Daddy’s home

 Michael has returned! Much missed by his class, the whole gang is back together. Heavy snow fall followed Michael back to Le Locle for this never ending winter.

A busy week for myself, have been working on a balance staff replacement for an old Russian watch. My first restoration of this kind, and a difficult one. With the guidance of Michael it’s all done by Friday afternoon. Beating happily away.

Alongside, Caio and Gui have now learnt how to operate every machine in the school and are now moving on the watchmaker lathe. 

While Chris, Gary and Phillip are learning how to properly service said lathe.

Short blog this week, but until next time!

Little excursion

 A fun week this week. We were all invited by Nicolas from Cenic watch parts for some pizza over at his lovely store. He had received some new tools and watches, which we are all excited to see. We had lunch together outside with plenty of pizza to go round. It’s always great visiting his treasure trove of a shop, thank you Nicolas!

Some happy students 

Marvelling at his watches

A unique school watch minute repeater

After a day of pizza, we were treated to a day of cake! It being Kaio’s birthday we sang and ate. 

Onto Kaio’s work, making his way through the start of the micro mechanics, he’s finishing up the shapes of his tools before the continues with the more detailed work.

Tools coming along 

Guillerme is doing some restoration work on the Jacot tool he just bought from Cenic. One of the runners was missing a cap, so he turned and sawed one for a seems fit.

Existing and new caps 

Sens is here learning how to find leaking spot on a watch case. He used the water pressure tests to find that the case failed the test, then used the leak finder to isolate the leak.

Craig is pursuing some side quests, doing a full overhaul of a lovely Valjoux 23, an iconic chronograph.

Very sexy

Here is Joan’s radioactive dial.

As for me, I’m doing some experimenting on making frosted dials. Slowly making progress, but it’s nice to see that I’m heading in the right direction.

That’s it for this week! 

Until next time 

Time for celebration

 We are all in high spirits thanks to Craig’s final exam result returning. Craig is now a fully fledged watchmaker, and his journey is just beginning. So a huge congratulations to Craig, we are all very happy for him.

Now that Craig has spare time on his hands, he took the opportunity to teach us aspiring watchmakers his techniques to bevel wheel teeth. 

Craig (blue coat) sharing his secrets

Onto the other students, Joan also took an exam this week. Having done his escapement exam. A difficult and tedious exam. After having passed the exam very nicely, he has now started to restore a vintage IWC.

Cute lil guy

On the topic of buying watches, Jaewon has also made a special purchase, having acquired the legendary Valjoux 23.

A beauty

Chris accomplished a great feat. He made a negative set winding stem. Adapting a pocket watch crown and stem to have a pusher which goes through the winding stem.  A very difficult task, as you need to drill and very thin and very long whole through the stem. He did this by drilling two hole from different sides which met in the middle.

Finally, here we are celebrating Guillerme’s birthday!

That’s it for this week, until next time!