Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Quartz Destruction

This last week I was working on an older quartz watch.  My teacher, Elaine, sabotage it in various ways and then I had to find and fix the problems.  I have taken pictures of the problems below.  There was a broken setting stem, a bent hack and a metal dust-covered rotor.  The endshake of the rotor was also too small. 

The hardest part of this watch however was the face that the crystal popped out after cleaning the case.  Then, during the trial and error process of figuring out how to cleanly glue a new crystal back in there I broke the the crystal that was in there.  So I got to grind a new crystal to fit, which was an additional challenge.  Funny how a little quartz watch took nearly a week of my time to finish.  I sure learned a lot though.

Broken stem!


The new, the old

The new stem, shortened to nearly the finished length with a nipper was then brought to the final dimension on a stone

Nearly short enough, but the space between the case and crown is still too extreme

A perfect fit!

The bent hack.  This is the part that blocks the geartrain (with the top finger) and shuts down power to the rotor (with the bottom finger) In this case the bottom finger had been bent downwards so it was not engaging the electrical contact, it had to be bent back upwards to ensure effectiveness

The rotor, covered with iron filings!  This will not do.

The rotor was easily cleaned off with ruboff compound

1 comment:

  1. What an interesting challenge for you. Good job figuring it all out!

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