Hello, watch wizards!!! My partner loves building watches and recently expressed wanting to try laser engraving. Anybody have any experience engraving watches? Know any good beginner machines? Not looking for anything huge, just something powerful enough to do letter engravings. Also if you guys have any gift suggestions, let me know. Really wanna nuture this. Thank you

Hello everyone,

I am looking to build my own watch movement and was wondering whether it was possible to 3d print some of its parts. From what I have read online, it is impossible to completely 3d print a movement, but I don't care if I have to make it a hybrid between classic and 3d printed. My goal is not to have it partly 3d printed for the challenge, only to be able to get the watch movement done faster than making each component by hand. I understand that I may have to polish 3d printed parts and that there is components so small that I have to make them by hand or buy them no matter what, and that is fine with me.

So I am turning to you guys to ask, could 3d printing parts be useful in making a watch movement and would it save considerable time?

(By the way, I am of course talking about a mechanical watch movement, quartz has no value to me)

Thank you for your time.

Sometimes that's all a watch needs they said.. and they were right! Fellow noobs, get one. Had an old seiko 6903 wasn't running. Popped it on. And what do you know, that's all it needed. Grabbed my old orient 3 star that runs fast. Suddenly it's keeping time. I underestimated how much magnetic charge builds up in old watches. Rather cool.

How much of a design change is needed to create a new watch? At one extreme, there is not much intellectual value in adding gems. And, the face layout designs overlap or are grandfathered by now. Are there patent experts that specialize in watch intellectual prooerty?

Hello! I'm new to the watchmaking world. I built a NH-35 watch out of curiosity and it led me down a rabbit hole when I measured it and found it was losing minutes every day.

I sourced most basic tools from ebay listings and Aliexpress, and I want to start working on watches with the intention of actually making them work and not just learning how they are assembled and dissassmbled. I practiced with some scrap tongji movements from AliX, and my intention is to eventually test my skill doing a full service to a NOS Shangai or similar watch, before I feel comfortable servicing my own watch.

This is why I want to buy tongji movements to learn on them, I see them as inexpensive and simple. The problem is that for the life of me I can't find listings anywhere selling them. I would have thought they could be bought in bulk for cheap, but besides buying them individually from AliX, I can't find anything.

Am I doing something wrong? Should I be looking at specific places besides ebay? Will any vintage 17-jewels movements serve as learning practice?

For context, I'm in continental europe, and trying to learn as cheaply as possible.

Trying to repair my sky hawk. Nope. I sent it in, they refused to work on it. So I asked to buy a movement from them, nope.

What a SHIT company. Won’t buy one again.

Details: my stem doesn’t work sometimes to change time and other functions of twisting the stem. Also my capacitor for the solar charging is getting old and won’t hold charge. So I figured, eh…. Probably just throw a whole new movement at it since it’s being flaky in a few places. I build mechanical watches, should not be a problem. Except for getting parts.

Those bastards.

Anyway, rant over. Thx!

Has anyone been at a meetup of watch enthusiasts? Perhaps of a brand that you've purchased? I know that MB&F has a community called The Tribe and I'm sure other luxury watch brands have it too. The whole thing reminds me of car meetups. I'm wondering if you've networked with someone that benefited your life at one of those events, either emotionally(you found a best friend) or financially(you started a business or made a financial deal with someone). I'm wondering, if I have a disposable income, is it a good idea to buy a luxury watch to attend meet ups to network with people. I also enjoy watches themselves, so buying it for networking will not be the only reason. Has anyone ever networked with anyone in the watchmaking community? Where did you guys meet, how did it go, and what came out of it?

u/nikongod Here is the post that was supposed to accompany the photo! (not sure why it didn't post)

Okay…I’ll say right now, this is going to be a (sorta) long post (70 years in the making, actually!), so if you don’t have the time right now, I invite you to keep scrolling. 😊

PICTURE IT: September 1981.
One autumn evening (I was 15), my dad had a scotch and told me a story about his dad, Charley Allison, and the fantastic watch collection he had designed and hand-crafted. There were 13 clocks (technically watches) in the Allison collection and, since the shop was in the Los Angeles area, celebrities occasionally visited & signed the shop’s guest book. Apparently, the big draw was my grandfather’s “Allison Mystery Clock”, which had gained a little fame through word of mouth and some local newspaper articles.

I’ll add that I’ve learned (through my research) that, in that era, mystery clocks were a known spectacle. Since the 1800s, clockmakers have apparently been designing timepieces with no visible works. Similar to magicians, these crafty inventors sought to create conversation pieces that appeared to defy the laws of physics. They were sometimes placed in front windows of banks or jewelry stores as an attention-grabber. So mystery clocks would not have been entirely uncommon to my grandpa.

The Allison Mystery Clock, as my dad described it, was hung on a wooden square, about two-feet-by-two-feet. The numbers, also made of wood, formed a circle. The two (wooden) hands hung on a peg in the center of the circle. You could actually take the hands off and hold them—they weren’t ‘affixed to the peg’ in any way. However, you could spin them around on the peg at will. My grandpa would demonstrate by taking a yard stick (or his fingers) and give the hands a sturdy push—setting them spinning. Each would rotate independently, and would make several rotations freely—then would return to the correct time! My dad told me that Grandpa Charley thought of the design in a dream.

This was the magic that drew attention. Even if you tried to confuse the hands and rotated them really hard (for a longer spin), they always returned to the correct time—including the elapsed time while spinning. In 1940s LA, this was a pretty cool thing (actually, it still appeals to me in 2024).

I inherited the Allison Watchmakers visitor log, which includes signatures and comments from some pretty big names of the era (for example):

Gene Krupa, drummer for The Benny Goodman Orchestra wrote “In sincere appreciation of the love you have for your work--I'd like to be able to keep time as well as your clocks and watches do--and I'm supposed to be a fair drummer!”

Mary Astor, who starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, wrote “This is something new and different!”

And Sterling Holloway (the voice of animated Winnie the Pooh) said “For "The Wizard of Time" Allison. The Modern Joshua.”

With over 700 signatures/comments, the book is an awesome relic—I feel really lucky to have inherited it.

So—back to that 1981 night. My dad also told me about a Texas oil millionaire who came into my grandpa’s shop and was really wowed by the Allison Mystery Clock. He wanted to buy it from Grandpa Charley. But my grandfather, who made his money servicing watches, had a policy: Allison clocks were not for sale (behind the scenes, it was Charley’s desire that the clocks be displayed in a museum someday). And, from what I’ve heard, he also really didn’t like people telling him what to do. He told the Texas guy the clock was not for sale.

The Oil Man, not to be deterred, said something about how he was a collector of clocks and he had money and how much did Charley want for the Mystery Clock? And my grandfather, again, said “My clocks are not for sale.” They went back and forth for a bit and, according to my dad, the Oil Man got so angry, he threw down a blank check and said “You fill out any amount! I want that clock!”

…and my grandpa said “It’s not for sale.”

As you can imagine, I loved this family story (especially as a kid who loved mysteries). The things that stood out to me: a) I had a (genius?) grandpa who thought up a design in a dream and b) somewhere on the planet there existed an Allison Mystery Clock that engineers, watchmakers, and celebrities were interested in and c) we could have been millionaires if my grandpa wasn’t so stubborn!

According to my dad, all the clocks were supposed to end up in a museum, but he never knew what happened to the Allison Collection after his dad died in 1955. In effect, they had been “lost to time” (at least to us Rochester Allisons). That night, in my teenage journal, I wrote up the details of this story and made a vow to locate my grandfather’s missing clocks when I grew up (I still have the journal).

FLASH FORWARD: 2017.
After turning 50, I was taking stock of my life and the thought (finally) occurred to me that I had never seriously looked for the missing clocks. (To my lazy credit, during my 40s, I did submit one letter about it to “History Detectives” on the Discovery Channel to see if they’d help…but never heard back). So I started my own search.

I won’t lay out the EXTENSIVE details of my 4+ year search, with cross-country trips between New York, California, and, finally, Montana (that story is told in my upcoming book about all this!) but suffice it to say that the clocks were found (all except the Allison Mystery Clock…but I did recover a smaller model that works on a similar principle, so my grandpa’s dream design has not been lost).

FLASH FORWARDER: 2024.
Which brings me to May 2024, when the collection hit a fantastic milestone: the 12 surviving clocks of the Charles Allison Timepiece Collection are on display (5/1/24-7/31/24) at the National Watch & Clock Museum in Columbia, PA! I am so very grateful to the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors, Inc. for taking an interest in my grandfather’s craftmanship and story—and having graciously offered to host an exhibit of his work this summer.

If you’re in the Harrisburg or Philly area before July 31, feel free to stop in and see them at 514 Poplar Street, Columbia, PA, 17512. More details and pictures of the clocks are available on my grandpa’s website at www.CharlesAllisonClocks.com

This exhibit is a posthumous gift to my grandpa that I am so, so happy/honored to have been a part of. This one’s for you, Charley.

How does everyone feel about brass No. 5s? Had a teacher tell me brass 5s are not worth it. That brass won't hold the fine point No. 5s have for very long. That, I'd spend a lot of time reshaping them. Better off having steel 5s and other numbers for brass. Any thoughts?

Hey guys, I am casually interested in getting a run of custom 7751 chrono cases made up in solid 14K gold. I haven’t got a quote yet but I am estimating that they would cost around $900-$1000 USD apiece. Not sure what the minimum order would be. But I would like to see if there is enough interest to put together a group to get this off the ground. This would be a long term project probably over the next year or so. For reference, a 7750 can fit in a 7751 case, but not the other way around, so making the case for 7751 ensures maximum compatibility. I believe all other variants fit the 7751 case.

Design would be a simple case, 38mm 20mm lugs, as thin as possible, steel/sapphire screw down back, styled halfways between dress watch and field watch.

Price guesstimate based off 15g of 14K gold ($650 USD) plus $250-$350 manufacturing costs.

Modern watch cases machined out of steel use a lot more material but if you look at the chrono cases made of solid gold in the 50s, there were a lot of tricks to conserve the amount of gold used, so keeping those ideas in mind we can probably reduce the amount of gold used down to 10-15g. If we just used a maximal amount the way people tend to do with steel nowadays we would be looking at more like 20-25g I think.

Hi. I'm exploring several movements posibilites, and just found this

VP39A-3D Anyone knows how that big date wheel works? Or any watch that use it

https://preview.redd.it/q5tju4y4mocd1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=449858fdabe6523f58b0959f6519a24bc39f2cc9

Thanks!

I'm trying to exchange the clasp of a watch? How would I take out the riveted pin to remove it, without breaking it (To my knowledge it isn't supposed to be removed so I'm seeking help)?

https://preview.redd.it/f27nc99aakcd1.png?width=663&format=png&auto=webp&s=a33a47f631b9afb160cc404345dcf7020186559b

Hey everyone!

Recently, I've joined this community and it's been a lot of fun to see all your amazing creations. Inspired by many of you, I'm beginning my first mod project.

I'm designing a watch as a gift for my girlfriend to celebrate her achievement of getting her master's degree in classical studies. The watch design is based on the ancient Greek concept of seasons, symbolizing both her academic interest and this new season in her life.

Here are the details of my plan:

• Movement: NH35
• Case: 36mm gold-plated
• Dial: Blank white 29mm
• Custom metal decals
• Strap: Brown leather

I'm still figuring out how and with whom to make the decals. I've talked with 4Customize and a few suppliers from Alibaba, but they only offer large quantities. Do any of you have experience with ordering custom metal decals in smaller quantities?

Regarding the dial, I've seen some watches with mother of pearl dials, which I think would really fit the theme of the watch. However, I haven't been able to find any blank 29mm mother of pearl dials. Does anyone have experience with this or know where I might find one?

Below are two images: the first is a demonstration of my envisioned watch, and the second is the dial design I want to order.

I'm really eager to hear your thoughts and feedback on this project. Thanks in advance for your help!

https://preview.redd.it/x0jq8z9p4kcd1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a2f1490af827c3c3cf6f37f48122c51d70efa47

https://preview.redd.it/gsrdalvp4kcd1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=10ed108fd24d6e6c3262232bd383d6eb619e473e