Here is a very scruffy jump hour that has sat in my drawer for probably 5 years. Looking in terrible state and probably why I left it in there so long.
It clearly was loved once so why not try to see if I can save this one and get it going again? I had a spare few ours so went all in on this one.
Inside this one we find the pin pallet BFG movement that is about as crude as they come but functional. They came in many varieties with my favourite (said with sarcasm) being the 1 jewel versions where they kindly put one cap jewel on the top of the balance!
This one is the more upmarket 17 jewel with a few of those jewels being made up using jewelled screw on covers over the main functional jewels on the plates. I guess you could say these aid with keeping the pivots clean but in my opinion at least, its there to up the numbers.
Case, flanged acrylic crystal, a movement ring and the dial screwed to to the movement. It screams quality!
This is the more interesting part, the rotating discs. All look quite nice, a bit of a change from a normal 3 hander watch that’s for sure. This is where a lot of people now struggle, how to get the discs off, mainly the minute one.
On this model you just pry it up. I use Horotec hand levers and get both levers under it opposite to one another and then lever. The wheel is stuck on tight but it will come off, usually at force and resulting in a flying tiddly wink minute wheel flying across your bench.
Under it we find a cover, you remove the screws to that and to the hour wheel disc and you will see all of this.
There is a simple spring and detent for the hour wheel (in the background on the removed plate. They are all out of position, detent sits on the post in the recess and the spring sits in the opposite recess with the long part then resting on the detent to hold in position of the teeth on the hour disc.
Once all that is removed there is yet another cover.
You can now access the hour wheel and canon pinion and jewels for oiling.
The business side is again simple and crude. Here is is with the balance removed where you get a glimpse of the pin pallet fork. Instead of a jewelled escapement on lower model watches they just used metal pins.
Significant arm cheese around the stem hole…..
Strip down commencing.
BFG866 movement.
Now I need to fix the rather strange bracelet. It has normal links on either end but in the middle there is a flexiband which had two broken rivets which took some time to repair, very crudely using my staking set.
Actually fits well much to my surprise.
Once cleaned and built, this is the timegrapher result.
Amplitude is magnificent but the trace is a little noisy. To be honest I thought it would be better but alas not, either way its keeping good time and these are not to the second dials so it does not really matter so much. What they are though it noisy! very noisy movements indeed but I do like to hear a tick at night.
