![]() By adjusting position of these teal components we can modify the duration of a single beat and make the watch run slightly faster or slower. The teal components can freely slide on the hairspring, but they reduce or increase its effective length as they prevent the tail section of the hairspring from oscillating freely. This ensures that both the “tick” and “tock” phases of the balance wheel swing take the same amount of time. The yellow components are firmly attached to the balance spring, and by turning them, we can adjust the resting position of the balance wheel and its jewel roller. Those parts make sure that the pallet fork can switch sides only at the appropriate time – it’s a safety mechanism that prevents the watch from locking up when the watch is shaken or dropped: You may also have noticed a subtle dance between the little horn at the end of the pallet fork and the notched disk on the balance wheel. When the balance wheel comes back, it performs the same action, just in the other direction. This causes the balance wheel to gain some energy, which prevents it from stopping after a while – it’s equivalent to giving a push to a person swinging on a swing. Once unlocked, the escape wheel powered by the mainspring pushes on the pallet fork which, through the jewel roller, pushes on the balance wheel itself. In the demonstration below, you can witness that by observing little dots I put on each gear – the yellow gear, which is powered by the bigger red gear, takes much less time to finish a single revolution:īalance wheel is swinging back jewel roller strikes the pallet fork, knocking it out of position escape wheel unlocks and pushes the jewel of the pallet fork pallet fork pushes the jewel roller and the balance wheel escape wheel locks again balance wheel continues its swingĪs the balance wheel swings, the jewel roller strikes the pallet fork, which unlocks the escape wheel. Gears can be used to change the speed of rotation between two different axes. I’ve talked about gears on this blog before, so let me just recap things very briefly. We need to find a way to convert a small number of revolutions of the barrel into a large number of revolutions of the hands. Moreover, the second hand should cover around 40 × 60 = 2400 complete rotations in that time. If we wanted our watch to run continuously for around 40 hours on a single wind, we’d need the minute hand to complete 40 rotations in that time. Clearly, this contraption won’t let us track time in any reliable way. We clearly have some work to do – the hand spins way too fast and it only does a few rotations before the mainspring inside the barrel runs out of the stored energy. To secure the mainspring and prevent dust from getting in we close the barrel with a lid that snaps into its place: With the S-shaped spring the outer sections of the spring are also under a similar tension because they want to get back to their curve that is bent in the opposite direction. If the relaxed spring was just a straight piece of metal, then after winding, the inner parts would be bent much more than the outer parts. Notice that the inner sections of the wound spring have a much smaller radius than the outer parts. This helps to balance the tension in mainspring’s different sections when it is inside the barrel. If we were to keep winding the spring past its maximum capacity, we’d overpower that friction letting the mainspring slip inside – this acts as a safety mechanism to prevent the parts from breaking.Īs we’ve seen, in its relaxed state, the mainspring forms an S-shape with varied curvature throughout. This locks the outer end of the mainspring when the arbor moves the inner. While the entire watch movement has many parts, the timekeeping system, which forms the core function of any watch, consists of just seven major elements which we can lay out in a straight line: disabled, but if you prefer to have things moving as you read you can globally unpause them and have animations running. By default all animations in this article are enabled, but if you find them distracting, or if you want to save power, you can globally pause all the following demonstrations. ![]() ![]() In a functioning watch many parts are in constant motion. The world of watchmaking is jargon-heavy, so many of the components may have unfamiliar names, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to remember them – the names and parts will be color-coded for easy reference. The entire watch movement has a lot of parts, and in this blog post I’ll explain the purpose of each one. In this article I’m focusing on a watch movement itself, since beautiful watch cases merely hide the intricate mechanisms which are the real stars of the show. What you see here is known as the movement – the inner part of a mechanical watch that’s usually enclosed in a metal case.
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