In order to reduce the risk of watch parts getting lost, it is advisable to choose high quality tweezers and to maintain the tweezer tips. When new to watch repair you should spend quite a bit of time practicing with your tweezers and developing your technique.

It is never a good idea to start stripping a watch movement down when it is still in it’s watch case. The movement may not be fully secure and you will run the risk of damaging the dial as you apply downwards pressure on certain screws. This lesson discusses the same removal of the watch movement from the watch case.

Removing the Motion Work before removing the Train Wheels is a great example of where observing this guideline is important because the Cannon Pinion is friction fitted to the Centre Wheel.

The Pallet fork is located under the balance and is secured with a bridge which needs to be removed first. The pallet staff pivots are very fine and if you are not careful when removing the Pallets then you run a real risk of them breaking.

Rust is most definitely an issue you will come across at some point when you start servicing and maintaining watch movements. 

When you are first starting out with watch repair, it may not be practical or even advisable to invest in expensive equipment such as ultrasonic machines or watch cleaning machines.

Using a dedicated watch cleaning machine will both increase your productivity and arguably give you better results when cleaning watch components. You will still need to be able to clean certain parts by hand, but investing in a watch cleaning machine will be a natural step forward as you progress in watch repair.

Many modern watch movement calibers will have a corresponding data sheet with part numbers, illustrations and often an oiling chart. These can be extremely useful to help you determine the correct lubricant for a particular friction point.

Before we get started with re-assembly, lets take a look at some principles in the lubrication of friction points in mechanical watch movements. For the most part, you will need to lubricate where any two components come into contact and interact with each other…

Now we are ready to start re-assembling and lubricating the movement. You may remember, we previously talked about a guideline procedure for stripping a movement to pieces.

If you made notes or took photographs whilst you were stripping the movement down, this should be a relatively simple task. Assembling the train of wheels is a simple case of placing the wheels the correct way up and in the correct order.

When re-assembling the barrel you have to make a choice wether to use the existing mainspring which you removed when you stripped the watch down, or to replace it with a new one.

If a watch does not maintain a reasonable expectation of time-keeping, then it’s does not serve much of a purpose. And of course, following a full strip down and re-assembly along with fresh lubrication applied and perhaps even replacement of worn parts, the time keeping of the movement will need to be assessed and adjusted accordingly.

As the balance oscillates, it interacts with the pallet fork twice. These are called vibrations, or beats. Effectively it is the ‘tictoc’ sound you hear with any mechanical watch movement.

Now that you have adjusted the rate of your watch movement, it is very important to put the watch through various stages of testing.