Dogwood's Watchmaking Journey

[Watch_Tinkerer]

Thank you dogwood I have performed my very first service on a movement VS3135. I followed your suggestions.

Picture in the link.

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[Alkay3]

I've been playing around with recording time lapse video of my time at the bench. I'm still just using my iPhone and I just stack a couple of glass jars to get it up and out of my way. But I'm liking the kind of results I can get. This is about an hour and half of time on the bench doing the reassembly of a Clean DJ with a VR3235 movement. The segments where it's my forearm in frame are when I had to use the microscope to do something (e.g. lubricating the pallet stones).

Awesome video. That is my next endeavor, servicing movements. I figure if I can put automotive engines together and have them last for hundreds of thousand miles I can handle this! Just mechanical stuff on a much smaller scale! I assume patience, steady hands and repetition will help with this work! And hopefully I can ask some questions of the fine people here on the forum when needed!

 

[dogwood]

Thank you dogwood I have performed my very first service on a movement VS3135. I followed your suggestions.

Picture in the link.

1000028788

Image 1000028788 hosted in ClickPix.org

clickpix.org

1000028789

Image 1000028789 hosted in ClickPix.org

clickpix.org

Nice work. It’s amazing how mush brass swarf (engraving chips) are on these movements. I assume this isn’t how they arrive from Dandong or Shanghai, but rather it’s the engraving at the watch factories that’s not done properly (or not cleaned away thoroughly) which is causing this problem. Great job on the hand cleaning. I suspect you get as good a cleaning doing it by hand as you get with a machine but it takes a bit more effort.

 

[dogwood]

Awesome video. That is my next endeavor, servicing movements. I figure if I can put automotive engines together and have them last for hundreds of thousand miles I can handle this! Just mechanical stuff on a much smaller scale! I assume patience, steady hands and repetition will help with this work! And hopefully I can ask some questions of the fine people here on the forum when needed!

I often joke with my friends that my hobby is the polar opposite of heavy duty mechanic — I’m a mechanic with tweezers.

And yes, mileage on movements is how you get efficient. I’d say I stopped looking at the service manual after 10 movements. Started getting faster after 20. And after 50 I started to develop and remember tricks to get certain parts to go in more easily (eg spring in the keyless works, click spring on 2824-2, minute counter spring on 4130, etc).

 

[Alkay3]

I often joke with my friends that my hobby is the polar opposite of heavy duty mechanic — I’m a mechanic with tweezers.

And yes, mileage on movements is how you get efficient. I’d say I stopped looking at the service manual after 10 movements. Started getting faster after 20. And after 50 I started to develop and remember tricks to get certain parts to go in more easily (eg spring in the keyless works, click spring on 2824-2, minute counter spring on 4130, etc).

I think we all appreciate seeing and reading your posts.

 

[dogwood]

Another day, another time lapse of me doing something at the bench. This time it's a DD4130 movement in a franken Daytona. I bought a small tripod to help hold my iPhone above my bench without it being in the way. I think this works better than the methods I was using before. I still have to get up every 5 minutes to stop the time-lapse and re-start it since the camera app on my iPhone won't let me set an interval for the time lapse, but rather it tries to be smart and changes the frame rate depending on how long of a time lapse you record. I've found that 5-minute clips have a good frame rate. I put an IWC in the frame to show how much real time passes during this process.

 

[CTbeforeLP]

Another day, another time lapse of me doing something at the bench. This time it's a DD4130 movement in a franken Daytona. I bought a small tripod to help hold my iPhone above my bench without it being in the way. I think this works better than the methods I was using before. I still have to get up every 5 minutes to stop the time-lapse and re-start it since the camera app on my iPhone won't let me set an interval for the time lapse, but rather it tries to be smart and changes the frame rate depending on how long of a time lapse you record. I've found that 5-minute clips have a good frame rate. I put an IWC in the frame to show how much real time passes during this process.

This is so satisfying. That IWC is beautiful and a great way to show the time.

 

[dogwood]

Yet another time lapse, this time of manually pre-cleaning the DD4130 that I disassembled yesterday. I like to pre-clean in a watch glass of 99% IPA with an artist's brush as a way of lifting off any heavy grease that was left on the parts. It's also a nice way to gauge how much metal debris was on the movement parts by seeing how much more gold dust there is in the bottom of the watch glass after I've finished pre-cleaning. I'm guessing that this step isn't strictly necessary since I run the parts through my 4-stage Elma cleaning machine next, but it only takes 20 minutes and it allows me to get a feel for how dirty or clean the movement was before the service.

 

[PsychoTee16]

Yet another time lapse, this time of manually pre-cleaning the DD4130 that I disassembled yesterday. I like to pre-clean in a watch glass of 99% IPA with an artist's brush as a way of lifting off any heavy grease that was left on the parts. It's also a nice way to gauge how much metal debris was on the movement parts by seeing how much more gold dust there is in the bottom of the watch glass after I've finished pre-cleaning. I'm guessing that this step isn't strictly necessary since I run the parts through my 4-stage Elma cleaning machine next, but it only takes 20 minutes and it allows me to get a feel for how dirty or clean the movement was before the service.

I’d say it’s completely nessecary and a good practice.

I personally throw the entire movement in first for the pre-clean, which is what Rolex recommends. But either way works.

Two cleans I think is crucial.

 

[dogwood]

And the final instalment of the the DD4130 movement service time lapse. It takes me about 2 hours to complete a re-assembly and lubrication on a DD4130. Or at least it would have taken me 2 hours had I not spent 20 minutes trying to get the chronograph bridge to seat properly... so actual wall time here was two hours and twenty minutes. Getting that chronograph minute counter spring / paw to sit properly is such a fiddly process. I understand why the SL4801 movement engineers opted to have the intermediate wheel fixed to the train bridge -- removing one of the variables makes seating the chrono bridge on the SL4801 much easier.

 

[Cubatobaco]

Another day, another time lapse of me doing something at the bench. This time it's a DD4130 movement in a franken Daytona. I bought a small tripod to help hold my iPhone above my bench without it being in the way. I think this works better than the methods I was using before. I still have to get up every 5 minutes to stop the time-lapse and re-start it since the camera app on my iPhone won't let me set an interval for the time lapse, but rather it tries to be smart and changes the frame rate depending on how long of a time lapse you record. I've found that 5-minute clips have a good frame rate. I put an IWC in the frame to show how much real time passes during this process.

What kind of movement holder is that?

 

[dogwood]

What kind of movement holder is that?

It's a 4130 movement holder from AliExpress. I think you can get them for around C$100 ($70 USD). Just search for "4130 movement holder" and you should find one. Make sure you get the version for the 4130 though, there's also a version for the 4030 which kinda works but is just a little bit off in size.

 

[Cubatobaco]

It's a 4130 movement holder from AliExpress. I think you can get them for around C$100 ($70 USD). Just search for "4130 movement holder" and you should find one. Make sure you get the version for the 4130 though, there's also a version for the 4030 which kinda works but is just a little bit off in size.

Awesome! Thanks so much!

Looks like it makes servicing much easier.

 

[bavarex]

Yet another time lapse, this time of manually pre-cleaning the DD4130 that I disassembled yesterday. I like to pre-clean in a watch glass of 99% IPA with an artist's brush as a way of lifting off any heavy grease that was left on the parts. It's also a nice way to gauge how much metal debris was on the movement parts by seeing how much more gold dust there is in the bottom of the watch glass after I've finished pre-cleaning. I'm guessing that this step isn't strictly necessary since I run the parts through my 4-stage Elma cleaning machine next, but it only takes 20 minutes and it allows me to get a feel for how dirty or clean the movement was before the service.

What do you use in you ELMA machine? I regcognized rep movements are much more sensible to solvents than gen movememens Is used WF Pro waterless ( which somtimes dissolves the screen printing of the Rep movement engravings) and ELMA Red ( which totally fucks up the rep movements without metal surface treatments). any suggestions ?

 

[PsychoTee16]

What do you use in you ELMA machine? I regcognized rep movements are much more sensible to solvents than gen movememens Is used WF Pro waterless ( which somtimes dissolves the screen printing of the Rep movement engravings) and ELMA Red ( which totally fucks up the rep movements without metal surface treatments). any suggestions ?

Elma Suprol Pro Cleaning and Rinsing solutions are some of the best.
Zero issues with anything rep.

 

[bavarex]

Elma Suprol Pro Cleaning and Rinsing solutions are some of the best.
Zero issues with anything rep.

Yeah normaly i use ELMA WF Pro as cleaning an Suprol for rinsing. Some engraving coloring of ZF Portoguese unfortunatley dissolved into the solution. With ELMA red its ok but not for the cheap brass parts of chinese movements.

 

[dogwood]

I had an interesting 16650 build on my bench this week from @GregB. Greg purchased the watch here on RWI, but wanted me to swap in a VS3135 movement. One of the issues certain versions of the VS3135 is that (as @KJ2020 has discovered) the date can end up not being perfectly centred in the dial's date window.




The proposed solution for this problem is to use the date plate from the VR3135 movement to build a hybrid movement with a VS3135 mainplate and a VR3135 dateplate. I tried this, but unlike when KJ2020 did it, the movement I was starting from was an SH3135. Note that the SH3135 has a steel shock setting cup (green arrow), a side mounted screw on the beat adjustor (red arrow), and something that I haven't seen before, a silver coloured reversing wheel (blue arrow).



I ran into two issues trying to build a hybrid using the SH3135's date plate. The first issues was that there are two locator pin holes (blue arrows) on the SH3135 date plate which are ever so slightly smaller than the locator pins on the VS3135 mainplate (hurrah for rep movement manufacturing tolerances!!!). The second issue was that the date finger from the SH3135 seemed to be rubbing against something on the VS3135 mainplate. There was quite a bit of friction and the date finger didn't spring back and forth freely. As a result of the friction / binding of the SH3135 date finger, the date wouldn't fully jump forward, nor would the date finger have enough force to centre the date disc by pushing fully into the date disc's teeth.




In the end, my solution was to revert back to a fully VS3135 movement, and to ever so slightly bend the dial feet to introduce a dial rotation so that the date was correctly centred in the dial's date window.



One other thing that I noticed which I don't remember seeing before is that the SH3135 date plate screws aren't fully blued. The VS3135 date plate screws are fully blued. I guess this is just another way that the manufacturer of the SH3135 cut corners.

 

[CTbeforeLP]

From what I read about the SH3135s, their reversing wheels were painted with latex paint that use to flake off and eventually foul the movement. So some people would peel off the paint before that happened.