Friday, May 28, 2021

SUNNY WEEK!

WEEK 112

Willy, Yuriy, Alex, Michael
Origin : Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, Malaysia 
Watchmaking class: Technician & Fullskill 
Current mood: It's graduation time again, how time flies. Willy and Yuriy will be leaving the school sometime after next week. But it is still no reason to slack off. The week remains to be high productive. We went through several subjects including hand removal and installation, winding stem replacement and restoration, water resistance check, and received a bunch of notes. Overall a good week.



Renato & David
Origin: Zug, Zürich, Switzerland
Watchmaking class: Fullskill
Current mood: David worked on the 8mm thick squares for the brass anvil tool (filing) and finished the base plate for the poising tool. I worked on the pointed head nose vice tool. This one we can design partially as we want. Learned the fundamentals of technical drawing and did the two drawings for my modified version of the tool, which will be ready for two-sided use, where one side is designed to accept detachable/exchangeable end pieces (separate drawing) to clamp smaller watch parts like hands and similar. Also there will be 2 vs. 1 fixation screw(s) and one height adjustment screw between them. Milled the 2 symmetrical brass pieces for the vice accurately to measure incl. the 90° angles via dial gauge adjustment. Then glued together the 2 pieces with Loctite 480 to mill the angled parts next week.


Name: Markus McDonald.
Origin: Stockholm, Sweden. 
Course: 2 years full skill course.
Current mode: 
This week a lot happened from movement work, consisting of various different checks and additionally demonstrations for other smaller modules. These demonstrations consisted of the Automatic module, encasing work, repairing the winding stem and correcting a tilted crown. These demonstrations where spread out from the middle to the end of the week. Which in addition to the main work made the week very dense.



STEP 1:  ! (WILLY)
Wow! That is very cool and a great honour!! Thank you Willy we will never forget you!!


STEP 2:  ZODIAC PROJECT! (YURIY) 

There were lots of issues with this watch before Yuriy got it to run again, Its alive and well again and he did some really nice black polishing on some parts and polishing and bluing on the screws that are shifting to purple which looks really cool with the blue jewels!



STEP 3:  OSCILLATING WEIGHTS & BALL BEARINGS! (TECHNICIAN) 
The technicians practiced replacing ball bearings on oscillating weights for automatic watches.


STEP 4:  POINTED NOSE VICE! (RENATO) 
Renato decided to have detachable jaws on his pointed nose vice!



STEP 5:  TOOL REPAIRS! (RENATO & DAVID) 
In each Fullskill class we had, we always had at least one screw broken that needed to be machined out due to the very extreme tensions some of them are under, golden lessons!
The plan!





STEP 6:  FINAL CHECKS! (RENATO) 
Renato making final checks in the profile projector on his brass piece soon to be milled to be the pointed nose vice!


STEP 7:  FRIENDS! (ALL) 
Our friends came for a visit and enjoyed the green pastures!





HENRIK's WORDS:

 

Finally, we got some sun! Things are looking brighter now and even our friends came for visit 😊 Very busy week for everyone! Yuriy and Willy will soon leave us and it will be a bit sad, however, we will very soon receive new students! The perfect circle continues! We covered some last aspects of the technician course such as the automatic watch, ball bearing replacement, hand setting, water resistance issues how to deal with different type of cases etc. Yuriy finished one of his side projects, a beautiful pocket watch with a Zodiac movement with blue jewels! Absolutely stunning looking movement! On this project he learned black polishing as well as bluing screws, making bushings to replace the worn ones among many other techniques to make it run with good amplitude and timing ones again, and he even learn how to gold plate, unfortunately the hands he wanted to gold plate did not fit in the end so he had to use the old ones, but at least he learned the process! David and Renato continued machining tools and learn how to extract a broken screw from a tool holder which is always an interesting process!

Willy handed over a unique special commemorative plaque as a token of appreciation of the education he received, what an honourable thing to do! Thank you so much Willy! we will certainly never forget you!

We probably covered more things this week that I already forgot about as the week was so fast! It was an awesome week overall! Have a great weekend everyone!

Friday, May 21, 2021

SURPRISE WEEK!

 WEEK 111

Willy, Yuriy, Alex, Michael
Origin : Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, Malaysia 
Watchmaking class: Technician & Fullskill 
Current mood: It is another busy week. Michael and Alex are working on the 7 movements for the final timing as well as full assembly including all the complications. A very interesting process to say the least. In the mean time, Willy and Yuriy takes on the final exam. Fingers crossed that they pass with flying colors!!


Renato & David
Origin: Zug, Zürich, Switzerland
Watchmaking class: Fullskill
Current mood: David worked on the female cone and finished all other press fit parts. Later on he worked on the poising plate tool and finished the V shaped cut. I had a milling week this week. Did a test piece to practice the milling to be done on the 8mm brass anvil tool. Did it later on on the real piece and it turned out fine. Many steps involved and having an exact milling plan upfront is highly recommended to avoid any mistakes. Especially on this piece that contains many steps, manual ones, milling, jig boring... very easy to make a mistake on the milling machine or in the calculation. Also milled a deep hole through Yuriy's Bergeon 3007 collet reaming tool, so he has full visibility from the bottom of it. Plenty of milling, cool week!


Name: Markus McDonald.
Origin: Stockholm, Sweden. 
Course: 2 years full skill course.
Current mode: 
This week I worked on two things, firstly the poise error for the 6498 to improve the timing. Secondly the 7750 specically three stages. Initaly assembly and disasembly, this went well being different than the other calibers due to the chronograph module, then oiling initally just the chronograph section and then the entire watch and lastly repeating the whole process several times to improve and also improving small details and quality such as the approach to disasembly, oiling and cleaning.
This went well as my understanding and skill for the 7750 improved a lot making it an intense week but also good.


STEP 1:  OMEGA! (ALL) 














































Amazing visit! a must for anyone interested in watches!


STEP 2:  BOOKS & DVD's! (RENATO) 






HENRIK's WORDS:

 

Still raining off and on! Same as last week. However, this week had some pleasant surprises!  First of all, we went to Herrli in Bienne ones again and as always got really good stuff, I got a monster case-back opener which is extremely stable and rigid, have never seen anything on this level before! I cleaned it and tried it out on a very hard to open titanium case, it opened the case-back without a struggle whatsoever and made no mark at all! I also got a very rare antique handmade Breguet double bend tweezer and a bunch of NIVAROX 2 quality hairsprings for my stock, I got all of it for a very friendly price, Thank you Maurizio! As a surprise one of my former students dropped in as well, we go way back to the olden and golden WOSTEP times, probably around 2005-2006 or so, I had him in the refresher course and have not seen him for a couple of years or so, he now works in Omega, and recommended us to visit the Omega Museum as we were only 10 minutes’ walk away, what a great idea! it was surely a surprise high light of the day, especially for me who never visited before and Omega is also one of my favourite all-round Swiss watch brand as I used to work a lot with their watches in the past which is always a joy and happen to still work with their vintage movements today! Enjoy the pics from the museum visit! I highly recommend anyone to visit it, it’s really nice!! As a bonus I also got my movement with a really nice, almost mint porcelain dial which I love the vivid colours of, will probably make it into an interesting project as the movement is really nice! Will post some pics of it ones I get time. Willy and Yuriy finished their final exams for the technician course, we hope they will both pass! Really super week it was!! Have a great weekend everyone!


STEP 3:  TWEEZERS! (HENRIK

Got these really cool Breguet tweezers from Herrli in Bienne among many other things, Thank you Maurizio!!