Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mechanical Watch

ciechanow.ski

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 425 posts

Re: Mechanical Watch

#271

Post by donthellbanme »

boesboes wrote: post #72

Wow very comprehensive & well done. If mechanical watches tickle your fancy, there is a ton of watch repair video on YT. I particularly enjoy wristwatch revival ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD80T1s2Za4K682CQDGwEKQ ). A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive (I spend close to €1k and that is with b-quality stuff. Good stuff is 5-10x more expensive.) and can b…

To those interested in becomming a Watchmaker I can offer this:

1. The school route is great, but after the two year program you still won't get a parts account from anyone. You will have no problem finding a job though.

2. Self-taught. It will take awhile, but it's a rewarding hobby/career.

Every budding Watchmaker should have books. Books by DeCarle, Fried, and Daniels are great.

There are old correspondence courses that are good to. Try to get Chicago School of Watch Repair, and Bulova School of Watch Repair. Hunt around for the best price.

The quality of internet videos on the internet are spectacular. You are lucky to have them. When I started their was only one guy who taught Watch Repair.

Tools:

#2, #5 Dumont tweezers. (any tweezers will do, even the cheap ones.)

Watch back removal tools. You will need various types, including Rolex, and universal tools.

small ultrasonic bath to clean parts. A mason jar filled with cleaning fluid, and rinse will suffice to hobbiests though.

oils. Moebius are recommended, but expensive. Personally I think they are overpriced.

Presto #1,#2 hand removers.

some Radico.

A mainspring tool. These can get pricy. Look for a old set of Marshall mainspring removal tools.

Decide if you want to work with a loupe, or a 10-40x stereoscope.

a band remover.

A staking set. (Look around. No need to spend more than $250.00

A jewelers lathe, mill, etc. come way later. The biggest mistake newbies make is buying every tool they thing they might need. Then again you wealthy boys can go crazy.

Too tired to go on, but I'm in the Bay Area under "I buy Watchmaker, jeweler, amd some Machinist's estates. I'm gearing up to do repairs. I hope to have a website soon. I'm thinking about teaching, but not sure if there's a market for it.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#272

Post by hamburglar »

aliljet wrote: post #4

This may not be the most valuable comment, but my goodness, the quality of this writeup and it's interactive descriptions of complex mechanical components AND their interactions is radically impressive. The treatment of complex topics in deeply visual and partially interactive ways, for me at least, is a remarkably helpful way to learn.

And in true HN style we react to such objectively awesome content by having a slapfight over whether the author wrote the code in the “right” way.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#273

Post by brchr »

cyounkins wrote: post #270
Prcmaker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the same mechanical watch, more or less every day, for a little over 12yrs now. Miyota movement, stainless body, Sapphire window, about $300. In years of machine shop work the movement survived fine, and has one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide. Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn't…

> I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week. Are these two things somehow related to one another?

Watch movements are generally sensitive to magnetic fields, and can become magnetized and lose accuracy. Some watch models explicitly advertise their level of resistance to magnetism, for instance the Rolex Milgauss, which is designed to withstand 1,000 ("mille") gauss.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#274

Post by emmelaich »

grishka wrote: post #265
ThePhysicist wrote: post #31

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js

Are you sure about the by hand part? There's a lot of repetition, it feels like at least some of it must be generated.

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of it is copy/pasted or #included from his other work.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#275

Post by exhilaration »

mjard wrote: post #223
rotten wrote: post #157

This bumps up my desire to build my own mechanical watch using one of the kits here: https://rotatewatches.com (something I've had bookmarked for a while as a possible rainy day project)

One of my isolation projects was to put together a watch using an ETA 2824-2 movement from EBay. You might want to consider buying the parts you want individually. Match a case to a movement or it's clone. Find a dial that matches the movement complications and the case diameter. Find hands that match the movement and the case diameter. Most of the work is in the identification of parts, putting the watch together is…

I'd love to see a picture of your watch!

Re: Mechanical Watch

#276

Post by soheil »

JayStavis wrote: post #151
soheil wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point to what libraries he could have used that would have made it simpler? I doubt anything like would benefit from any type of abstraction that currently exists, unless it was a more interactive application that would incorporate user input etc.

Depending on one's skillset, you could use a dcc tool like Blender + three.js to make creation of these visuals and interactions much simpler. Have a look at gltfjsx + react-three-fiber [1] combination, which themselves are abstractions over vanilla three.js. With that said, the raw webGL approach here is arguably more educational, so goal achieved I think! [1] https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/e…

Cool example, but all r3f is doing here is just providing the threejs camera, controls and the text with emoji, the watch itself is loaded as a .glb file, where I'd assume most people would be interested in learning about.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#277

Post by bacon_waffle »

For folks who are interested in the subject matter: electronic tuning fork movements, like the Accutron 214, are amazingly elegant bits of engineering. Both the time regulation and motive power are provided by a tuning fork (vs the balance wheel and mainspring), which is kept oscillating through electromagnetism (vs the escapement) in one of the first consumer applications of the transistor. The movement was designed and started being manufactured in the late 1950s.

Max Hetzel's patents are a good starting point - https://www.accutrons.com/tuning-fork-watch-patents

Re: Mechanical Watch

#278

Post by modeless »

subsubzero wrote: post #87

As someone who has been into mechanical watches since I was kid, this article is beyond amazing and explains everything about how a watch is powered with excellent interactive diagrams and cool animations. The author should try to go after other areas of mechanical movement like operation of a car or a plane. So well done!

He didn't do planes yet but he did the internal combustion engine: https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/ and boats: https://ciechanow.ski/naval-architecture/

I could post more but just go to the archives and see. Every single one is a treasure and there are few enough that you can read them all: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

Re: Mechanical Watch

#279

Post by andai »

kragen wrote: post #228
donatj wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is "drawing a triangle" https://www.tutorialspoint.com/webgl/webgl_drawing_a_triangl...

That looks like a fair bit of boilerplate, and a shitty tutorial with comments that mostly just repeat what the code says, but the API doesn't look unusable. https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/glslCanvas/blob/mast... has most of that same boilerplate in a less repulsive form. https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/glslCanvas/blob/mast... has other bits.

Now compare it with Flash ;)

Re: Mechanical Watch

#280

Post by modeless »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #156

Interesting content, interactive, ad-free, and social-media free. The entire site is a great example of how the old Web was better than it is today.

Your definition of "old web" includes WebGL?

Stuff like this is a smaller percentage of the web these days, but in absolute terms there's more of it than ever before and a lot of it is higher quality too.

Post reply on HN