Double Flee A

school is dumb

We have a lot more things to know this year, and what with the upcoming AWI certified watchmaker exam in July, it's for the best we get crack-a-lackin' now. A bit of pain signals this shift in how we do things. Last year was like a big party; we made watches and the pace of life was slow and smooth. Now, we have to learn things according not to how they work, but to the Swiss. Let me explain.

There are some things that have to happen in a swiss lever escapement for it to function correctly.

Like when the pallet fork swings all the way to the banking to allow the balance to oscillate, that's the run to banking. Run to banking. Sounds like a verb, right? But translated from the French by a poor English speaker, that becomes a noun, describing an angle. Not too tough, but when there are more of them, like draw and recoil, that do the same thing, one gets rankled.

One is required not to explain a thing's function so that someone could understand it as if one were teaching it, but to regurgitate words that make comparatively little sense in explaining a thing and how it functions. We basically have to spit up the bad French-to-English crap that is a poor simulacrum of the actual reality of the thing and how it functions. If you read my answers to the questions of what draw and run to banking are, and compare them to what I was eventually required to (reluctantly) put down, there isn't one way their answers are better. Pff.

So there's that. We got our first actual nice watches to work on the other day, Rolex 1575s. The finish is better on them than what we've had so far, though there are little devices that make them more challenging. There are stout little clips that hold cap jewels in place that like to be touched just so and only just so, but they're well built enough that you're glad the wheels aren't going to wobble all over the place when you put it back together. I'm going to toss mine in the cleaner when I get in today. There's been some monkeying about with the cleaning solutions and I want to figure out what's what.

Not that I don't like going. It's better than the pharmacy. The power went out at the hospital once when I was there for about ten seconds before the generators kicked in. It was a huge pain and all the computers died, which was a hoot later, but for that short interval deep in the catacombs under the hospital (which is where the pharmacy is) there was that refreshing darkness and silence. Did you ever read the childrens' book "the stupids die"? It was kind of like that.

posted by dale @ 8:52 AM