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 9 – Bench Layout
Over the years I have built up a series of small cabinets around my bench that hold the tools I use the most often (Figure 9). This makes it easy to find what I need, and also easy to write this article. I only need look around and pull out a few drawers to see the tools I use the most often.
A - LED Photo Floods
B – Binocular Microscope on an articulated arm
C – Camera mount on an articulated arm
D – Web-Cam on an articulated arm
E – Computer Monitor for webinars and the like
F – Cabinet for pin-vises and cutting/smoothing broaches
G – Cabinet for pliers, cutters, note pads, X-Acto knives and razor blades, micrometer and weight line
Lighting is so very important, yet often left to pretty dim sources. I have gone over to using LED photo floods for my main bench (Figure 9) and my 8mm Levin lathe bench. Not only do they give brilliant white light, but they do not heat up.
Flip side, I am using a small florescent light on an articulated arm on the rest of the benches – including the bench for the 10mm Levin lathe shown in Figure 15. Of course, having most of my benches right in front of the northern-exposure windows provides excellent light as well.
