Tour de Romandie!

 Week 17

This week we had a nice surprise when the Tour de Romandie passed through the town in the afternoon!

Traffic in and out of Le Locle was backed up all the way to La Chaux de Fonds!

STUDENT HIGHLIGHTS

Workshop B
Students: 

    Åsmund, Dean, Francesco, Robert, Tetsu, Xin

    This week Åsmund, Francesco and Robert took a trial exam for the hairspring. Afterwards Francesco and Asmund took the real exam.

    Åsmund also assembled a 6498 hairspring and changed the greiner collet for an older style collet.

    Tetsu and Dean also took two practice exams but for the escapement. Their goal was to increase the quality of their work while reducing the amount of time required to perform all the checks and adjustments.

    Additionally, Henrik provided the final lesson in their gear train lesson regarding the barrel. Freedom of movement between the barrel and bridges is important, as is ensuring it does not encroach on other movement parts while in operation.

    For repair points projects, Tetsu completed making and installing a barrel bridge bushing for his vintage IWC.  .  

New bushing in worn barrel bridge

 

Bridge after "magic rhodium", the bushing stayed its natural color.

    Tetsu used “magic rhodium,” a brass whitening liquid to repair the partially worn barrel bridge while keeping the bushing its normal colour.

 

    Dean white rhodium plated the main plate and bridges of his WWII-era Oyster Raleigh.

 

Oyster Raleigh disassembled for repair

Oyster Raleigh mainplate pre-plating

 

Oyster Raleigh barrel bridge pre-plating

Oyster Raleigh parts after cleaning Rhodium plating.

    Dean also repaired a damaged pallet jewel from a Longines 53M wristwatch movement.
  

Chipped pallet jewel

 

Pallet jewel glued to a brassplate to do repairs

 

Repaired pallet jewel installed

 

    Dean also registered an Omega pocket watch for a future repair project.

 

    This week Xin passed his hairspring exam and is now on the final part of the technician course! He has also been completing practice movements and is trying to deepen his understanding of how to achieve better timing by making different adjustments to make it more accurate.

    Henrik also introduced to all of them new lessons such as cannon pinions and how to set the tension for proper operation, escapement lubrication, and the use of Episurf Neo which is a chemical used to prevent the spreading of oil to unwanted areas.

Tools to adjust the cannon pinion. From top to bottom: smoothing broaches, removing tool, cannon pinion, crimping tool to tighten the cannon pinion and a 6498 movement.

 

GUEST STARRING

Workshop A
Students:

    Amer 

 

    While making one of his tools, Amer made this amazing fibonacci spiral!

 

COMING UP NEXT...

 There will be a long weekend because of Labor day on monday, so we'll be having a shortened week.

 

 

 

 Thank you for reading and hope to see you again next week!