Spoonbender sent me some watches. One to fix, and one to keep, from his recent travels abroad. His is a "Breitling", mine is a "Rolex", and they're obviously the same exact movement in different cases. Day/date/24 hour, minute/second/hour. Since these watches are made in somebody's basement in Taipei, they're hard to get parts for, but I'll do what I can.
I have discovered something great. Put your coffee mug on top of your coffee maker and it heats it so you don't wind up screwing up your nice hot coffee pouring it into a cold mug. I imagine the guy (or girl) who thought of hard boiling an egg in his soup and saving dishes and trouble, would have blogged about it, had the internet existed at that time.
Yesterday was a milestone in a watch project I undertook for fun, which was a nearly hopeless eighteen-size Illinois watch company pocketwatch made in 1904, this close
-->.<--
to being useless garbage. After cleaning mounds of gunk out of it, polishing and bluing screws, replacing a roller jewel (locating one was a challenge unto itself) and an upper olive hole jewel on the balance (whose bushing was the wrong size so that I had to put it on the lathe and shape it), and eventual reassembly, I put some power on it and it ran. I thrilled. Now to find hands. The old ones were rusted nubs. If things have lives, this thing is thankful that a student found and fixed it, because no one would have worked on it otherwise; it was too far gone and not worth the time where money is concerned.
I have a Jules Jorgensen from the mid eighteen hundreds waiting to go after this. It's going to be scarier to work on. Far more delicate and totally irreplaceable. No parts exist for this watch, so if I scar something up, it stays that way. I wish I could tell that to the last guy who worked on it, but he's probably dead by now, roasting in watch hell, where hardened screwdrivers skip recklessly across gilded finger-bridges, and plates are bent to change end-shake. I guess you have to do what you can when the proper tools aren't around, but while it's impressive to see brutality that works, it's not the class of work I'm being trained to do.
Today is exam day. We've had our watches all goofed up by our instructor and now we have to get them working again. I remember now the relief I felt when in diving school, after all the hoses were undone and nothing else could go wrong before we started making it work again. There's something about a sigh of relief in that instance that defines the metaphor better than anything else.
I was talking to my benchmate the other day about how I never knew I liked watches, or small things, but I knew I hated everything else.
Here's something I made to illustrate the relationship between that which is felt, and that which is real, for all those people (isopraxic lame-brain dimwits) who don't know there is a difference:
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