I just posted this on WRT and thought I'd try here as well. I'm servicing a little Mortima diver driven by a Cattin C66. Not a Patek, but a nice little beater with a "Kalashnikov" movement. Everything was going fine, it had been stripped, cleaned and ready to re-assemble. I'd just oiled the plate balance jewel and replaced the cap and went to pick up the shock spring. My brass tweezers were just a stretch too far to reach from where I was using my microscope, so like an idiot, I picked up the nearest set of tweezers (SS ones!). I looked down and picked up the tiny cap spring, and just as I was about to move it to the movement I felt that sensation we all dread. The "snick" feeling as the tweezer tips pinged the spring into the ether. I was like a rabbit in the headlights, not daring to move and straining my hearing for the sound of a landing (a futile effort with my "ex-military" hearing). I searched high and low from a frozen position, scanning the bench but nothing there. I gently started looking at my lap, shirt front, even got a mirror and checked my face/eyebrows/hair. Nothing. A magnet sweep of the whole area turned up two forgotten screws, but no spring. So, the point of this post. I need a new shock spring or a donor movement and I'm hoping somebody may have one in their parts box. This is the movement as shown on Roland Ranfft's encyclopedic site http://www.ranfft.de...uswk&Cattin_C66 I've included a pic below of the balance jewel spring from the other side, shown next to a Seiko spring for size comparison. As you can see it's a tiny little bugger and not your usual item that could be replaced by a common BestFit spare. If anyone can help, please reply or PM me with price and availability. Cheers Jim
Good luck with that one - the quickest way would be to buy a spare movement likely. The chances of finding this part as a spare is going to be pretty slim...
Bad luck there Jim. Surprisingly, Cousins list a whole host of parts for this movement but no shock spring. There's also a service manual/parts list for download but it just lists the Cattin number (380 as I remember). Do you know the name of that system? Am not sure it would help but...
Woo Hoo! Look what I found (no, not the original, but just as good). After looking through my junkyard I came across a Cattin C66 in an old thing I got in a box buy. I know it's only an old pin lever but just getting it working again gives me a sense of job satisfaction. It sure pays to keep all of those old clunkers and basket cases
I was almost going to say @dougiedude knows a bloke that could rig up a paperclip that would do the job.
Box-O-Watches saves the day. I'm glad you found something to help because I was dreading going through my boxes. I hate that tweezer "DOINK". My last resort before scouring the scrapyard is a KILLER magnet from a commercial hard drive. This bad boy can pull parts from the floor 2 feet in the air. Downside is sheer strength of the field and it has to be put in a special place.
Yes those "bag-o-watches" you buy for $5 can certainly come in handy. I use them often for sourcing parts, in particular screws for watches that always come in missing one or two for whatever reason... Cheers, Al