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 14A - My Screws drawer
Jim Duncan was kind enough to remind me that some British clocks used BA (British Association) threads. Not to be confused with BSW (British Standard Whitworth) or BSF (British Standard Fine) or British Standard Cycle (collectively referred to as Whitworth threads), BA is a metric-based standard that can be found in old machinery (like Jaguars) along with Whitworth threaded screws. BA screws have a diameter of 6 mm and smaller. For more reading - check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standard_Whitworth
Fortunately during my restoration of a ’57 Jaguar XK-140 I ran across a gent in the Midlands of England who dealt in bolts. I can’t find a reference to Bernie the Bolt on the web, and hey, it has been 25 or 30 years since I contacted him, but he had a wonderful selection of metric as well as BA nuts and screws. Hence, in part my having lots of screws.
Whilst I didn't include the next picture in the Bulletin article, it does reflect how important I think having appropriate screws is when restoring a clock mechanism. I have 6 more drawers similar drawers of washers, nuts, taper pins and wood screws.
