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Comment by EarthIsHome | Hacker News Reader

As a watch enthusiast, I've wanted to build my own watch in the past. However, as I got deeper into watches, I realized I could never really make the watch my own creation unless I developed and manufactured the movement myself. Otherwise, I'll be dressing up a generic ETA movement [0] with a personal dial, hands, bezel, etc. This is what most of these DIY watches are. With that said, ETA movements are some of the most solid movements out there with decades of support. They're also capabale of COSC [1] chronometer timekeeping if adjusted properly. For me, the DIY magic dies with the movement because I'm limited to the dimensions of the ETA movement. It's the heart of the watch.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_Movements

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC

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I've been making my own movements for fun for a while. Most of the parts you can print/order, but for accuracy purposes I tend to use an existing balance spring (generally sourced from any old Seiko movement).

I recommend 2 books if you want to make your own movements

1) Watchmaking by George Daniels 2) Practical Watch Repairing by Donald de Carle

The first is a textbook and second deals with repairing, but actually taught me the more practical side of how to assemble & regulate a watch, and what makes a movement accurate.

I've made my own hand-winding movement. It is within COSC specs but only when it's more than 75% wound, perfectly flat, and in a cool place. Oh did I mention it's the size of a ping pong bat. It makes me appreciate ETAs and their reliability even more now. It's time consuming and drives me nuts at times but totally worth it.

This is cool, do you have any recommended blog posts on the end-to-end process? I’d love to build a movement but would like to gauge the effort/cost/time involved

It's a never ending thing!

You could start by sort of reverse engineering movements (disassemble and reassemble).

Start to build your own tooling.

Then make a copy of the bridges and baseplate.

Try to change the geometry of the bridges and baseplate, keeping the same moving parts.

Then build your own moving parts.

Start from massive clocks to "table clocks" to marine clocks to wristwatches movements.

And it could be very expensive, wood clocks are cheaper, less time consuming. There is great stuff and ideas online. For example, see the timer from Ugears there is mind-blowing tricks hidden in this model.

super interested. i do machining on the centimeter scale and have no idea how to work on those parts.

do you buy gears? if not what is your gear cutting rig look like.

it seems pretty clear you need a jewelers lathe and some decent files. what else is indispensable?

It's not possible to buy gears due to the "module" (I don't know how to translate it), it's a factor of scale that influence the spacing between gears.

The hardest parts are the springs (balance spring and mainspring) and the screws (there are so small, it's a specific norm, see NIHS for Normes de l'Industrie Horlogère Suisse). For the gear cutting, there is an example here [pdf link]: http://www.cowells.com/docs/cutter.pdf

There is a lot of custom machine tools, many of them are needed to resolve problems that an individual doesn't care. But there is always alternative ways and it's the fun and watchmaker's task to find them!

So there is not really indispensable tools as it depends a lot of the project. Expect if you want to make specific watch decorations, like perlage, guillochage, soleillage...

I can't find links but there is an operation named roulage where the guiding parts of the pinions are hardened, it's not indispensable if you don't want an industrial grade, kind of.

The simplest design is the roskopf movement.

> "module" (I don't know how to translate it)

fyi, it is called module in English too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear#Standard_pitches_and_the_...

This is more clock making rather than watch making, but check out the clickspring channel on youtube. He builds a mantel sized clock from scratch in his home machine shop. Amazing stuff and beautifully done videos.

That's super cool. Can you please, pretty please post some pictures?

I've been wanting to attempt to make a coaxial movement, roughly that size as well. As there's no chance I could make one that would fit in a watch.

I've also pulled a few Unitas (pre-ETA acquisition) movements out of stopwatches and assembled wristwatches with them. It's not "watchmaking" but it's fun nonetheless.

I went to an exhibition at the Science Museum in London on George Daniels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Daniels_(watchmaker)

Fascinating story - he spent years making a watch from scratch in every spare moment. For no other reason than that he wanted to. And look where it led for him!

Oh did I mention it's the size of a ping pong bat.

That sounds more like a clock movement, but you quickly realise that the miniaturisation is the truly difficult part; making a mechanical clock is not nearly that hard in comparison.

I've had the first book (Watchmaking by George Daniels) on an Amazon wishlist for some time but the price never seems to drop below £50 (and used copies go for far more). Always a sign of a worthwhile book :-)

> I realized I could never really make the watch my own creation unless I developed and manufactured the movement myself.

Exactly. But clocks are definitely doable and once you have mastered clocks who knows, you just might be able to use your experience and graduate to a watch small enough to be worn. The good news is that there isn't anything that 18th century clockmakers knew that hasn't been documented somewhere.

This guy has the right idea and has some interesting movement workarounds for tools he could not afford:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1CaZaNSrTM

It's unconventional but it is an actual watch movement. Far more impressed with that than the generic movements in some case.

Before diving into wristwatch movements, a step by marine clocks could be interesting and fun too!

It's funny how when you start tracing clock making you end up reliving pretty much all of the industrial revolution.

Those people were really artists improving their products and their tools at every step and their heritage is still alive today.

The watchmaking/clockmaking industry trained a whole generation of precision machinists which led to a revolution in mechanics, toys, calculating machines and ultimately set the stage for worldwide navigation and the industrial revolution.

True and clocks and watches are still the most precise mechanical tool/instrument.

These are amazing too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta

I've never been able to find one that I could afford though.

What do you base that on? I thought some industrial applications actually required much finer tolerances. Things like telescope mirrors. It probably depends on what you consider to be a mechanical tool.

Sure, most watches have a tolerance of +4/-5 seconds by day (86400 seconds). It's about 58 ppm.

I don't know which precision a not electronically assisted telescope have, but it's sure it's impressive.

-That would be pretty good watches - the requirement for being labelled a chronometer by the Swiss is +6/-4/day (with some further requirements - positions and temperatures)

Seiko tune their top-of-the-line Grand Seikos a bit tighter - +5/-3/24h.

They also have some limited edition VFA (if memory serves - Very Fine Adjusted) watches capable of +/-2s/24h.

The engineer in me finds this kind of accuracy in a mechanical device just a hair short of black magic.

>The engineer in me finds this kind of accuracy in a mechanical device just a hair short of black magic.

I'm curious where you get this intuition. As an engineer with a background fully in electronics/software my intuition is that multiple-seconds per day of error is horrible. I never got into mechanical watches because of this. There are so many great quartz based watches that keep time so well that I've never seen the allure of the mechanical. I'm now curious from this discussion how big of a feat it is anyway but have no intuition for it.

https://www.amazon.de/Bauen-erleben-begreifen-Technikgeschic... has a chapter where you‘re building several types of real, working clock movements. Very imprecise, of course, but still.

You could probably build a movement yourself these days with one of those $500 SLA 3D printers, mostly-plastic movements have definitely been done before.

Though it sounds like these people are using CNC mills for the cases, that is definitely not cheap equipment.

SLA printing services also provide a pretty cheap option (Shapeways or dirtySLA). You can also print (and then fire) ceramic parts printed with SLA printers (Vitrolite), I'm not sure very small parts would work well however.

Milling services are also available (and not super expensive in China) but the parts are very small, and there are a lot of them so it might not be a easy option.

The idea of printing the entire movement is certainly interesting though...

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1249221 is very cool - '3D-printed Watch with Tourbillon' (it does look pretty big though ;)

While I don't doubt that clockworks can be 3d-printed, doing a watch-scale movement with even a $5k printer sounds pretty incredulous.

Have you seen what the new cheap SLA machines can do? Several ~$500 machines out now with 47 micron X-Y resolution, using phone LCDs for the UV mask. Wanhao D7, Anycubic Photon, etc. Not sure if it's quite good enough for watch movements but they're certainly capable of much finer details than any FDM machine including the very expensive ones. In principle they should even be capable of finer details than the $3500 SLA Form2 which has 140 micron laser spot size.

> Have you seen what the new cheap SLA machines can do?

I'll have to admit, I haven't seen what the state of the art is like. I did some googling of the printers you mentioned and the level of detail is pretty impressive (although most reviews were printing pretty figurines instead of engineering applications), so maybe 3D printing watch movement is not that far fetched after-all. That being said I'd still be quite impressed seeing a 3D printed watch movement. Even more so (and this is moving the goalposts) if the movement ran whole day on a single winding, demonstrating good meshing and low friction.

Not really.

$500 SLAs gives you LCD SLA printing with medium resolution.

You will need at least $1300 for a Moai kit(with Laser Galvoes):

https://peopoly.net/

Or at least a $1500 DLP kit with a good resolution for creating small parts.

Fo really small parts you need the strength of steel or titanium. But you can made then in plastic, metalize the plastic and use something like EDM(electrodischarge) to make your parts.

What do you mean 'medium' resolution? The Moai has 70 micron laser spot size. Form2 is 140 micron. The $500 SLAs have 47 micron pixels. They have major disadvantages vs the expensive laser SLA machines but resolution is not one of them.

I hear a lot of you talking about ETA movement.

Great movements, but buy them up while you can.

Swatch Group will cease selling their movements to just anyone.

There's enough movements in the secondary market to keep most home hobbiests happy though.

The Swatch Group, and The Wilsdorf Foundation (Rolex) will not sell parts/movements to pretty much everyone.

These practices are killing the watch repair industry, and making fools out of anyone who buys a quality watch.

Certain supply houses (Cousins UK) are fighting the monopolistic behavior, but the lawsuits are going nowhere.

So that custom watch, with the ETA movement is really not yours if you can't buy parts for the movement.

Our government (USA) knows about the problem, but has bigger fish to fry?

Mechanical watch movements are really cool! But I'm not sure you can call it monopolistic behavior if, first, you are able to name many major competitors, and when the substitute good (a quartz movement) of equivalent accuracy is $5... It seems a bit silly to complain overmuch. Especially when other posters are talking about printing the parts off on a $1500 machine!

Nobody cares about ETA at this point.

The patents and registered designs of ETA movements have expired. You can buy exact clones of ETA movements legally.

ETA clones by Sellita and Soprod are said to be better than the original. Sea-Gull (and other Chinese) aren't bad either. Especially for the price...

"I realized I could never really make the watch my own creation unless I developed and manufactured the movement myself"

Aren't you equally disappointed that you didn't mine the metal from the earth, and raise the cows from which the leather was taken? ;)

The movement is he heart of the watch. I'm not sure you could call yourself a watch maker if you are not designing and building the movement. You work on your specialty and outsource everything else.

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