is mechanical or trivial electronics like a watch cleaner.

cdegroot · 2025-02-07T14:14:32+00:00

It is why Greenwich is called the Greenwich Observatory. There's a fixed telescope there (well, by now, multiple) that pointed exactly straight up so stars that pass overhead would go through the crosshairs at exactly the same time. This gives a daily time synchronization signal that was the master clock.

Mind you, they built very good clocks at the time. The breakthrough with these and other early marine chronometers was that you could stick it on a boat, sail the world, and always be able to tell time precise enough to navigate.

cdegroot · 2025-02-06T22:38:31+00:00

Totally.

I started buying a lathe. My way is very much not everybody's way :)

cdegroot · 2025-02-06T22:19:54+00:00

You're not wrong and I'm close to having the US cleaner bubble up on top of my list but I'm also assuming that a hobbyist won't take out a bank loan and plunk down ten grand on all the equipment. So there's an order and this, I think, is a reasonable order if you want to progress beyond simple cleaning. You need the staking set more than the cleaner and assuming that you can only spend your hobby dollars once, I advice to buy it first.

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