How Do You Replace A Balance Staff In A Watch? - Vintage Watch Repair

hi everyone ashton here and welcome back to another episode um of watch repair or watch restoration on my channel precision horology so uh thanks for joining us today today we're going to be looking at um well it's a relatively common repair i guess you could say it's not like every watch that comes in needs this repair but it's the removal and replacement or refitting of a balanced staff now here we have um the balance in question now it's quite a large balance it's from uh a clock it's an eight day um clock a hoya here that's actually one of the dash mounted clocks that we talked about in the previous episode so i've put the movement together we didn't go through um the assembly process because i wasn't able to capture that um uh on on film but uh we're gonna do the balance stuff together today so it's a large balance uh for an eight day clock and we have a bent balance pivot so let's have a look at that pivot so the staff is readily available which is something that we're very very happy about which means we don't have to make the balance staff so i could order a balanced stuff for this caliber in this situation so that that definitely makes our life a little easier so the first thing we need to do when changing a balance staff is we need to remove our balance spring now it's important to note before we move our balance spring where the stud lies on or in relation to the actual rim of the balance now in this particular case um we have there's a marking on the balance that a previous watchmaker has made um to indicate where the stud would go now i don't like to scratch into the balance where it usually goes some balances actually have a factory um i guess you could say dimple a little drill dimple and that's where the stud goes but in this situation someone scratched it i prefer to use a good old sharpie um just to mark it but i don't need to in this situation because someone's already marked it so let's go ahead and we're going to use levers to lift off this spring to get underneath so as not to not to damage it and there we go so we have our spring off we've lifted it off at the collet and then we can put our spring to one side it actually has quite a hefty collet on it this spring um quite a large large sized collet now that gets pushed right down to the base here um of the balance itself and now we're going to put that aside now the next thing we need to do is we need to remove the roller now we can see here what i've done is i've marked with my sharpie where the impulse jewel of the roller goes so that we know exactly where to put that roller back back on the back on the balance now to remove our roller we're going to use our roller remover which is a tool that looks like this and we are going to slide it roll is almost too big slide it on like so and we just gently squeeze and our roller will pop off and the reason we don't use levers or try not to use levers is because someone's used levers in the past and we can see that they've just kind of pushed in pushed in the sides here so it's better to use a roller remover um some staking tools actually have roller removers attached bergeon make a specific roller removal tool but to be completely honest with you these relatively simple bergeon roller removers here number two eight one zero i believe it is they they work very very well um yeah they're very good and they don't have a tendency to depending on how fargo you could actually chop the balance staff off um but you can just uh make sure you you use the right section of the remover there so now we have everything removed we have just our balance and our staff now these staffs um are riveted on in place so it's a two-stage riveting process um they use a rounded punch to form uh to to rivet over as it were and then a flat punch is used um to flatten out that rivet and get a nice tight seal so we're going to go ahead and we're going to remove the rivet so there are multiple ways to remove the balance staff from the actual balance um one of the more traditional ways would be the tool you can just see that we're focusing in on in the background there that is a staking tool so you would put it in the piece and you would punch it out um various different mistakes you would use for the right size another way is to actually mount the balance in the lathe and then with the balance mounted in the lathe you would cut the rivet out of the balance the way i like to do it is with the haurier tool here the haurier jeweling tool this is actually a way i learnt at rolex this is how rolex do it to punch out or to remove their balance staffs so what you do is you find a bottom stake that just fits over and will allow the actual hub of the rivet there to be removed and then you apply downward pressure and push it out i like this method a little better than punching um i find it a little safer um it doesn't uh have a tendency to walk the balance rim uh at all so you find the appropriate size stakes and you twist and you break the rivet and push it out like so so we can see that the staff has been completely removed but we haven't distorted the rim in any way because we have appropriately supported it on the bottom so the next step in our process is to rivet the balance staff onto the balance itself now we mentioned earlier that we use two punches to do this first we use a rounded punch with a rounded end like so to actually spread out the rivet and then we use a flat punch like so to once the rivets rounded once the rivets spread out just to flatten and neaten everything up uh with that with that punch there now we need to make sure that the punches are big enough to go over this body of the staff and get to the rivet but not so big that they're sloppy because we want that rivet to be nice and tight we want it to be able to rivet in in the correct spot we don't want to be uh we want to have half the rivet not getting riveted as it were um i think you understand what i'm trying to say so what we've done is we're going to put our balance staff now uh our good balance staff in the base of the staking set like so now i've centered up this hole already and locked the staking set in place it's actually this is the first time i've uh riveted a balance staff on this staking set it's uh one that i just bought myself it's a very nice full uh k and d set um if you can probably see it here in the background but a nice full k and d set uh so i'm very very happy with this so looking forward to actually using it [Music] to do this job here so once the staff is on the next thing we need to do is we need to put the balance over and make sure that it's pressed down in onto the staff and over the rivet what i like to do sometimes is use a larger punch use a larger punch just to make sure that the balance is seated all the way because we don't want it may be catching if that rivet is a little wider uh bigger tolerance it might catch i mean i might not have it fully seated down like that and that could cause us issues so we just press it down just to make sure it's nicely pressed down there uh like so and then what we can do is we can check because we need to make sure that well as there actually meet over our rivet you know is the balance staff correct you know whether any manufacturing defects whether tolerance is wrong because watch parts aren't always perfect so the name of the game is check check check check and check again before you do anything before you go through each step we need to check it's so important because we'll get to it later but sometimes um we'll rivet it and or people will rivet it and they won't check that the rivet's good and then what'll happen is the rivet will actually move or the staff will actually move on the balance um so you put it in the watch you put the balance spring you've poised it you put the roller on and then um you you uh are in trouble because the rivets loose and you don't know why the watch is you know acting acting all funky so we've got our we've got our rivet in there we've got our staff in there so what we'll do now is we'll use our rounded punch and we'll check again to make sure that it slides all the way over and we'll check that we don't have too much freedom and we don't so at the moment we can see that we can spin that that's completely loose so we pushed it down earlier with the larger but it wasn't really needed because it's quite loose now we need to tap hard enough with our hammer to make sure that we spread the rivet but we don't want to tap so hard that we actually crack the balance stuff or crack the rivet because that can happen and silly me only ordered one balanced stuff they're always better to buy in pairs so we want to just and as we go we want to turn our steak so at this point what we'll do is we'll check so our rivet looks good we've riveted over nicely so now use our flat punch to just neaten everything up and completely flatten out our rivet so we have a nice flat surface um for our balance spring collet to be put on so we now come to the fitting of the roller back on our staff now to fit the roller we come back to the horia tool the drilling press and remember what we do is we support in the bottom and then we push the roller on from the top like so so now we look for our mark that we made that we made earlier and then we can put our roller loosely on and then we can line up our jewel with our mark and press in place the place it into the horia tool and then you can line up and we press down to the base of the hub and now we want to do is we want to make sure and check that our roller can't move because that's something that can happen if our roller is not tight um we need to tighten it up and our roller seems like it can move so our roller is loose so we need to take our it back off and tighten up that roller so to tighten the roller up we put it in the staking set with a little three sided punch and we just bring in the sides just to create something for it to catch on to we need to be very careful though when we do this because it can be it can be dangerous and can damage and crush the roller so we just need to give it a very light tap and check and see because we don't need to bring it in much we only need to bring it in a small amount just so it bites so just a couple of light taps uh is going to be the way to do it there and then we use the horia tool again to successfully push the roller on and i already did that because i forgot to press record so the the roller is now mounted so we can check it and our roller is now nice and tight on to the next step so now we get to the most important part of it all we get to the poison of the balance now what's happened is we've been hammering and banging and hitting and cutting and doing oh well not cutting but we're doing all these things to the balance and we now need to ensure that the balance is perfectly poised now what do we mean by that well we need to make sure that it's the equal weight all the way around the rim so to do this we've obviously got everything on but the balance spring so what we're going to do is we're going to use this poison table here which is essentially a vice it's a vice with ruby jaws now what happens is the balance is mounted in the ruby jaws on its pivots and then the heavy point of the balance will fall to the bottom now what happens at this point is we use the screws on the rim of the balance and we take metal away from those screws so that we eliminate any heavy points in the watch now alternatively we can add weight to the opposite side but in this case we're going to eliminate some just just just to make a few cuts we're not going to have be hugely out of poise here we're just going to make a few cuts now why is it important well what will happen is if we have a heavy point and a light point in different spots when the watch is in the vertical positions when the watch is hanging wrist down um in different positions it's going to keep very different time you're going to have wild fluctuations in time keeping this is particularly important with a wristwatch this watch is actually going to stay or this clock is going to stay in one position mounted on the dash of a vehicle so it's not as important but we are still going to poise the balance correctly so that we have nice poise throughout the duration of the run now there's two types of balance poising there is dynamic poising excuse me there is static poisoning which we are doing right now and there is dynamic poisoning now static poisoning is when we take the spring off and we use this table to eliminate the heavy points dynamic poisoning is actually when we use the timing machine to find the heavy spots on the balance so with the balance in the gear train everything's done everything's serviced everything's correctly running balance spring is in good condition we can make tweaks to the balance by dynamically poising to really get some perfect results when it comes to timekeeping now that's really precision timekeeping at that point so what we're going to do is we're going to now dynamically poise sorry we're going to statically poise this balance so we have our balance loaded up into the poisoning table now over here we have a little level uh now that level all these feet are adjustable so that level ensures that we get a perfectly level table for our balance to be poised on you can imagine if we didn't have a level table we would be chasing a fault that wasn't even there we'd be looking for a heavy point but it's probably just gravity doing its thing so we need to make sure it's level now i like to use i've pulled out the bristle of this paintbrush here and i like to just use the bristle to get the wheel going now if we look what's happening here is once we start it moving it's rocking back and forth now we'll go again that was a bit too vigorous it slows then it rocks back made all the way over now it's gaining a bit of momentum so we'll slow it down now we need to check if we move it what happens see what happens i should have mentioned too before we did this we cleaned the balance uh we got all the markings off that we've done with pen um we've been touching it with our fingers so we removed um any residue from that so it's important to clean it before this point i forgot to mention that now do we notice that what's happening is when we try to stop it it wants to come back so what's happening is the balance is always resting in the same position so what does that tell us if it's always resting in the same position well it tells us that it's always falling toward its heavy point and that is that heavy point that we actually need to eliminate so it's stopping there but then it wants to fall again it's always going back to that same spot so we're going to take it off and we're going to eliminate some of that heavy point so at this point we've done our cutting and we can now check our poise i like to use just a tungsten carbide drill to cut out just the very end of the timing regulating screws on the watch now for a watch of this caliber that's totally acceptable um if it were a more high grade watch an important watch perhaps um you can actually remove the timing screws or weights and you can mount them in the lathe and you can undercut them but in this situation it's totally fine to just cut the outside of the screw so that's the way we would do it we would just drill out the very end of the screw yeah in very small increments to see how much we need to remove so i like to um bring the wheel around to various points check it to see i like to stop it check it to see what our poise is like in various positions i've got a very small heavy spot there still but all in all we seem pretty good all the way around the rim so i'm very happy with that so we're going to stop there um and i'm going to fit the balance spring and now for the final time you press the collar of our balance spring down on with the hurrier tool and we're complete and now at this point we can mount it in the watch um we can check the time keeping and if we do have any discrepancies um with some slight heavy points we can dynamically poise it based on our timing machine results so thanks for watching guys i hope you've enjoyed this video on how to replace uh remove replace and refit um a balanced stuff so if you've enjoyed it please um like the video uh share it with your friends please check out my website precisionhorology.com if you have any questions about servicing you can get in touch and you can check me out on instagram and uh please yeah share the video and subscribe to the channel it helps to helps me to be able to make more content like this so thanks again guys and until next time

Channel: Precision Horology

Views: 19,357

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Id: K8EtGKDg8Qs

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021