Back in September, we talked a little bit about magnetism; more recently, as I’ve been working my way through reading the whole of Donald de Carle’s Practical Watch Repairing, I came across this interesting illustration of a hand powered demagnetizer that requires no electric current at all to function.
While it’s not something I can see myself using in daily practice, ever since the blackout of 2003 I have been keeping my eyes peeled for different ways to keep my workshop off the grid and this fits the bill. I may just consider making some variant of this if ever I do happen to find myself stuck with a magnetized tool when the power is out.
If you have thought of innovative ways to conserve or go without power in your workshop, leave a comment and let us know how you did it.
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4 Comments
Thanks for this post. It wasn’t all that long ago that everything in our profession was done without electricity. Of course the sources for magnetism were much fewer back then.
There certainly were much fewer sources of magnetism back then. I can’t remember a single week in the past year that I haven’t had at least a few watches come in with errors due to magnetism. Both quartz and mechanical.
I have an audio cassette hand winder that would probably work wonderfully for this. You can still get something similar now for removing the scratches from CD/DVDs.
It would be more fun to make you own though, if you could justify the spare time it would take.
It would be a fun project to tackle – given the right justification or bare necessity.
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