Part I - The Tendency Towards Tinkering
When I was fifteen and taking care of my grandfather, 87 at the time and in poor health, I remember thinking that it would be nice to have something of his to keep after he’d passed on. My mother gave me his old wool sweater which I still bring out on occasion, and one of his blankets, which is long lost. He had an old beat up craptastic timex watch too which I regret not asking for.
Truth is my grandfather and I weren’t exactly close, we were living in a religious commune which emphasized allegiance to the order rather than family ties. But that sense of legacy and being able to have a physical object to remind you of it was something I’ve always missed.
That’s not a very good setup for a microbrand watch company, because this isn’t a microbrand watch company. It’s me, deciding a couple of years ago that I wanted a decent mechanical watch and then proceeding to fall down a rabbit hole of not wanting to fork over enough cash to buy one and then proceeding to spend WAY more money buying a broken one and, over the course of a couple of years, learning to fix it and others I picked up. I ran into a watchmaker's estate at a thrift store, a bunch of tools and parts, bought, disassembled and destroyed countless $10 ebay watches. And acquired tools, parts and various lubricants and cleaners. And when I finally thought I could reasonably repair a mechanical watch movement, I did the typical Giles thing and decided to build my own.
This is the tale of how to avoid buying a decent mechanical watch and how one middle aged man tried to make his own.
New installments every Sunday morning.
G
My dad would remind me frequently that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. This very sound advice unless you want to have a kid who knows how to fix shit. I’ve never been the smartest tool in the crayon box but thanks to a stubborn streak and ignoring my dads wisdom, I do know how to take things apart. Sometimes those items die a slow death by my hand, but often I learn a bit about what holds the together, the innovations which make their parts turn and add that knowledge to the tinkering corner of my brain.
Two years ago I didn’t know anything about watches, I wore a small plastic Casio which you can pick up on amazon or eBay for 10$. It kept perfect time and, I thought, looked kind of chic. A small understated notice to the world that I liked to be on time but didn’t care about appearances. That said, I always had my eye out for an old watch on my antique shop visits. I’d never see any watches which I liked, or if I did, they were priced hilariously above what I wanted to spend.
In the summer of 2018 I did find a watch which I thought looked nice and was priced around 50$. It didn’t run but, being the confident fella, I bought it and figured it couldn’t be too difficult to make something which was manufactured before color television, work again.
I was wrong and after 15 minutes with a eyeglass screwdriver and a Makita drill I had a collection of tiny parts resting, first on my desk and several minutes later, in the trash can. Turns out these old fuckers knew how to make tiny shit. And I didn’t.
So I started digging around, trying to learn via the internets about how watches work and how to fix the dumb things. Watched YouTubes of old men fiddling around with small screwdrivers. And then, having learned all there was to learn, I went on eBay and bought a $300 Omega Geneva which the seller assured me worked perfectly. It arrived with the movement flopping around in the case and definitely not keeping good time. So I started on my second attempt to fix a watch, but this time, having spent some real money and rather liking the way this new acquisition looked, decided to do so with a bit more care and grace.
(I realize that this is a lengthy diatribe about the background and I’ve probably lost half the readers in the process. Brevity has never been my strongest asset when I’ve had two cups of coffee before 9am and forgot to eat anything.)
I’m going to speed things up now and get to the actual build.
But first a tiny bit of background on my inspirations. I’ve always loved the look of 1940’s mens watches, the simple ones with big numbers, clear hands and minimal design. Over the course of my learning to repair watches I kept finding one particular brand that I liked, Doxa. Coincidentally it was a watch worn by the extremely douchey hero of the Dirk Pitt books my dad used to read us as tweens.
So about a year ago I started doodling out dial designs in auto cad and borrowed more than a little from the Doxa designs. I wanted the big hour hands but also liked how some of them included the five minute numbers so someone like me, again, not the cleverest tool in the lightbulb store, could confidently state 11:55 when the long hand was almost at the top.
It took a few weeks of screwing around with cad to finalize the dial I wanted and during that time I was also looking around to see how dials were made. In the world of watchmaking there’s often nothing more than a disc of brass with markings on it which separates a $5000 watch from a $500 watch. The cases are about the same, the movements are often picked up from one of the same movement makers so really the unique feature of most watches is it’s face. The oldest method of dial making was hand painting but this quickly gave way (in most cases anyway) to pad printing which was far faster and could render much finer details in a design. Pad printing uses a piece of steel which is etched with the markings on a dial, has paint smeared over it and is squeegeed off leaving paint only in the etched part. A silicone pad is pressed into this which transfers the paint to the pad which is then stamped on to the dial itself. Clever technique for sure but from my reading, it was one which took a ton of practice and a considerable amount of equipment to do well. Throughout the design of this watch I wanted to keep things as simple as possible. Both as a time saving but also so that I could change designs at any point without a significant amount of retooling.
I landed on the idea of using direct etching on the dial itself which would then be smeared with paint and wiped off, leaving paint only where the etching was. It’s not something I’ve seen a lot of with watchmakers, probably because if you’re going to make more than a few watches it makes much more sense to have the pad printing line setup and be able to crank out dials at hundreds an hour. But with a limited run of watches it made sense to me to try the direct etching.
I looked into various ways of making this happen. There was hand carving which I was definitely not up for, mechanical etching with a cnc machine but that was limited in detail without an insanely expensive tool. That left chemical etching which I dismissed since it was a multiple step process and finally, direct laser ablation.
This appealed to me since it was a one step and could be changed simply by changing a drawing file.
So the digging began to find someone who could do the lasering without my losing a kidney. I tried several vendors who had lasers and said they could do the job resulting in some hilarious bits of scrap metal being sent my way. Turns out that lasers designed for doodling on coffee mugs are not cut out for marking something with lines that are less than a hairs width thick.
From my photo background I knew that there were Gobo projectors which used thin metal cutouts to project shapes in light on a surface. I’d used these and seen how minute the details were so I began calling around to places who made these. I landed on one in Indiana who seemed the most competent and started sending them files. The initial results were a lot more positive than previous attempts and, although it’s costing me more than I’d care to admit, having them do a bit of R&D on their technique is going to result in a relatively cheap to make dial with limitless design possibilities.
The other good thing about the laser engraving is that the equipment they were using was more than capable of cutting so I could have the same vendor make the hands. Again, one step process, minimum post processing work, easily modifiable and relatively affordable.
The hands were another part where I drew a lot of inspiration from the past. My favorite hands were steel with luminous paint filling a center groove. There are a good number of these hands available used but finding one in the correct look, with the right length, and the right hole sizing is nearly impossible. Plus, I wanted to make this thing, not buy it off a shelf.
After a numerous iterations and tweaks I settled on a hand design which I thought would fit the dial and the watch. The minute and hour are in the classic “syringe” shape with a center line going through the minute hand to make it easily differentiated from the hour hand. The second hand I designed with a crescent moon counterweight, harkening back to old industrial pressure gauges I remember fiddling with as a kid.
The designs were sent out to Indiana to the laser fellas who sent back the following bits for my inspection. They’re good, but are going to need more refinement.
This is quite long enough so I’ll wrap it up and continue my watch building saga next Sunday morning.
Have a great week!
G
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