My custom watchmaker's tools and improvements

In this article I’ll share some of the tools I’ve made for myself.

Tool sharpening set

Parts needed:

On multiple occasious I found myself in a situation where I need to pick up a small parts, but my tweezers aren’t sharp enough. Or in a situation where my screwdriver doesn’t quite fit the slot perfectly and there’s a rist of damaging the screw.

As I hobbyist I have a relatively small table and in these cases it was tricky for me to sharpen the tools without leaving abrasive particles all over the desk and the movement I’m working on.

In order to deal with this, I made a box with all I need for sharpening the tools. Essentially it contains a few strips of sandpaper of different grit and a polishing cloth.

The sandpaper strips have a loose end so that I can grip it with tweezers (to polish the inside of the jaws).

Now I can open the box, quickly sharpen the tools I need and go forward! All the particles are left in the box, not on the desk.

Endshakes samples watches

Parts needed:

While it’s important to keep the endshakes in watch movements to specific values, in the beginning I struggled to estimate the actual amount of movement.

It’s recommended to provide around 0.04-0.06mm of an endshake for wristwatches’ pivots (but it also depends on movement size and particular pivot size), and having a skill to estimate the value can be very useful in correcting all the related faults. It is extermely difficult to measure such small endshakes and in many cases a watchmaker has to ascertain the actual amount by feel while moving the wheels with tweezers.

I decided to create a set of learning watch movements to estimate the endshake amount. The movements can be used either as a learning tool (if you keep practicing with it you’ll be better at estimates with time) or as a sample to compare against.

To prepare such movements I did the following:

Note that you’ll have to add 0.01mm to all of your required changes. E.g. if you want to increase endshake by 0.04mm and the initial depth reading is at 42 you’ll have to aim not at 46, but at 47. This is related to the jewel press’s internal tolerances and backlash and is true for both Seitz type and Horia type tools (however, I would recommend you to experiment with that youself: measure the position, adjust it and measure it again).

If this topic is interesting to you, you can also check out this great article on endshakes by NoBSWatchmaker.

Customisations: painting marks

When you have a hammer in your hand everything around looks like a nail.

At some points I was restoring my jewel press and decided to repaing the depth gauge. In order to do it, I bought a cheap set of acrylic paints and then I understood that so many tools I work with would benefit from adding some coloring to it!

Painting oilers orientaion

I took my oilers and put some dots to mark where the plain parts of them are. That allowed me to save some time and efforts during picking the oil, as I already know where the surfaces are.

Overall I found this easy modification very beneficial and I’m actually surprised that high end brands like Bergeon don’t do that out of the box.

Pro tip: feel free to use luminescent paint on darker handles. This would allow you to see the direction of the tool even in far from perfect lighting conditions (well, a watchmaker’s desk should be well lit, but for me it can sometimes be helpful when I use a microscope and mostly rely on its own lighthing).

Color-coding hand-setting bits

I purchased a cheap press for setting hands and all the bits looked pretty much the same out of the box. Using a drill as an improvised lathe, I drew some color coding lines on the sides of the bits (I used my Bergeon screwdrivers set as a base for my color coding system as I already got used to this color scheme).

This color coding idea can of course be applied to other sets of tools you have.

Painting washing machine knobs markers

I also painted the tips on my washing machine knobs so that I can distinguish them in darker conditions. Wait, it’s not related to watchmaking. Ah, useful anyway, so feel free to apply this tip as well.

Plans for the future

Bronze tools

One of the things I’m planning is to build a set of bronze tools. Berillium bronze is a hard copper-based alloy and tools made of it keep their shape quite well without any risk of damaging the steel parts.

A set of bronze screwdrives and tweezers can be useful when you’re working on an expensive or delicate parts.

In the future I might potentially get a mini lathe, and then it would be quite easy to implement such a project and it might be useful in my future repairs.

Summary

I highly recommend you to experiment with tools customisations as it’s something that will allow you to optimise your own processes and achieve better results.

I hope you learned something from this article and I’ll talk to you in the next ones!