Hi
I was given this watch in 1988 - it was used for cycle timing/productivity analysis and measures in 1/100ths of a minute (centiminutes) - I recently came across it when tidying out a drawer - i haven't used it for 25 years and no use for it and wondered what it was worth - I can find similar ones on the internet but not one exactly the same - any help greatly appreciated

 

Unfortunately, stop watches aren't worth much - they have been overtaken by technology. I am very much an amateur, but I recently repaired one for my uncle. Without charging for the labour, the parts cost pretty near as much as the watch is worth but fortunately, the sentimental value was worth more to him.

The full story is here:
https://omegaforums.net/threads/ever-wondered-what-50-year-old-grease-looks-like.23194/

 

I think you meant 'noobie'. I like nebbie though so maybe it'll catch on.

 

Debbie should be his under title ...it's too good to pass.

 

I use stop watches regularly in my professional life and prefer mechanical over electronic. I've bought several high grade swiss stopwatches in the last few years, the most expensive was $60. At that price I figure I can afford to use them without serviceing them and toss them when they break.

Problem is you can't kill 'em!

 

I would be interested to know how you use them.

I used mechanical stopwatches when I got my first job...in the industrial engineering department in the manufacturing plant I ended up working at for 23 years. I worked in that department for 4 months before moving to the plant engineering department. It was a foot in the door at the time, l and I knew how to do the things they needed done (and I liked the technical aspect of motion study in particular), but it was the longest 4 months of my life. Doing time studies and motion studies in a unionized plant was not fun to say the least. As soon as I walked up to any area wearing my white coat and carrying my clip board with dual stopwatches on it, the abuse started...

Later on we got a fancy new timing board that had a digital clock on it, and all you had to do was press the button to pause the time so you could write it down. Much easier than managing the two stopwatches with starting, stopping, resetting two watches, while writing down all the times and performance percentages while people did their jobs.

Ah the good old days...

For anyone with an interest in the history of things like motion study, try to find the movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Not the recent versions (which have zero to do with the original) but the one from 1950 that tells the story of the Gilbreth family. Frank Gilbreth pioneered the science of motion study, which is why the unit of measure is called Therblig...his name spelled backwards, sort of. Sorry, I'm a geek.

Cheers, Al

 

I feel like I just stepped into a Pink Floyd video picturing AL on his white coat with the trimming and chasing people around...

 

noobie + nebbish = nebbie

 

Why.... I do occasional time and motion studies in an electronics assembly facility as well as checks on machine cycles. Whoda thought!

This part of the job is a bit of a time warp but its also relaxing after building and testing prototype headlamps for some new vehicle. Since it isn't a big part of my time I'm able to use the antique equipment. Its kind of odd using a 50 year old Excelcior Park flyback stopwatch to time an SMT machine that can lay 15,000 components an hour onto a printed circuit board.

 

Very cool. Even just doing cycle checks was enough to get a lot of abuse from some of the guys running the equipment.

I was only "certified" to do an actual time study after about 3 months, so I only did a couple in the end. They would test all of us that did these studies (4 of us in total in the department at that time) on how well we judged effort that people were putting out against the standard, so their performance against standard. So we had a person who would walk down a hallway a known distance, and we had to judge by eye if they were walking at 100% or 80%, or 130% or whatever of what "normal" was. We also did a similar exercise with the manager of my department dealing a deck of cards. He would deal out the cards 20 times in a row, and we would write down the percentage of how fast he was working for each deal. In both cases someone would time the actual events, and calculate the actual percentage against the standard, and our estimates had to be +/- 5% before we could do a time study. As you know, this is done so that people can't work extra slow during the study to cheat the system (our plant had an incentive system)...and yes they would try!

After 3 months in there I went to the plant engineering manager and begged him to give me a job in his department, and a month later they offered me that job. Never regretted making that move since the industrial engineering department was eventually dissolved about 5 years later.

We didn't use nice stopwatches like you are using - I can even recall there being a brand on them actually. Start and stop on these was a slider (kind of like you would see on the side of a repeater) and then reset was a button. You started the time on the first watch, then reset the second watch while writing down the time of the last element you timed, and the performance rating of that element. Then you started the first watch again, stopped the second watch at the same time, wrote everything down, and reset that watch while the first watch was timing a new element, and so on. Some of the elements were short, so you had to move fast, and hope you didn't get screwed up and reset the wrong watch!

Fun days that seemed to last weeks....

 

30 years ago I redid all the labour standards in a piece work union shop one summer, in the week after the new contract came out I was attacked twice on the floor (stabbed once) and finally pulled off the production floor for a few weeks....... after that 20 years in automotive QA was a breeze!

ah the good old days..... no talk of charges when an engineer got stuck with a sharp tool!

 

Yikes - I was verbally abused and threatened, but never actually attacked. My manager was attacked once by one machine operator, so when we had to do a study of any kind near him, it made me nervous. I went out once to simply track how many parts were produced using a new cutting tool on a screw machine that he was running, and he laid into me verbally and started bad mouthing my boss, that he had previously attacked. I ended up telling him I hated this job and wanted out of that department as fast as I could, and he was suddenly my buddy...the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing I guess.