..............always give me the heebie jeebies when I'm working on them. I had a clock to service and no mainspring winder as my jury rigged one got used on another project, so it was off to Bunnings (Aussie hardware super store). I grabbed some of this: and these bits........ Then I went around the corner to my local tool merchant and got these. Back home I had a ferret through my scrap box, got some more bits and pieces and started cutting/chopping/modifying/grinding/hammering/screwing and making noise. Eventually I ended up with this. No more clenched buttocks when working on mainsprings .
Ingenious! Your set up doesn’t show what you use for sleeves to capture the coiled mainspring prior to inserting the spring into the barrel. Your set up seems to be designed for hole end mainsprings. How would you use it for loop end mainsprings?
Well spotted Doug. At the moment I use copper water pipe adapters modified to fit the barrel for hole enders. For loop enders I put a thread on the loop hook and use a nut to make sure the hook doesn't escape (don't ask me why I know about that ).
Nicely done! It's bad enough on the rare occasion when a watch mainspring gets way from you (pocket watch size spring in particular) but clock mainsprings are on another level entirely. Not a stretch to say one could kill you if it got loose and hit something major. One of the most common questions I get from people when they find out I'm a watchmaker is "Do you repair clocks?" My answer is always no - completely different tools required. What do you have for bushing plates?
I'm showing your contraption to my urologist, because anything that unclenches buttocks will be very interesting to him.
In an ideal world Al, I'd have one of these: But as I don't have AUD$1900 to splash on one, I have to rely on my trusty pedestal/bench drill. The spindle and the point of the chuck have very little slack (nice and tight in fact) and the table can be adjusted to give me a true surface to work on. I can set up the plate on the table and use the chuck to keep the broaches and reamers perpendicular, and then use a turned brass rod in the chuck and use the feed handle to press in the bushing. I've only done one so far and it was easy as the hole hadn't wandered, it had just received three punch marks from a previous "clockmaker".
