scrape no more
Today my benchmate at school and I discovered the source of a strange noise that her bench had been generating.When she opened a certain drawer on her bench, it would make a deafening screech that severely perturbed anyone who was in the room. We lubricated the rails of said drawer, opened it, and to our dismay the noise continued.
Vexed, we investigated, and soon found that on one spot on the bottom of the drawer, a paint chip had been scratching the broad side of the drawer, and formed a very slight scar in the metal. A little motor oil, a nervous, tentative pull, and it was fixed. The stupid thing had been giving the class cause for alarm for weeks. Think nails on a chalkboard and multiply by about one and a third.
My benchmate and I celebrated with tea. Well, I had tea. She threw her teabag, by accident, in the trash, where we went to see if it could be saved. Sadly, it had landed in an uncertain puddle of shmutz, so it had to go live with Elvis. Moral of story, don't throw your tea's trash away until it has been prepared. Tea is a morning ritual steeped in tradition!
This week in watch school, we took our movements apart, ETA 6427s, pushed the jewels to reduce endshake, tested for backlash, cleaned and oiled the jewels. We made new gravers that will fit into a cross slide and that we can use on our lathes. Also, we got our hands on the schaublin mill, an incredible machine whose job it is to make every other machine sting with envy. Its top speed today was 5000 rpm; we cut brass plates 2.50 mm thick, and I made a blued steel punch for the locating pin holes. I'll be punching the brass plate with that thing to prep it for drilling. Pretty nice that if we need a tool now, we can just whip oneout on the lathe. Last semester wasn't a waste after all, which is good since being into the watches we see how boring it was by comparison scraping and cutting steel all day.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home