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Comment by foodislove | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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 :-)

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.

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