30T2 repair help

That's an experienced watchmaker, so I assume he has exhausted his contacts that sell parts. If so, then you should probably be looking for an appropriate parts watch or complete movement with the same 30T2 variant. With some effort and patience and negotiating skills, you might land a movement for $200 or so.

eBay, auction houses, etc. You may need to hunt patiently for a month or two, and be ready to act quickly. Just like with watches, at any given moment in time, 95% of things on the market are either junk or overpriced.

More like a year or two if focusing on something like US or UK, EU only. I noticed that the listed items for north America went from 80K items to around 40K in the last few months. A lot fewer parts, more complete watches.

There is also quite a bit of competition for a dwindling supply of vintage parts. I would not mind adding more non automatics like the 30 T2 to my collection. So I keep a watch for this caliber.

The posted photo does show a balance and bridge. What seem to be missing is the cap jewel spring clip what locks in the three studs. I have a T17 missing this clip. Never seen one in three years looking.

I have a large collection of old balances. It looks like most balances were made by a few groups of subcontractors. This is more true of the chronographs. Surprisingly Val-23 staffs trend at a premium. On the other hand I have a box of elgin staffs for post war stuff still in the plastic bubble packs.

I tend to buy lot assortments, so the unused parts tend to wind up in the general parts box. Without packaging there is often no way to identify what it is. I am sure I have 30T and 26X parts.

I still think there should be a way to use micro-controllers that could take some of the grunt work out of this. Most of it is a statistical grading process. Basic robotics does seem to be taught in high school. mostly though with the competitions to destruction. However some AP students use the maker space to do some fairly complex challenges.

What does not seem to be taught is hydraulic and pnuematics. Robotics seems to be based on servo control. Physics also works different at the macro level where air currents and gravity do not react the same way as they do at the automotive part size level. The tiny inertial masses are hard to visualize. Hand are also more adept at shoveling food in the mouth and scraping meat from bones, than controlling tiny parts what fly across the room.

I suspect the AI tail eating dragon probably ate the bestfit catalog. The bestfit catalog does remain copyrighted. So what comes out of generic replies is probably garbage. I have better ways of wasting time than attempting to drive a chatbot.

We did get an example of an optical flow scanner, at the makerspace, which was not quite optimized for the omega plate I had. I downloaded an open source version. Also have a box of lenses.

Such is a non trivial process. So far I have yet to meet anyone else with motivation. No discussion on any of the threads I started. Why I tend to reply to the more general inquiry threads which get more views.

I have been sort of outlining and researching my 'Child History of AI.' Looking at the old programs from 40 50 years ago. Which are quite proficient at identifying and sorting parts.

Spending a few hours here and there a week is not the most progressive. This week I was revisiting JPEG huffman codes. Found some you tube tutorials, and comparing them to code I wrote in the 1990s. JPEG destroys correlation in image processing. (why there is a strong interest in bayer demosaicing.) Dumping the high frequency data is not a bad thing, yet the training data is mostly garbage. So it is real easy to get distracted in the trees. I still have not found a way to get the Tissot pictures out of the Quark Immedia database, which may have additional code compression as while I can see the source disassembly calls a standard JPEG library, but the Tags are not in the data. So the exercise was yet another dead end.

More to the subtopic at hand. A lot of the traditional ways have been lost. Or are too time consuming. There is also a lot of baggage and dogma around, that stuff has to be done the way it was done in the 18th or 19th century. Or the way it was industrialized in the 20th.

It is like we want some swiss gnome to do it, and remain behind the curtain.

I recently had a friend bring an under performing Omega with the 30T2 movement in it. It had a lot of problems, but among them was a bad balance staff. I went to my stash, and Lo and behold, I had one! The watch required a lot of other work before it was satisfactory. I’m sure a recent “technician” learned his craft from a plumber! The watch must be doing okay as it has appeared in the WRUW thread numerous times.