Some interesting points.

While I tried to reduce the overall diameter of the movement under the original, it ended up being very close to the original (this was actually a good thing – will explain in a later post)

The original movement uses large (2mm outside diameter) jewels on the bridge side of the movement, and small (1mm outside diameter) jewels on the dial side of the movement, while this has little functional effect, I prefer to have nice beefy jewels on both sides, as it looks much better, and I had a few spare due to the number of movements I had bought.

Dial Side, showing jewel sizesBridge side, showing Larger jewel sizes

Bridge side, showing Larger jewel sizes

The original movement uses the manipulate itself as the lower bearing for the barrel and this is a common wear point for many watches (looking at you Seiko.. and early Rolex as well..) I decided to replace this with a jewel (coincidentally the same pivot diameter as the centre wheel) although I haven’t found a jewel large enough for the upper bearing, I will use a bronze bushing for this, which at least can be easily replaced.

Because of the way I had moved the train around, the setting mechanism would no longer fit in the orientation that it was originally used, luckily (again) the 6497 and 6498 use a mirror image of the setting mechanism, and with some juggling, I found a spot where everything appeared to play nicely.


Handy!

Over the Christmas break I also caught up with a number of friends, amongst whom is a retired engineer who’s father was a watchmaker, he showed me an old electric car clock, and the hands immediately took my fancy, I knew straight away that these shapes had to end up on my watch.

Neat hands, stylish too!

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