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Horologist
·This afternoon I took in my 18k manual wind Geneva’ for a service quote as it was now starting to lose time and got to speak straight to the watchmaker while the others were at lunch! We had a nice chat and gave it a good check over with the timergraph as we spoke!
What I found interesting was when he closed the threaded case back, he avoided using the wrench tool, but used something that looked like a giant squash ball to close it! I then made a funny remark and he replied that he preferred to close gold watches that way as gold is very soft. This way he avoided risks of causing thread and case damage in over tightening it with the rubber ball! He would not have been too concerned if it was stainless steel! He also made another comment that being also a goldsmith, the coefficient of expansion of gold is much higher than that of stainless steel, so you want to keep the last thread tightening a tad less than stainless steel to also avoid thread splitting!
I must say that I was very impressed to learn all this for the very first time and the meticulous attention this guy gave to my watch! This sort of deep rooted technical detail would never have crossed my mind! This begs the question to those who are into the repair side if this, whether this is something endorsed in watchmaking school or just at the discretion of different quality watch smiths?? An interesting topic to my ignorance to say the least!!
What I found interesting was when he closed the threaded case back, he avoided using the wrench tool, but used something that looked like a giant squash ball to close it! I then made a funny remark and he replied that he preferred to close gold watches that way as gold is very soft. This way he avoided risks of causing thread and case damage in over tightening it with the rubber ball! He would not have been too concerned if it was stainless steel! He also made another comment that being also a goldsmith, the coefficient of expansion of gold is much higher than that of stainless steel, so you want to keep the last thread tightening a tad less than stainless steel to also avoid thread splitting!
I must say that I was very impressed to learn all this for the very first time and the meticulous attention this guy gave to my watch! This sort of deep rooted technical detail would never have crossed my mind! This begs the question to those who are into the repair side if this, whether this is something endorsed in watchmaking school or just at the discretion of different quality watch smiths?? An interesting topic to my ignorance to say the least!!
