by Akcium on 12/10/23, 12:28 PM with 163 comments
by fellerts on 12/11/23, 3:24 PM
Watch repairing is a very rewarding hobby. It requires copious amounts of patience, but there's something fundamentally satisfying about disassembling something to its individual components, cleaning them and reassembling them meticulously. These things are designed to be taken apart, and it shows. I'm hard-pressed to think of other modern day objects that are meant to do this.
by jstanley on 12/11/23, 8:01 PM
The concept is that it will only have one hand (the hour hand), and the mainspring barrel will encircle the entire movement, you'll wind it up by rotating the bezel (and therefore the outer part of the barrel) clockwise, and the mainspring will drive the inner barrel clockwise. The hour hand is mounted directly on the inner barrel (which therefore completes 1 revolution per 12 hours), and the rest of the movement only exists to regulate the speed at which the inner barrel rotates. So the rest of the movement will be a series of gearings-down, with an escapement at the end.
And to set the time, the movement will be mounted into the case with a ratchet, such that when you turn the bezel anticlockwise, the entire movement (and therefore the hand) rotates anticlockwise allowing you to set the hand. You'll only be able to set it as precisely as the ratchet (i.e. you'd need 720 positions of the ratchet to set it to 1-minute precision), but the watch will never keep particularly good time anyway so I don't think this is a problem.
Yesterday I got an escapement at almost-watch-scale ticking for the first time, albeit erratically and requiring enormous drive torque: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNODOp6uBc (3d printed for expediency, the real one will all be machined; and I say "almost-watch-scale" because although it fits inside the 50mm diameter that I am aiming for, it is obviously too thick to go inside a sensible watch).
I have more info in this post: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/the-watch-project.htm...
by Rudism on 12/11/23, 3:34 PM
For a while I wore a solar-powered Casio that self-adjusted every morning using the NIST atomic clock radio signals, and the peace of mind knowing that my watch was always accurate was such a pleasure in comparison. It was kind of cheap build quality and eventually fell apart, but I don't think I'll ever go back to a mechanical watch again after that.
by steezy13 on 12/11/23, 2:27 PM
I have been reluctantly wearing a Samsung Withings watch that looks mechanical but is actually smart, but a mediocre compromise (you need to wear it higher up the wrist than I usually do, and I don't believe it gives accurate heart rate and activity measurements). 30 day battery life is pretty cool though.
I may just start going back to my Vostok and Seiko watches full time at this point. (I don't like spending a lot of money on watches, anyone who is curious on getting into them should check out both brands as economical starters - the Vostok Amphibia has a storied history!)
by cloogshicer on 12/11/23, 2:35 PM
What tool/library would you pick to create similar ones yourself?
Looking at the source [1], the author seems to hand-craft them using the canvas API, but man, that seems really difficult!
by bejd on 12/11/23, 2:49 PM
Tangentially related, the documentary The Watchmaker's Apprentice [0] is a captivating look at the dedication it takes to create a mechanical watch. It's amazing that it's possible for a single person to craft each tiny cog and spring from scratch and put it all together.
by waltwalther on 12/12/23, 1:40 PM
The boss, who was an old jeweler who had started out in the business as a boy in the fifties working under a jeweler and watchmaker, always said that watchmakers are a dying breed, and could pretty much name their price.
When I started working and learning the trade we had two watchmakers that we shipped to. Within two years one of those had retired, and we were unable to find a replacement for him.
I loved working and repairing jewelry (even more so that my fulltime job in IT for local gov), and wanted to become a watchmaker, but my life took me elsewhere. Now that I am older and in a better place in life I often think of those three years, and have been considering obtaining the tools to start up a hobby in one or the other...or both.
Thank you, OP, for an awesome post and link.
by pyr0hu on 12/11/23, 1:25 PM
by nicholasjarnold on 12/11/23, 5:02 PM
by allsunny on 12/11/23, 4:02 PM
by lloeki on 12/11/23, 3:23 PM
- bicycle: https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343495
- sound: https://ciechanow.ski/sound/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33249215
by g9yuayon on 12/11/23, 6:12 PM
by dallyo on 12/11/23, 2:09 PM
by redbell on 12/12/23, 10:01 AM
The original post [1] was ranking #4 as the highest-upvoted story on Hacker News before it got kicked to #5 last August by Bram Moolenaar's death announcement [2], then to #6 after Altman's saga ranked #3 a few weeks ago.
Over all, this story is classified as #1 in creative content that is not in the genre of news or announcements.
_____________________________
by samgranieri on 12/11/23, 2:02 PM
by KaiserPro on 12/11/23, 4:50 PM
I don't have the skills or machinery to make a wristwatch sized version, but I did make a _big_ sized version: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...
by incahoots on 12/11/23, 9:47 PM
by aswinmohanme on 12/12/23, 12:42 PM
by lldoraMay on 12/12/23, 12:59 PM
by gwbas1c on 12/11/23, 2:20 PM
I've since switched to a smart watch, but I keep getting tempted to go back. I generally use my smart watch as a very gentle alarm, and for fitness tracking. I just don't want to be the geek who wears two watches. Maybe I should only wear it at night?
by yolkedgeek on 12/12/23, 3:22 PM
by asylteltine on 12/11/23, 8:53 PM
by Aaronstotle on 12/11/23, 4:56 PM
by Loughla on 12/11/23, 1:06 PM
I always wondered what all those bits and bobs inside as mechanical watch are.
by vietvu on 12/12/23, 2:35 AM
by denton-scratch on 12/11/23, 4:11 PM
by rounakdatta on 12/11/23, 4:00 PM
by m3kw9 on 12/11/23, 5:46 PM
by bvan on 12/12/23, 5:02 AM
by ktt8788 on 12/11/23, 4:04 PM
by ktt8788 on 12/11/23, 4:04 PM
by jmclaughlinhn on 12/13/23, 8:02 AM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 12/11/23, 1:16 PM
by nobulus on 12/11/23, 7:42 PM
by fuzzfactor on 12/11/23, 8:10 PM
Take a look at the 9th or 10th interactive drawing, where you can move the slider to the right to wind the mainspring, then release the slider to watch the mainspring unwind.
When the energy is depleted, all the bands in the coil are bunched up around the outside of the barrel. It's not much of a spring any more.
This is the same type of torsion spring as in drawing 4 but with the mainspring being used for primary energy storage there is no desire for recovery to a neutral position from both clockwise & counterclockwise directions like you see in drawing 4. Instead you only need to ever draw energy from storage to use in a single rotational direction. Opposite rotation is used only to store externally applied energy.
So you wind it in one direction to store energy then it releases the energy in the opposite direction.
But without the precurvature shown in drawing 11 the torsion spring would tend to be exhausted when it was "zero-wound" like the one in drawing 4, with the coils widely spaced away from each other, free to absorb & recover energy from either rotational direction. And since we only need to draw energy in one rotational direction, that amounts to only half of the energy the spring is capable of storing for our purposes. Notice how about half the length of the spring is coiled similarly to drawing 4, with the upper half of the loose spring coiled less tightly and in the opposite direction.
Because when our mainspring is exhausted, we want it to be bunched up along the outside of the barrel so we get the most out of it before it needs to be retensioned. And when it's fully retensioned we want to get maximum energy storage from the hardware so at that starting point we want the coils to be tighly wound, bunched up around the arbor.
But not too tight.
Or it could be overwound.
As long as there is some space in between the coils, when recovering rotational energy you have access to what is stored along the entire length of the free portion of the coil. But once it's wound tightly enough for the coils to be in significant direct concentric contact, the free portion of the coil becomes so small it does not contain enough energy to drive the timekeeping mechanism.
It could get so tight that it's not much of a spring any more. Closer to a solid cylinder with a slight tab hanging off.
Which is more of a problem when both ends of the torsion spring are permanently attached to their substrates.
Instead in these drawings, the color-coded metal strip is used to provide a friction grip between the outer end of the coil and the barrel, strong enough grip to drive the timekeeping mechanism but designed to slip counterclockwise within the barrel if manual winding proceeeds more than necessary, slipping before the coil can get wound too tightly.
Basically, overcharge protection for a non-electric hardware device.
by JR1427 on 12/11/23, 1:17 PM
by KolmogorovComp on 12/11/23, 1:00 PM
by mikestaub on 12/12/23, 12:07 PM