Adjusting the Etachron Regulator: A Beginners Guide

if you're having problems regulating a watch that uses the etochrone regulation system more than likely it's because you're not adjusting it before you start trying to regulate the rate in today's video not only am I going to show you how to remove and install a new balance wheel and hairspring but I'm going to take you step by step through the entire process of adjustment that sets up the regulator to be able to adjust the rate from multiple positions this is part of a series of videos on watch regulation and adjustment that I'm doing so if you're new to watchmaking you may want to follow along and we're going to do it starting right now so what's different about the enochrone regulator well around 1976 ETA introduced this new two-part regulator system that replaced the adjustable regulator pins that have pretty much been used forever this was a big advancement for regulators and they did it by only changing two small things the first change was to the stud block instead of holding the hairspring to the stud block with a tapered pin the hairspring was now permanently epoxied to the block then instead of the stud block being held in a fixed position the stud block is held under tension in a fork slot which allows the hair Springs position to be easily adjusted the second change was to the regulator pins themselves in the edachron system the regulator block has two fixed pins which keep the pins at a 90 degree angle to the Hairspray because this new regulator block is also held in place under tension and a retaining Fork it allows the entire block to be rotated closing the gap between the hair spring and the regulator pins without having to actually bend the pens themselves now like always in order to be able to regulate any movement it needs to First be properly serviced and lubricated the movement should be free of all magnetism the gear train must be running freely all end in side Shanks should be normal the hairspring should be flat and centered on the collet the movement should be in b the escapement needs to be operating correctly and you should have a consistent amplitude of at least 270 degrees in the horizontal positions so let's start by removing the balance wheel now removing the hairspring and balance wheel is pretty straightforward there's just a couple small things that you need to remember first of all you're going to always want to do it with balance mounted to the bridge and the second thing that you need to do is we need to put the regulator pins in the correct position to remove the Hairspray so as you're looking at the hairspring regulator you can see that it's tilted slightly towards the hairspring stud what we want to do is straighten it out so that the Gap is parallel to the hairspring once we flip it over now they have tools to do these adjustments but in this particular case you can just use your tweezers we're going to slowly turn it until the regulator pins are at their widest point so when you're looking at the top you want this running straight up and down next we need to remove the hairspring stud from the fork that holds it now they have tools to remove this and I'd actually bought one but the first time I used it it broke so I've used my go-to method ever since not looking for any tools to help me out here because you really don't need one for this these two forks are under tension so what we need to do is get something in this area that we can just push the stud out for this I find my bronze tweezers work the best so what we're going to do is just put one tine into the Gap and then we're just going to slowly twist it until the hair spring stud pops out and try to do this without putting any pressure down on top of the stud arm just want to give it a nice gentle twist in the hairspring stud is free and now we'll just go ahead and remove the balance so I like to start by just loosening the balance from the main plate and then we're going to pick up the balance wheel and the together because remember we don't have the spring attached to it and we can just pick it up and flip it over on its back now with the balance removed from the watch the next thing we need to do is get the hairspring out from between this little slit between the two regulator pins so again I like to use bronze tweezers we're just going to grab the hairspring and gently lift it off now when we look at the two regulator pins you'll see that the opening at the bottom is just wide enough to get the hairspring out so if you are struggling a little bit to get it out first make sure that you're pulling it straight up because the in order to separate these to make it wider you'll need to use a razor blade to spread it open a little bit which means you'll also need to close it back as well and it would really be best if you didn't have to fool around with that at all so be patient make sure that you're pulling straight up on the hairspring gently and it should slide right through that Groove at the bottom of the regulator pins now when you're replacing a balance complete which as you probably already know is the balance wheel and hairspray this is done as a set if you have a movement with the endocrine regulator and you have a damaged hairspring you're going to need to replace both the hair spring and the balance wheel the hairspraying and balance wheel are poised together at the factory as a set and this is what you need when you go to replace these you want a set that have been vibrated together when you look at a balance wheel after it's been poised with the hairspring you'll notice that there's a slight groove cut on the underside of the balance wheel well during the poising operation it was determined by the factory that this area of the balance wheel was heavier than the rest of the areas around the balance wheel so this is where a little bit of material was cut away from the underside of the balance wheel to make the balance wheel balanced now the amount of material that's cut away from this balance wheel its location on the balance wheel is all factored on this particular Hairspray now to reinstall the new balance wheel we're just going to set it roughly in place where it's going to be we're going to hold down the bridge and just drop the hairspring through the groove now we're going to go in and we're going to pick up both the balance wheel and the as one piece flip it over and then we're going to put it in position on the movement roughly in the place where everything is going to ultimately be installed now at this point I don't care about the impulse Jewel being in the fork slot all I really want to do before I put the screw in is I want to make sure that my pivots are in the pivot holes so when I put my screw on I don't bend or break the pivots and to do this I'm just going to lightly hold down the balance and I'm just going to see how the balance wheel ax and it certainly looks like the pivots are in their pivot holes so now I'm just going to get my screw started as soon as I feel the first bit of resistance as I tighten the screw down I'm going to stop I'm going to check it again and now I'm just going to move the hairspring stud to the location on the fork where it's going to snap in looks like we're still in the pivot holes just tightening tighten it down a little bit more clearly we can see that the impulse Joule is not in the fork slot but now with the hairspring stud in position I'm just going to take the back side of my bronze tweezers and I'm going to lay them on the side of the hairspring stud at a 90 degree angle holding the tweezers in my right hand and with my left index finger I'm just going to slowly apply pressure to the stud until it snaps in position now with the hairspring stud secured in place now we can remove the balance and reinstall it properly and that's how you install a new balance complete on a movement with the endocrine system foreign so the first step in adjusting the edocrine system is we want to put the watch and beat so I've given the movement a full wide and now I'm just going to make some small adjustments until we can get the bead error to zero now in watch repair you should really obsess too much overbeat error as I've talked about before beat eras under 1.0 milliseconds do not affect the timing of the watch so if you're working on an older vintage watch where you have to turn the collet to adjust the bead error you know if you can get it down to 0.4.5 milliseconds I would be happy with that sometimes you get lucky and you can get it to zero or 0.1 milliseconds just get it as close to zero and as far away as nine as you can get now in modern movements like this adjusting beat air is pretty simple because you don't have to take the balance out to change it or adjust it and since we're talking about being error just be aware that there's many other things that could cause a watch to be out of beat for example you could have a sloppy pallet armor you could have something like a loose roller Jewel or a loose pallet stone or a loose cap Jewel all those things will cause beat errors as well as loose regulator pins and banking pins they can also cause a beat error one of the most common causes of being air and older vintage watches is the hairspring collet is just loose and maybe one of the harder things to detect is the guard pen is rubbing on the safety roller now that the watch is in beat we're going to go ahead and let down the power to the mainspring what's up until our balance wheel stops now the next thing we want to make sure is that our micro adjustment screw uh is pointing straight up to the middle and if you haven't done it already you want to make sure that the regulator pins are in the fully open position which you can tell by looking at the top of the regulator stud so step one in making these adjustments is we want to look at the current spacing of the coils of the mainspring so you'll just have to peer in between things so that you can see and what we're looking for really is we're looking for any bunching that will basically tell us that the hairspring is not concentric so there's one side and then we can see the other side it looks pretty good so the first thing that we need to do now is we want to Center the hairspring in between the regulator pins now looking at the hairspring in between the regulator pins I think it's obvious when you're looking at it at this angle to see that it's not centered in between the regulator pins it's not tied up against the inside pin but we need to adjust it so that it starts off in the middle if you're not sure why that's important the video that I did previous to this one was about the relationship of the regulator pins with the hair spring and I'll leave a link in the description for that video now to make this adjustment there is a special tool that you're going to want to have now you can turn the regulator block with a pair of tweezers but this is an incredibly fine movement and it's going to be very hard to do it effectively with a pair of tweezers especially depending on the angle which you're trying to see the actual Hairspray now the way you adjust the hairspring to the middle of the regulator pins is by inserting this tool on top of the hairspring stud and I think you should just be able to see the tool on the hairspring stud and then we're going to very slowly and carefully turn the tool until the hairspring is in line with the center of the regulator pins so now that we have the hairspring centered in the regulator block the next thing we want to check is the regulator curve here so what we want to do is we want to move the regulator arm along the regulator curve from one end to the other and what our goal is is that the hairspring doesn't move if the hairspring does move that means that this curve is out of shape and will need to be adjusted so in order to check this we're going to move the regulator arm from one end of the regulator curve to the other and what we're going to do is we're going to focus on the coils right here and what we're going to look for is to see if the spacing between those coils changes well clearly we can see that the coils got smaller so that means this regulator curve needs an adjustment so let's go ahead and do that now to find the problem on the Hairspray I've went ahead and taken the balance wheel back out of the movement and when we look at the spacings on the coil we can clearly see in the lower half right here where the coils are closer together than any other place on the Hairspray now the first thing I would probably do is make sure that it's not magnetized and this is a pair of carbon steel tweezers and you can clearly see that it is not magnetized otherwise the hairspring would be sticking to the tweezers so here lies at least one problem with the hair spring that we need to correct now in theory hairspring Corrections are pretty straightforward as there's really only two rules that you need to be aware of when the spacing of the coils is incorrect the correction point is 90 degrees away from the problem area so basically what you do is you look for the area on the hairspring where the coils are either too close together or too far away from each other in the correction area is going to be 90 degrees from that point now looking at this hair spring I can see that here's where the coils are the are closer together than they should be so the area of Correction is going to be 90 degrees away from this point so about right here is where we're going to grab the hairspring with our tweezers and we're going to needle it out or we're going to bend it out a little bit to correct this Gap right here now when we're doing needling work the shape of your tweezers makes a lot of difference in how easy it is to actually grab the hairspring itself and there's a couple different styles it doesn't really matter straight tweezers like this I think you'll find that they're a little bit awkward but they will work I prefer using a curved pair of tweezers here's one style this one is really specifically for holding hairsprings but some people prefer just a curved pair of tweezers either one works now beside the tweezers you also need a needling tool now you can find needling tools for hair Springs on websites like eBay and I think you can even buy new ones but this is one that I made myself it is essentially just a sewing needle that I heated up the end so that I could put a bend in it and epoxied it into a piece of Peg wood and then I just shaped the end of the needle on a Arkansas Stone to thin it out and then just polished it with the polenium just a high gloss polish on a heartfelt wheel so that's really all there is to that so again looking at our hair spraying here's the point where the coils are too close together and we're just going to go back 90 degrees grab our hairspring and we're just going to lightly bend it up what's important here when you're making these type of Corrections is that you want to make very small Corrections at a time don't try to correct the bend one shot make small little Corrections until you get it where you need it now the next thing that I can see is that the regulator curve the width here gets narrow when it gets up close to the hairspring stud so I'm going to go 90 degrees from this area I'm going to grab the hairspring and just give it a slight needle a slight little rub see if we can open that up just a little bit and there was just like we're just making we're just rubbing the needle lightly across the Hairspray and it was so slightly now we'll go ahead and install the hairspring back to the movement and we'll check our work all right so we have a balance wheel reinstalled back into the movement I've moved the regulator to the bottom of the regulator curve and now we need to Center the hairspring again now just as a general rule the Gap that we're looking for between the hairspring and the regulator pins is about the thickness of the hairspring itself so as I'm looking at the hairspring between the regulator pins what I'm looking for is to just try to get the gap even on both sides which is about the width of the hairspray so now that looks good to me so what we're going to do now is we're going to move the regulator arm up the regulator curve and what we're looking for is to see if the width of the coils right here change as we move up the regulator curve so here we go now that we have the regulator curve centered on the pins along the length of the regulator curve now we're going to bring the regulator back towards the middle and now what we're going to do is we're going to close the gap by turning the key on the top of the regulator pins to close the gap between the hairspring and the regulator pits now the one thing you want to do when you make this adjustment is that you turn it towards the hairspring stud so we're going to close the gap we're going to turn this so this corner moves this way we don't want this corner moving that way now if the hairspring stud was on this side we would turn it towards the hairspring stud over here but since it's on the right side right here we're going to turn it clockwise so let's do that next now the key here is we do not want the regulator pins to bind on the hairspring so this is going to be a micro adjustment of the regulator pins themselves now I want you to think about what we just did we started off by adjusting the Hairspray so that it was centered in between the regulator pins then we check the travel of the regulator pins up along the regulator curve which revealed that the curve was not concentric that the pins were now pulling on the hairspring causing the coils on one side to Bunch up we then made another series of adjustments to the coils of the hairspring to correct the errors of the spacing between the coils now once that adjustment was made we reinstalled the balance and then we rechecked the travel of the regulator arm along the curve verifying that no matter where the regulator pins are along that curve that the hairspring will still be centered and therefore it's going to act the same no matter whether you're in a horizontal or vertical position then we made one final adjustment to close the gap between the hairspring and the pins this entire process is what is known as adjusting which will always be done prior to regulating the movement for rape no matter whether it's a watch with the etochrome system or if it's a 100 year old pocket watch the process is basically going to be the same now the regulation tool that I used is pretty much one of those tools that's really a must-have if you're going to be working on edachron systems but if you have files available and you can cut a slot six tenths of a millimeter then you are better off just making the tool yourself I made this one in about 30 minutes using a piece of two and a half millimeter brass I just installed the rod into my screwdriver sharpening jig to get this taper and then to cut the slot I just used a screw sliding file and I size the opening to be just a little bit larger than the regulator and hairspring keys I'll leave links to all the tools I used in the description below in case you want to make one yourself as you can see not only can you turn the keys for the pins and the stud but unlike the Bergeron tool you can actually see how much the key is moving and that brings me to my second bonus tip of the day the Bergeron tool works great except for one thing it's hard to gauge how much you're turning it to solve this problem you can attach an hour hand to the shaft of the tool and now when you turn it you can see exactly how much it's moving using this hand as a visual gauge now the shaft on the tools one and a half millimeters so pocket watch hands are going to work better but you could also use standard 1.2 millimeter hands and just open it up with a smoothing brooch now for any of you who are patrons I uploaded the first part of a two-part series on the sixth step escapement inspection in this Master Series video I'm going into great detail on how the escapement works and how you go about troubleshooting and correcting problems in the escapement so if you have any interest in this type of thing check out my patreon page whenever you get a chance thanks for watching and because there's so much more to learn I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Watch Repair Tutorials

Views: 31,631

Keywords: watch repair, watch repair tutorials, watch repair for beginners, watch servicing, watch repair lessons, etachron, etachron regulator adjustment, etachron regulator, etachron adjustment tool, eta movement, watch repair tutorial

Id: ExfFlYFAffg

Length: 30min 31sec (1831 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022