My Watch Making Journey: Part 3 - Watch Hands

 In the last post, the dial was finally attached to the movement. This time it's step 2 - "Attach the hands to the movement."

By this time, I was confident that attaching the hands to the movement was going to be fairly easy. The dial snapped on to the movement with no problems and I was determined to attach the hands in one shot.

Immediately, my confidence waivered a bit because I found it incredibly difficult to handle the hands with my tweezers. Tutorials online made it sound and look very easy. Oh man! For me, it was not easy. I could make an excuse about my tweezers, but in reality I did not have the manual dexterity to manipulate the hands.

For this project, the hands need to go in the order of, hour hand, minute hand, then finally the second hand.

In the image below, you can see the kind if tweezers I was using. These are shorter than the watch maker's tweezers. These are sold as eyelash tweezers and they have the finest tip I could find.

Installing the hour hand.

It took a while to set the hour hand. It was very difficult to align it to the 12 o'clock position. The movement is set so that the date just changed over indicating midnight hence the hour hand should be aligned perfectly to the 12 position.

Next, the minute hand.

The minute hand

The minute hand installation even took longer. I got frustrated a couple of times and needed to get a few minutes to compose myself. The red tool on the right is my hand press tool. I noticed the hands to be very tight fitting and I kept wondering if maybe I ordered mismatched parts.

Checking the alignment of the hands. Making sure they do not touch each other as they went around.

It's important to check the alignment and while the alignment on the hands was not as perfect as I wanted, overall it was an ok first attempt so far.

I also tested the date change so I had to advance the time until the date change making sure both the hour hand and minute hand are pointing at 12 as the date changed.

On to the dreaded second hand. This was so thin and tiny that it took even longer that the installation of the hour and minute hands combined.

Installing the second hand.

Second hand installed! Or so I thought.

This was when everything wend sideways. The fit of the second hand was so tight that I ended up breaking the seconds pinion and misaligning the gears in the watch. 

The watch movement didn't want to wind up anymore and was no longer running. I later found that one of the screws holding the movement together broke in half resulting in all the gears popping our of their jewels. I attempted to put the movement back together, but that didn't work out. The second hand was also ruined at this point. Part of the seconds pinion got stuck in the hole of the second hand. Removing that was next to impossible.

Removing the hands with my hand removal tool.

I was so frustrated that I did not document anything after this. Sadly, I am not able to show you steps 3 and 4.

(3) Put the assembled unit (movement, dial, hands) into the case. 

(4) Trim the winding stem to size and attach the crown and screw on the case back.

To be continued...

Enjoy!