Watch disassembly tool

If you're ready to dive into watch repair, consider a watch repair kit that includes a variety of tools for many common repairs. When you are looking for the right watch repair tools, look no farther because you can get it all with one stop shopping with Esslinger. And if you have questions, take a look at our learning center to see common watch repairs and the tools and process explained step by step.

Home Watchmaker Tools Watchmaker Tools. Bench and Accessories. Bergeon Watch Tools. Books, Publications. Brushes, Fiberglass, and Blowers. Envelopes, Bags, Tags, and Boxes. Horotec Watch Tools.

Magnifiers and Loupes. Make My Own Watch Kits. Then use tweezers in small tight places where needed. With the watch dial taken care of, I turned my attention to the rest of the watch movement and looked for the most easily accessible screws to remove. This happened to be the ones next to the balance wheel, so I used my screwdriver or sharp blade to remove them. The balance wheel is actually kept in place by a balance bridge that the balance spring is attached to.

Unfortunately for me, there was a final screw keeping the balance bridge in place, but my screwdriver wasn't a good fit and it was inset so my blade couldn't access the groove. Thus, I resorted to snapping off the spring to remove the wheel.

There should be a small screw next to the crown and stem. Once you remove it, you'll be able to detach the crown from the rest of the movement, along with adjacent parts stem, click, washer, crown wheel. This crown wheel is the one that engages with the mainspring barrel to transmit energy from the crown to the mainspring. The two main plates of the movement should now separate since all screws are loose or if not, look around for more screws to release.

The escapement components forked level, escape wheel should become loosened, along with the gear train third, fourth, and central wheels -- see here for a good exploded view of what's happening. The escape wheel turns the fourth wheel, which turns the center wheel, which turns the third wheel. Another piece you'll notice is the mainspring barrel, which houses the mainspring thick coiled spring. Be VERY careful handling this, as the mainspring stores a lot of potential energy that will lash out if you loosen it from the barrel.

Carefully use your fingers to remove the mainspring and let it unwind slowly maybe turn your head, in case it pops up at your eyes Look around for more screws to remove, but otherwise that was it for me! The finishing touch was simply removing the small wire springs on the two main faces of the movement first image above.

The second image above displays all the parts with labels so you can have a bird's eye view of everything. This was yet another Timex watch, but it was round instead of rectangular as seen previously.

Even so, the movement inside was exactly the same; just the dial was different to account for the watch shape. See the notes in the step by step instructions below for disassembly and watch part labeling, but the components are exactly the same as for watch 1.

This round movement was from a brand named Swank. The movement had significant positional differences from the Timex movements, but the major components mainspring, balance spring, escapement were all present and looked similar. Notably, I finally managed to remove a balance spring in one full piece! This round movement was from a brand named Medana. Like in the Swank and Timex, the major components mainspring, balance spring, escapement were all present and looked similar, though in different positions.

Interestingly, the watch case opened up by popping off the top rim! Also, the watch dial was held in place by two screws rather than with folded tabs keeping it in place. Somehow I couldn't find a "forked lever and pallets" construction that went with the escapement, and still couldn't figure out why Again, jewels in mechanical watches are for reducing wear in the movement in high friction areas because they are a hard enough that they're difficult to wear down and b smooth to allow for easy sliding.

The jewels of choice were usually rubies because they had hardness properties similar to those of diamonds with a relatively smaller price tag key word here is "relatively" -- cheap only compared to diamonds. Engraved on this watch movement is the info that it has 17 jewels. Back when real rubies were used for these purposes, having more jewels in your watch was a status symbol because it meant your watch was significantly more expensive.

Even so, having more jewels isn't always a good thing, especially as they can be dangerously redundant in some areas. As this site says good info on jewel background, by the way , "Jewels are added to make it easier to create a high grade watch, but adding jewels alone will not make a watch high grade and many high grade watches do not have lots of jewels. You can technically remove and replace jewels, but I don't have the special equipment for that job and thus didn't bother with that.

It's interesting that positionally, the main architecture inside the movement was relatively similar to the Timex movements from before. Unlike the previous mechanical watches, this watch has a quartz movement so the key components we've seen before will be missing, having been replaced by the electronics.

Even though this is a Timex watch, the components here look almost nothing like what we've seen in the Timex mechanical watches. See this picture for a nice exploded view of what to roughly expect. Notably here, the typical metal screws have been replaced with little rubbery stoppers that are fairly easy to pop off cheaper, perhaps?

Also, there's the green circuit board that's behind all the electronics. Here's yet another quartz watch Armitron. This one didn't have any of the rubber stops that I saw in the Timex movement, interestingly enough -- instead, it had metal screws. I originally thought that maybe the rubber was to replace the metal screws that might negatively interfere with the circuitry, but I guess not. This quart watch differs from the Timex one in the positioning, of course, but also the circuitry -- notice that the glaringly green PCB is gone?

It's been replaced with a brown version.. I selected two similar mainspring barrels from my collection to fill with gears. The gears were from the crown wheel gear trains, since the main gear train usually had pins though the middle that I couldn't remove. I used E to glue everything together for its strength, but it was also quite messy sometimes.

Use a toothpick for application for that reason: squeeze a small drop on scrap surface and use the toothpick as a brush to apply the glue where you need it. Now that you're equipped with some knowledge on different types of watches and pictures of some watch guts, go out there and try to do it yourself!

It's a fairly relaxing process, perfect for rainy days, and I promise that it's quite interesting to look inside what goes into as seemingly simple a task as keeping time.

Some things to try with the spare watch parts, besides the gear-rings:. Glue them together in interesting designs heart above for scrapbooking or Make sculptures better if you have bigger watches' gears, since smaller ones don't have much substance to them.

Reassemble a Frankenstein watch with different parts from different watches? Not sure if everything would mesh well together, but it'd be an interesting challenge. As always, feel free to leave any questions or comments, and I'll be sure to get back to you when I can. Participated in the Trash to Treasure Contest From us, you can buy watches from the comfort of your own home.

Customer Service We strive to offer you an amazing customer service to make your buyer experience as great as it can be. Authenticity Our goal is to make you feel safe throughout the purchase process.

Fair Prices We strive to have fair prices on all our watches.