Link to Video, “The Lost art of Automota”

Anybody want to pay me a few hundred thousand dollars to figure out how to do this? Feel free to contact me or just make a really, really big donation and I’ll get to work right away.

First order of business is to take my family of 5 off to Philadelphia to visit the automata in the above video and then perhaps to Geneva where I know there are many more automota sitting in museums. After some first hand study I’ll sit down, design and make an automota. All I need is the big infusion of cash. Anybody?

Their ambition with the project is simply this: to demonstrate and archive all of the necessary skills required to make a high quality, mechanical watch, from conception through to execution.

A little over a year ago, the team selected Michel Boulanger, a professor at the Paris School of Horology, to assist them with the project. Since accepting the challenge, Michel has been busy at work designing and developing a high grade watch movement under the direction and aid of the masterful trio of watchmakers. The process has been captured on video and will be augmented with photos, text, and 3D renderings to explain each step.

A spin-off of the Time Aeon Foundation, launched in 2006, this new project is being piloted under Le Garde Temps. You can follow the birth of a watch project as it unfolds on the official website or Le Garde Temps’ Facebook page.

When Bulova wanted a name for their new quartz watch, Tinker suggested Accutron.

It’s a fascinating book. I’m loving it, but I need to set the record straight: The Bulova Accutron is not a quartz watch, it is an electric tuning fork watch.

In automobile commercials, or at the end of 60 minutes, you hear the ticking of a watch, but most youngsters these days don’t know why that sound is associated with the passage of time. Most clocks and watches today (quartz) tick once a second and it is a hideous ker-clunk, not a nice tic-a-tic-a-tic.

I recently watched the movie Hugo based on the book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and I enjoyed it, but in order to do so I had to suspend my understanding of reality. The cinematography is incredible, the directing fantastic, the story amazing, but the physics are impossible! Throughout the movie Hugo runs around through the train station dodging spinning wheels and pendulums. The clocks move like electric clocks where motors spin fast and each successive gear turns slower, not like mechanical clocks where the barrel turns slow and each successive gear turns faster. An electric clock’s fastest gear will turn 60 times per second and it’s slowest will turn once a minute. In a mechanical clock with a pendulum the fastest gears will turn once a minute and the slowest gears will turn once every several hours. Also, a pendulums rate of oscillation is directly proportional to its length. A pendulum 10 feet long or more (as shown in the movie) will swing back and forth about every 4 seconds. So, how do I know they are mechanical clocks? Because Hugo’s job is to keep them wound! Since the period of these large clocks in the movie is about every 4 seconds no gear in the clock should be rotating faster than one tooth every 4 seconds, unless every time he runs through the mechanism he is traversing a chiming mechanism or something similar which turns freely, held back by a governor of such device, but I find that highly unlikely on a scale through which a small boy can pass through the center of a gear.

On another note that automaton is amazing and the mechanics for it are quite realistic. How can I find the time, energy, and money to create something like that?

So what is my burden? Knowledge of how certain things in the world around me work. I can live with it, but at times I find it a little bit annoying.

For those who oil pallet arbors I understand that an extremely light film is applied to the arbor as a rust preventative more than as a lubricant.

Whether you are a believer of oiling pallet arbors or not the following photo is NOT the way to do it.

You may want to click on the photo to get the full effect. What you see here is oil in the pallet arbor sink and flowing up on top of the pivot. Also you’ll notice oil on the top of the pallet fork. Whoever serviced this watch last used enough oil on the pallet arbor to take care of most of the gear train.

The estate came with a nice Boley lathe with a pretty nice set of collets. At long last I have a lathe at home, now if only I can find time to use it. I didn’t even have to buy a Chinese lathe.

It also came with a lot of other things including hundreds of parts movements, thousands of watch parts, other tools, books and much, much more.

I’m putting together a great workshop but there are many duplicates and I don’t often see a need for having 2 or 3 of something.

Also, as a young watchmaker I have a strong need to have an electronic database of the parts so I can easily locate them.

What does all of this mean? and why am I telling you this tale?

Introducing: The Watchmaking Blog Store, an ever growing on-line store of things very useful to watchmakers young and old. Take a look at it and come back later to see what I’ve added. If you need a watch part, don’t forget to look for it here. I’m sure I still have kinks to work out but the payment is secure through Paypal and shipping in the U.S. is free.

Apparently details are murky but it seems to me it is a simple matter of economics. Rolex has pulled their funding in support of other schools. Those who wish to fault Rolex for this matter should ask themselves how much funding Swatch or Richemont have given watchmaking education in the U.S. outside of their own schools? Richemont for one, hires most of their graduates so, in my opinion, their school is more of an in-house training than altruistic support of the watchmaking profession.

There is an interesting critique in the comments from an apparently disgruntled ex-Rolex employee. It is an interesting read and can be found here: The Emperors New Watch. There is no doubt that Rolex has “Their way of doing things” and if you don’t conform you are in the wrong. Their way seems to work for them. Could they do more good? Yes. Are they doing more than their major competitors? Yes.

For this year, I’ve compiled a list of small, stocking-suitable items that I’ve found useful and interesting over this year past. Some of the items you may not have heard of before and most of the items that made this year’s list I’ve come to use and appreciate on a weekly – if not daily – basis in our watch lab. For those who don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you still find the tools and ideas proposed in this list handy for your own work.

3. Coin Screwdriver

If battery changes are something you do on a day to day basis, you have more than likely encountered watches from the likes of Swatch, which require a coin to unscrew the battery cover. While convenient for people who wish to change their own batteries, this design choice rubs against the grain of a watchmaker or service techinician’s routine flow. I used to keep a penny in the top drawer of my bench for such battery changes, but modern smart watches from brands like Suunto and Polar employ a very large battery cover with a broad coin slot. Small change won’t cut it for cases like this. Tired of fishing for large coins in my pocket whenever this sort of case came in for a battery change, I was delighted when I finally discovered the Veritas Pocket Screwdriver. It’s a coin shaped screwdriver with a tapered that edge allows it to adapt seamlessly from Swatch sized coin slots all the way up to Suunto’s most behemoth battery cover slot with ease.

$10 per dozen

5. Polymide Tape

For a number of years I always thought that protective polymide tape was expensive. That presumption was due, though, mainly to the fact that the watch brands I was purchasing it from charged so much for it and my local material houses didn’t stock it or even know what it was when I asked for it. Thankfully, the Internet has changed that. Sites like Amazon and DealExtreme now stock rolls of polymide in sub-centimeter widths for 1/10 of the price I used to pay.

Polymide tape is widely used in the electronics industry for masking and insulating electronic circuits. In the world of watches, its phenomenal heat resistance makes it great for protecting individual areas of watch cases and bracelets during polishing and finishing. For instance, to mask off an area of a watch bracelet that has a high polish while applying a satin finish to an area right next to it, or vice versa.

One caveat of the polymide rolls available from Amazon et al is that it isn’t available in the 1mm width used to protect the thin polished detailing on Omega Seamaster bracelets. Serendipitously, though, after running out of 1mm tape one afternoon this past year, I discovered that it is both cheaper and faster for me to use a wider tape and run the bracelet through the satin wheel twice over, using an alternate taping pattern with each run, than it is to use the 1mm tape. Cheaper simply because it is less expensive to buy the slightly wider rolls online. Faster because I’ve never once had to head back to the polishing buff for a touch up because the tape broke, which was a not uncommon occurrence with the 1mm polymide.

Around $3 per roll

7. Sugru

Some things in life are hard to explain fully in words. Sugru is one of those things. You really have to hold it, try it, use it, and resolve a few hankering problems with it to know just how useful it can be.

In short: it’s grown-up Play-Doh that turns into silicone overnight. For a nice – but not exhaustive – sampling of what it can be used for, check out the array of examples on the company’s website. I’ve used it to successfully improve the ergonomics of a few tools and can easily think of a dozen other uses for it, applicable to watches, that I haven’t had opportunity to apply it to yet. Fixing silicone pushers. Replicating out-of-production watch straps. Creating odd-shaped gaskets. You name it.

If ever you do need to replicate an item using Sugru, and a small amount of shrinkage isn’t an issue, I’d also recommend checking out InstaMorph moldable plastic for casting a mold of the original.

$20 for a dozen packages

10. Cellphone Macro Lens

This one is a second repeat from last year’s list, but it’s another that’s worth repeating. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, this little macro lens has saved me millions. I have been surprisingly impressed with the quality of pictures I’ve been able to capture with this little guy over the past year and a half that I’ve had it and it has proved itself priceless in enabling me to easily communicate the details of a watch repair to potential clients. Used on an iPod Touch, coupled with Airplay to beam the images to an AppleTV, the customer service experience can be taken to a level that was hitherto unimaginable.

For some sample images taken using the macro lens with an iPhone 4 see this, these, and that.

$10 to $15

The complete assembly video checks in at just under 10 minutes of viewing time.