Pallet fork

20 January 2011
Next in line is the pallet fork. It needs to be turned over to work with the flipped escape wheel, this is done in several steps.

I will start with the axis, this is pressed in, and made so that it easily can be adjusted, so I simply adjusted the whole axis through the fork, I will later have to finely adjust the height.

Original pallet fork

Pressing the axis

Step two is to move the safety pin to the other side. This was also a matter of pressing it out and mounting it on the opposite side. In the bottom left picture one can compare the size of the safety pin with the tip of a Ballograf ballpoint pen.

The thickenss of the entry horns are not constant, they are higher on the original downside, I assume this is to create a safety distance to the jewelled shock absorber. When I turn the pallet fork over, the horns are low, and there is a risk that the impulse pin will miss the horns, plus the risk that the horns will hit the jewelled shock absorber, I hope I can adjust this by slightly bending the horns up and being carefull with not adjusting the pallet fork too low. There is also the alternative of adjusting the impulse pin.


Last step on the pallet fork is to move the pallets, they are now sticking up with the shellac on the top, these need to be cleaned, adjusted flush to the top and new shellac applied under the pallet fork. This is done in the hardcore traditional way, a homemade clamping tool for adjusting pallet jewels, and a lamp, I don't like the electrical heating plates so much. After adjusting for a while, the pallet fork is now ready for testing.

While puting away the lamp I managed somehow to lose the pallet fork, it is quite large, for a watchmaker anyway. After an half hour of panic searching, I found it under a sheet of paper on my bench, a good lesson in how important it is to keep youre bench clear, but one can wonder where the pallet fork would have ended up if the sheet of paper hadn't been there.


The pallet fork is now mounted, heights are adjusted and the watch runs backwards, with very good results in the Witschi.

Next steps are to make the secondhand pivot and the centre axis to come out through the movement side, and make the watch wind properly with the winding stem.