Fishtown, and a Bent Hairspring
The Rittenhouse got its first real outing recently: cased up on the freshly serviced PT5000, brought along to a Fishtown Watch Supply meetup.
It ran beautifully. I had before-and-after timegrapher readings to prove it, and for a few minutes I was feeling confident.
That did not last.
I'd mounted the dial with dial stickers — a quick, temporary fix before I have an appropriate dial feet workflow sorted out. The PT5000 has a date wheel which severely limits real estate for dial stickers. Somewhere in the process of trying to make that work or while attaching the hands, the paper backing from one of the stickers ended up in the movement. Trying to fish it out fast, because I was already running late to leave, I bent the hairspring.
So instead of showing up with a running prototype, I showed up with a nice looking but very dead watch.
I didn’t have the hands I wanted so I fished these out of the drawer. They are pretty beat up.
Lesson learned the hard way: never work on a movement when you're in a hurry. Patience isn't optional in this hobby — it's the actual job. Every time I've rushed a step, from servicing, to priming to curing, it has cost me time (and money).
The Philly watch community was generous about it anyway. Nobody blinked at a broken watch showing up to a meetup, and I walked away with some genuinely useful feedback on the design that I'm already folding into the next round.
Dial Feet: Testing the Workflow
Partly prompted by the sticker situation, I've gotten serious about a proper dial feet workflow: milling feet pads and gluing pre-made dial feet to the back of the dial, starting from technical drawings instead of improvising on the fly.
It's a stopgap. The real goal is home-turned dial feet on the new-to-me lathe. But I have a few lathe things to sort out. Good news is that I am attending a NAWCC lathe servicing course in September to work out the kinks before I am production-ready on that front.
(Also, I recently read Rebecca Struthers' Hands of Time, and she has named her lathes. Given how much of a badass she is, I think that means I should name mine - updates to follow).
