Common Mistakes New Watchmakers make Using a Timegrapher

there's no doubt that a time grapher is a game changer when you're new to watchmaking it gives you the watchmaker direct feedback on how well you are cleaning lubricating inspecting and assembling the movement you're working on now if i were to ask 99 of the new watchmakers what a time grapher is used for most of them are going to say it's just used to regulate the watch and they would be half right using a time grapher to regulate a watch is actually a two-part process the first step is called adjusting this is where you adjust problems which we call faults that are usually located in the escapement or the balance wheel that keep the watch from keeping accurate time in multiple positions in order to even begin the adjustment process a watch needs to be cleaned it needs to be lubricated and demagnetized as well as the powertrain the escapement and balance wheel all in good working order this adjustment process includes making sure that the powertrain is free running with the proper handshake and clearances the escapement must be an adjustment and the clearances or what we call divisions must be correct so that no parts are touching each other the hair spring must be centered on the collet and level under the balance bridge the gap between the regulator pins or the regulator key should be parallel and as close as possible without squeezing the hair spring the movement should be clean and oiled at zero hour or when a watch is fully wound the movement should not knock when it's in the horizontal positions or for an automatic movement when the bridle is wound to its limit knocking is when the balance wheel rotates too much and the impulse pin hits the horns of the pallet fork the amplitude should be a minimum of 270 degrees at a full wind and deliver consistent power after running for 24 hours the amplitude on a manual wind watch should be a minimum of 210 degrees or 190 degrees if it's an automatic when these conditions are met now you can move on to the second part of the process which is called regulation when you're regulating a movement you change the effective length of the hairspring by moving the location of the regulator pins along the terminal curve which basically makes the hairspring either longer or shorter when you make the effective length of a hair spring longer rates go down when you make the effective length of the hair spring shorter rates go up now regulation is only done to fine-tune the rates and they will not correct any faults that are actually in the movement now when you put the movement into the microphone stand allow the movement to settle in for 30 seconds before you even start looking at the results on the time graph and then let it go for another 30 seconds before you actually start recording the data on the screen you need to allow the changes of gravity and friction to take place in the movement in order to get accurate screen data now when you begin the adjusting process you should look at rate in two different ways the first is what you see on the screen that's the instantaneous rate which is a prediction of how well that movement will keep time in that one position if everything stays the same for a period of 24 hours the instantaneous rate is used primarily for regulation but when you're doing your adjusting before regulation we use what's called the delta rate or just the delta the delta is simply the difference between the highest rate and the lowest rate the amount of difference or spread is the delta now for most movements a delta rate of 10 seconds is pretty good if you can get the delta within 5 seconds you're doing great in certain high quality movements you can literally get the delta down to zero the goal of a watchmaker who's adjusting a watch is to get the delta rate down or as close to zero as possible before you regulate the watch now when looking at the delta rate between positions they could be all positive numbers they could be all negative numbers or they could be a combination of both so if your two extreme numbers are negative 10 and negative 20 your delta between them is 10. if you have two numbers and one is negative five and the other is positive five your delta is still ten if you have one number that's 0 and the other number is plus or minus 10 exactly your delta is still 10. in watch service the amplitude measured at the balance wheel is key because not only does it tell you the overall health of the movement and the quality of the service work but it actually controls the rate now in your mind picture a balance wheel sitting at rest when it's not turning amplitude is simply the angle that the balance wheel swings from its resting position in either direction although manufacturers don't really specify what the amplitude should be they will often specify what the maximum amplitude should be which is usually around 320 degrees so the escapement doesn't knock what manufacturers do specify now is what the minimum amplitude should be after the movement's been running for 24 hours now unfortunately this kind of data the minimum requirements is typically only going to be available to manufacturers authorized service providers but as a general guideline manual wine movements should have a minimum amplitude of around 210 degrees and automatic movements should have a minimum amplitude of around 190 degrees now these goals are for excellent time keeping and you may not be able to achieve these goals right away as you go along and build your skills and watch repair you'll be able to achieve these goals on almost every watch now lift angle is the setting used by the time grapher to calculate amplitude and it has nothing to do with calculating the rate of the watch lift angle is simply the number of degrees of rotation where the roller jewel is in contact with the pallet fork although lift angle doesn't need to be exact you do want it to be as close as possible because having an accurate amplitude reading is actually really important having an incorrect lift angle of just one degree off can throw your amplitude reading off by five degrees or more which is not ideal for watch adjusting lift angles in most watches are going to range anywhere from the low 40s to the mid 50s but some movements go up into the 60s as a general rule movements that operate under a lower beats per hour will have lower lift angles in movements that operate at a higher beat per hour or a higher frequency will have higher lift angles now when new watchmakers can't find a lift angle they typically default to just use 52 degrees for practically everything but this isn't ideal for watchmaking because everything we're doing is to keep the amplitude as high as possible so why just guess at a lift angle and guess what the amplitude is when you're doing all this work to keep it as high as you can and finally we get to the beat error which is probably the most misunderstood of all the readings on a time graph so why do so many people focus on it well it's because on modern movements bead era can easily be adjusted right from the top of the balance so it's one of the things that people who have limited knowledge in watch adjusting and regulation can actually do to change the results on the time grapher but in reality beat era doesn't mean hardly anything most manufacturers allow for a beat era of anywhere from 0.5 milliseconds all the way up to 0.8 milliseconds why because a beat era under 1.0 milliseconds doesn't affect the rate of a watch let me say that again anything below 1.0 milliseconds does not affect the rate on a watch so what is beat era you remember a few minutes ago when i said that amplitude is measured by the angle that the balance wheel swings in one direction and then the other beat era is the difference in time that it takes for the balance wheel to rotate in one direction compared to the time it takes for the balance wheel to rotate in the other direction when a watch is in perfect beat the pallet fork pivot the impulse jewel and the balance wheel pivot are all in a perfectly straight line when the balance wheel is not moving this is what we refer to as the line of centers so remember that the line of center because you're going to be hearing that more and more once we get into more videos about the escapement now when a watch movement is at rest or not moving and it's in beat or perfect beat or even close to perfect beat everything in the escapement is lined up in such a way that even the smallest amount of power added to the main spring will make the escapement spring to life now when a watch is out of beat you will either need to put in a lot more power into the mainspring or you have to shake the watch to force the escapement to start rotating also know that when you're adjusting a movement it's impossible for beat error to be the same in all the positions so when you see little fluctuations in the beat era there's no need to be concerned unless the beat era is vastly different think of watch positions in two groups you've got your dial positions and you've got your vertical positions dial positions are often referred to as horizontal positions or even laying positions the watch is laying in a flat position either with the dial up or the dial down in watch adjusting and regulation the dot the two dial positions need to be correct first before you can even start looking at the vertical positions ideally the amplitude and rate should be almost exactly the same but this will have a lot to do with the quality of the movement itself differences in amplitude and rate and the dial positions is almost always caused by friction somewhere in the escapement or the balance small variations in the dial positions are acceptable but when the deltas get too far apart you need to find these faults and correct them before moving on to the vertical position now the first thing to understand about the vertical timing positions is the amplitude is going to drop from where it was in the horizontal position this is due primarily to the difference in friction in the balanced pivots the effects on gravity to the movement and any poise errors that may be in the balance wheel now remember in the dial positions the balance pivot the tip of the pivot is actually spinning on the end stone but when you turn the movement sideways now the entire shaft of the pivot is rotating in the jewel hole that's inside the chaton this is why making sure that the end stones are properly lubricated because if oils not drawn up into the pivot hole to lubricate that pivot staff when it's in the vertical position this fault will come up as lower than normal amplitude drops because the friction is higher than it should be creating a larger delta between your dial positions and your vertical positions than you want gravity pulls the hair spring down making it droop which causes the balance wheel to use more energy to keep the balance wheel oscillating now poise eras are basically a heavy spot on the balance wheel that also requires the balance to use more power to throw this heavy spot back and forth correcting poise errors is advanced watch adjusting so for now just understand that the quality of the movement is going to have a lot to do with how well that balance wheel is in poise from the factory now in vintage watches that have timing screws on the balance wheel oftentimes you'll have poise errors because someone else has messed with those screws taking the wheel out of poise and you'll need to correct this fault in the adjusting process before the watch can be regulated now for timing purposes normally in a decent quality watch you're going to be really concerned with the dial up position the nine o'clock up position and the six o'clock up position if you think how most people wear a watch when you're sitting somewhere the dial is going to be facing up and then when you're holding your hands like this six o'clock is going to be pointing up and when your arm is hanging down the nine o'clock is going to be facing up now if you spend most of your time sitting at a desk all day or you spend your day being more active those dial positions may change a little bit for you the bottom line will always be how the watch performs on your wrist now i'm going to drop a little nugget on you that you've probably not heard anywhere else one position that's never talked about is the eight o'clock up position the swiss watch manufacturing industry did all kinds of studies and they determined that most people's arms spends the majority of the time at 30 degrees which puts the 8 o'clock hour marker straight up as a matter of fact that's even in the swiss watchmaking school textbooks so when we actually regulate a watch the eight o'clock position is always checked for final rates just to make sure that it's good as well now if you're working on a pocket watch those positions are going to be a little bit different with a pocket watch you're going to look at the dial up position you're going to look at the crown or pendant up position just because of how a pocket watch is normally carried usually there's a chain attached to the bow on the pendant and the pocket watch is sitting in your pocket with the pendant straight up for a pocket watch the other important positions would be with the pendant facing to the left and the pendant facing to the right oftentimes finding the correct lift angle for a movement could be hard depending on the actual movement you're working on i'm going to show you a easy way to quickly figure out the correct lift angle for any movement no matter what it is so that you can have confidence in your amplitude numbers so starting with the power released from the mainspring find a spot on the balance wheel where you can see it clearly at the top and also have a clear view of the opposite side of that balance wheel now using a fine probe dip it into some liquid white out and put a small drop at the top of the balance wheel now visually split the wheel in half and look at the opposite side and apply a drop of the white out to the main plate this drop should be exactly 180 degrees from the dot that you put on the balance wheel now add a couple turns to the crown until the balance wheel just starts moving at first you'll be able to barely see the white dot moving back and forth but as the wheel speeds up it'll get harder to see now with your smartphone film the balance wheel spinning in super slow motion for about four seconds now watch the video and check the location of the white dot on the balance wheel what you're looking for is you want the dot on the balance wheel to line up with the dot that you placed on the main plate just add very small amounts of wine to the main spring until it lines up with the reference dot that you made on the main plate now once those two dots line up install the movement onto the microphone stand and adjust the lift angle until the amplitude on the time grapher reads 180 degrees make adjustments to the lift angle until you get the amplitude as close to 180 degrees on the screen as you can now if the two dots on the movement didn't line up exactly adjust the lift angle so the amplitude reads either a little bit more than 180 or a little bit less depending on how the two dots lined up if the dots swung a little bit beyond the reference dot on the movement then just adjust the lift angle until the amplitude is slightly more than 180 degrees now simply record the lift angle that you've determined on your time grapher and now you can fully wind the watch and you will have an accurate amplitude reading on your time grapher and that is how you can figure out the lift angle for any movement thanks for watching i hope to see you again very soon

Channel: Watch Repair Tutorials

Views: 44,781

Keywords: watch repair, watch repair lessons, basic watch repair, watch repair tutorial, using a timegrapher, regulating a watch movement

Id: x1XPx9uIzRM

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022