Tid-Bit 23 - Horological Tool Time
Folks who visit my shop often comment that I seem to have a lot of tools. This can be a bit daunting for someone who is considering getting started in clock repair. Fortunately many of the tools I have are focused on very specific aspects of mechanism restoration, tools that are not needed most of the time. This Tid-Bit discusses the tools I use most often – the tools that I think are needed to do good work.
Thinking about tools takes me back to when I decided that I wanted to get serious about clock and watch restoration – when I concluded that I needed to learn to use the watchmakers lathe.
I signed up for a 2 week lathe course taught by Roy Hovey. A week later a list of required tools showed up in my mail box. Fortunately (or perhaps not) I had already discovered a couple of clock supply houses so it was an easy thing to go down the list and order all the things needed to attend the class.
Funny thing was, attending the same class was a truly wonderful couple, Harry and Peggy Blair. I don’t remember the whys and wherefores, but they had with them box after box of old tools. Which they were more than happy to pull out and let the members of the class pick through and buy. At truly wonderful prices.
I saw immediately was that the older tools were better made, elegant even. And, for me, the patina of age only made them more attractive. Don’t get me wrong, not the patina of abuse (like marks where someone had used a pair of pliers on a pin-vise), but the wear that results from a tool being used hundreds of times.
A set of Starrett pin vises I bought from Harry are in the top drawer of the small cabinet in front of my bench. The new ones I bought for the lathe course? They were given away years ago.
Which in a roundabout way brings me to why I chose this as the next subject for a Tid-Bit – I was using my pin vises to clean up the heads on screws from a wonderful miniature Viennese mechanism and realized just how much I really like those pin vises.
Figure 28 – Spade Drills (top), Carbide Drills (left) and High Speed Steel Twist Drills (right)
Initially I did not include twist-drills in my list for this article, but several of the people on my technical list thought they were important.
Most folks have drills in the 1/16” and larger sizes. Fortunately if you can get a hole drilled a little smaller than you want it you can always fine tune the diameter with a cutting broach. In fact, this is my recommendation so you don’t drill too large a hole.
The drills in Figure 28 are a small high-speed steel set that goes from 61 to 80 wire sizes (0.039 to 0.0135 inches). These are especially handy for reaming holes. I included spade-bits in Figure 28 – they are better for drilling precisely-sized holes, as in for replacing a pivot. And, lastly, I also show some small carbide bits – which are necessary if you must drill a hardened arbor or other work piece. And the small carbides come in sizes smaller than 80 wire size.
