Show off opportunity: Fero EB 1333 pin pallet escapement, a movement from late 1950s hell

 

This one kinda ran, but only occasionally. Would randomly stop.

It uses a pin-pallet escapement (Roskopf) so the 17 jewels on dial, while true, is extremely misleading. It is a cheaply made disposable piece of crap that needed a huge amount of work.

The mainspring, regulator pallet fork needed replacing.

Broke the escape wheel top pivot by mistake as the lower cap jewel wasn't installed when installing the train bridge. Lesson learned. 

Three cap jewels needed replacing.

The hairspring was out of round and out of flat. Hairspring work has to be the thoughest part of servicing watches. took a long time to get right.

Before. Who knows what happened here, but something did happen.

 

 

And after.

The third wheel also had rust and pitting between the pinion leaves. So dialux and a wooden skewer were used.

 Even polished the setting rocking bar and dial-side cap jewel settings, because why not.

 

All this work and effort, for what? The timegrapher results are sad.

Cased and left to run for 24 hours then will re-check. But this one got the royal treatment that would have been really expensive and a task no professional would probably accept.

 

 Then, touched the regulator and dial up stopped working. Too much endshake. Oh well, leaving well enough alone for now, I'm fed up of this movement. I'll adjust the endshake when I get the Horia tool.

Update: the balance top cape jewel became loose. Closed the hole again, re-inserted the jewel and will let it run for a day or two but the results are really promising. I managed to get a low quality movement that's almost 70 years old to work better than it did when it came out of the factory. This is the sign that I've gotten simple wrist watch servicing and basic repairs, jewel replacements and ahrispring work, down. I have a couple more watches that need servicing and after those I'll be moving on to tougher repairs with an inital focus on bushing worn pivot holes.

 

The timegrapher results after fixing the loose cap jewels are impressive, for such a bad escapement. I'm proud of this one.

Position	Rate	Amplitude	Beat Error
DU	61	273	0
DD	63	277	0
CL	-32	228	0.1
CD	-1	229	0.3
CU	-19	232	0.2
Delta	95	49	0.3
Mean	2.2	193.2	0.12