Re Studding a Watch Hairspring

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hey folks, welcome to my channel. Please subscribe. Please hit like. Sorry, I'm pretty slow on watch making. It is the summer and I'm very busy with work, so things have slowed down considerably.

[00:00:10]So, I'm going to have a look at Wayne 2's watch again today. I'm waiting for a jewel for Wayne one's watch. When that jewel comes in or gold, Jerry, that should fix the problem. I'll be able to reassemble that. I also got the watch from Grant.

[00:00:28]Grant's watch is here and I have to take it out of the box and start doing some work on this watch. So, I have to shout out to Grant. I've got your watch and I'm not taking any other watches right now and probably until September unless I can completely empty the bench. Right.

[00:00:48]So this device you're looking at here, the BJO 3007 is made, as you can see kind of from the diagram here, it for it's made for holding the stud on a hairspr. It's actually made for reducing the stud size down on a hairspr. And that's the center collet I'm talking about. So, but I'm going to use it for actually holding the stud, not the collet. So, what you typically do is you put the collet in one of these holes and then you slowly collapse this down like that and it squishes the collet kind of uniformly which allows the collet to have more grip on the balance staff. So, that's a pretty cool device. I've got it I bought this long time ago. They're not cheap.

[00:01:34]They cost like 300 bucks just for this giant chunk of metal. I think you can get the same thing from China for a whole lot less. So, what I'm going to do today, this watch I have here is running perfectly, except it's not running fast enough. And I've already taken the meantime screws and moved them in, and it still didn't allow this watch to run fast enough. Um, and this is a vintage South Bend, I believe. Let me have a look. See if I can read this with the camera here. Can you see Southbend? I think I can. Southbend adjusted.

[00:02:11]South. Come on, South Bend.

[00:02:16]Oh man, that gold lettering makes it so difficult to read. So difficult. It's impossible. Anyway, it is a vintage South Ben.

[00:02:29]I can sort of see it.

[00:02:31]I wish they wouldn't have uh wouldn't have put that crap in there.

[00:02:38]Let me get my glasses out and have a closer look at this just so I can be sure I got the right watch here. But this is Wayne 2's watch running with a really strong amplitude. Um, no issue there. Everything's perfect. And wouldn't you know, it can't run fast enough and I thought I had it all fixed and stuff. I think I might have replaced the balance staff on this. I can't remember anymore. It's been too long.

[00:03:03]So, safety pinion adjusted to temperature in five positions.

[00:03:10]South Ben Watch Company. So, it says Southbend Watch Company right here. You can barely see it. I'm not sure how the hell you can see it, but I looked up close.

[00:03:22]Southbend Watch Company. So, that's the Southbend watch. And here are the fixings for it. There's the dial and the case and everything else all ready to be reassembled. This watch was was ready to go. And now I got to strip it apart to get the main spring off it or the hair spring off of it and see if I can reduce the size of that hair spring. I just want to bring it back a bit from the stud. This is a recommendation from a friend of mine who said, "Well, why don't you just take that stud and move the hairspring back a bit?" I'm I'm gonna try to capture the hair the stud in this device here and then take the whole lot under the microscope and see if I can actually remove the pin that's holding this hairspr in place and then slide the hair spring back and put the pin back. This is I don't know whether this will work or not, but I've tried everything else. Not sure what to do here. Um the the thing that pisses me off with this watch is that its amplitude is really good. Um, it's just running too too slow. So, it needs to speed up. It's like minus minus 250 or something like that and I can't speed it up. The other thing is I saw I thought I saw one of the screws here on the balance being bigger than its opposite screw and that might be a problem. But, but why would that be like uh and so you could undercut the screw to remove weight from the screws? That might be a bit more difficult and then you're taking it out of poise. That might be another problem. But once I get the hair spring off the watch, I can check the poise of the watch as well. So I can check check the poise of the balance, which is like balancing your car tires.

[00:04:58]So we're gonna It's like when you rotate a car tire and you decide which part of that car tire needs a weight on it to make sure the the balance of the of the car tire is absolutely uniform um in all positions. You do the exact same thing with a poisoning tool and a pocket wash.

[00:05:17]So, first of all, I'm going to remove the uh balance. And I'm going to do it in an unusual way for me. I'm going to actually unscrew it from the side here and then poke the stud down so I can safely remove the balance So, let's get at that work. So, this should be pretty simple. Um, a shout out to Wayne one, a shout out to Wayne 2, and a shout out to Mark from Australia who who um has helped me quite a few times. He told me that that the technique for shellacking up the jewel.

[00:05:54]He sent me a video that I should look at to help with the technique for shellacking up the jewel. So there, the stud is out. Um, but now when I lift this, I'm gonna have to lift it and poke the stud a bit more, I think, because the stud just doesn't drop all the way out.

[00:06:12]So, um, but it but I had shellaced that jewel on and I lost the damn jewel. That was one of my jewels. So, I'm down a jewel. I think it was a 18032 and I needed a 17032.

[00:06:28]I ordered a new jewel. There's the uh screw. Get that out of the way. I order her ordered a new jewel and it should be coming uh within a week, I think, is probably good.

[00:06:41]Trying to be careful here. Now, what I'm going to do is lift this up a bit and then poke the stud down on the stud so it comes out because these studs never come all the way out unless you do that. There we go.

[00:06:54]So, there's the balance here.

[00:06:57]And now I've got the balance here. And I'm just going to rest this on a piece of rodico.

[00:07:01]This is an old piece of rodico. A piece of old rodico.

[00:07:06]Yeah, my watch work has slowed down. I'm really sorry to some folks out there when I'm doing watch repair on Wayne one, I think, has got a lot more watches for me to do, but it is the summertime and and I want to and this is a hobby, so I want to take time with my family and my boat and other things in the summer. and not in Canada, you only get a short period of time to have a summer.

[00:07:29]So, you got to take advantage of that time and I want to do that. So, here's the here's the balance here and the balance spring. So, the theory here is that I'll be able to unstud this this here.

[00:07:47]Um, but before I put this back in, I'm going to mark going to put a little mark on the balance where the stud is facing so I can put the put this back relatively in the same position.

[00:08:00]So, I'll take my little marker out here.

[00:08:02]And it's just kind of at the end here.

[00:08:12]There we go. Small red mark. Later on, I'll go, wonder what this little red mark is for, you So, what I want to do now is remove the hairspring.

[00:08:26]And I'll show you the poise on this to see if there's any poise issue here. So, to remove the hair spring carefully, I've got a block here I like to use and fit that in there.

[00:08:40]And I want to make sure it's as tight as it can be. So, move it over a bit here.

[00:08:44]move it over one and that should flatten it out. There you go.

[00:08:48]And then what I do, this is my technique. I'm not sure if other watch makers do that, but what I do is I carefully take my um let me move this watch out of the way here.

[00:08:59]Carefully take my screwdrivers and tuck them in underneath the um the hair spring. Now, if you recall a couple of videos ago, I actually demagnetized all my screwdrivers, which is recommended cuz they were magnetized, and that is not a good thing. So, there we go. And you just you put them in like this, and you rotate them in the opposite direction, and the stud the collet will pop up from there. And I've got the hair spring out. Let me just grab that quickly.

[00:09:33]There's the hair spring here. And I'll put that aside.

[00:09:38]I'm just going to put it on on this little piece of foam here that I have.

[00:09:43]And then the balance. And I'm just going to check the poise, this balance for 5 seconds here. See if I have a poisoning issue on this. So this little tool here is the undercutter tool. And so you put the screw drops in there. And there's little little sharp teeth here. And when you rotate that screw that under that takes material off the balance screw.

[00:10:06]It's for undercutting. And usually there's one size on one side and another size on the other side. I have other undercutters too, but that was in the same box as the poisoning tool. So put that back in the box.

[00:10:20]Back in the box reminds Jack in the box.

[00:10:22]So So I've got my poisoning tool here.

[00:10:26]Move everything out of the way. I've learned that. What I haven't learned is how not to drop jewels on the carpet.

[00:10:32]So, somebody said, "Use an ultraviolet light. You'll be able to find the jewel." Yeah, right. I It was kind of a an iffy kind of thing. Anyway, so I was never sure whether it would really work.

[00:10:45]I've got another balance here, too, that my wife found. And here it is here. And I wonder if that's the same size as this balance. Probably not. Now, it's smaller. It's for some other watch. Not sure what watch it is, but anyway, I'll keep that aside for future use. So, in the poisoning tool, there's a a ball here which tells you whether it's level or not, but the ball this ball and the liquid have long past gone. I think you unscrew that, you put a little liquid inside there. You can use oil and then the bubble forms. H there is a bubble in there. I move it a little bit. I can see the bubble moving.

[00:11:25]Yeah. So there has to be oil in there right now for that bubble. And that that's just that's to balance this out.

[00:11:32]So it's perfectly balanced. But failing that, I'm just going to put this on the poisoning tool here. And what you do is you ride the balance on the poisoning tool. Now, to be fair, do I poise it with the uh I'm going to poise it with the uh balance the uh let me just lay this down for a second here.

[00:12:01]Okay, I got to widen this up a bit because it should be just on the pivots.

[00:12:14]There we go. So, it's moving already.

[00:12:16]Now, you get a puffer out.

[00:12:21]The art of poisoning. So, so you want to make sure this thing is relatively level.

[00:12:31]Like this is parallel with the with the ruby jaws of the poisoning tool. Right?

[00:12:36]So that when I puff it like that, it's going to go it's going to stop at the heaviest point.

[00:12:44]Um, and that seems to be the heaviest point. And then you make a note of what that heavy point is. And I've got to I got to puff this baby again here. Hang on. Let me just move this up. And if you don't know me very well, I've got long fingernails because I play guitar.

[00:13:01]That's the only reason. I've had them since I was a kid. So, if I look at what I've got here, the lightest point is this point here.

[00:13:14]And let me see.

[00:13:18]Yeah, it's not where the red mark is where I marked it earlier. So, the red mark is facing down. So, if I roll that forward now, that's stopped in a different position.

[00:13:38]Now, just because I'm anal retentive, I'm gonna raise this leg up a bit.

[00:13:50]You're never sure whether it's the leveling of the poisoning tool or if it's the balance itself.

[00:13:59]Okay, here it went sideways, so it's not going to work when it does that.

[00:14:09]Now it's stopping in a different position.

[00:14:13]It's kind of down like this again. So I'm really curious whether it's where that red mark is. I'm going to lift it up here and have a peek because the heavy point.

[00:14:26]Yeah, it is. So the heavy point is right here.

[00:14:30]That's the heavy point of the bounce. If I look at the balance, then what I would typically do is remove some material from this screw here.

[00:14:47]It's funny though because this screw that supposedly is the heavy point, but if I look on the other side, it looks like the screw on there is just slightly bigger. But that doesn't mean it's heavier. It depend depends on how the thing is constructed.

[00:15:04]So the poise isn't too bad. It's uh you put that back on again.

[00:15:15]On again, off again, and squirt that for a little bit of air and see where it stops.

[00:15:39]No, it seems to be stopping in the exact same place. So, one solution here is to take the meantime screw and move it out slightly.

[00:15:52]And that will make it a little heavier on that side than the other side for poisoning. So, because the meantime screws are both screwed in pretty tight, like they're pretty pretty uh far in.

[00:16:05]So, you can take this meantime screw and move it out like half a turn or like that and then drop it back in here.

[00:16:35]See if that helped at all.

[00:16:41]Um, actually think it did.

[00:17:04]This thing is continuing to roll, which is interesting. So, it's uh just squirt that a bit like that.

[00:17:26]Yeah, that's uh a lot better.

[00:17:36]Yeah, I believe that's a hell of a lot better from a poisoning perspective.

[00:17:55]Yeah, you can tell how smoothly it's moving here.

[00:17:59]Still stopping in the same place. So, I could take that meantime screw and move it out just a bit more. But first, I'm going to see if I can fix this hair spring. It's not stopping at exactly the same place, though, is it?

[00:18:11]No, it's not.

[00:18:15]So, that that might be good enough from a poisoning perspective.

[00:18:21]The art of poison. So, let me take this off here.

[00:18:26]Put that on the stuff. And that's it for poisoning. All right. So, now I've got to take this um this device here and capture the hairspring collet um on the inside of that. I'm not sure if that'll work actually, but we'll see.

[00:18:43]There's a lot of I'm not sure today, I think, because this hair spring, this is the hair spring that I want to adjust.

[00:18:53]I want to adjust like take this out like depring over just a bit, but it looks like it's so finalized when I look at this hair spring.

[00:19:07]Doesn't look like I can actually remove the thing.

[00:19:11]So the idea is if I turn this upside down and pinch it right, pinch this inside this device, will will it allow me to adjust the uh the stud.

[00:19:28]So there, that's in there now. And I'm just going to pinch it ever so slightly. So now I've got the hair springs kind of just sitting there.

[00:19:38]Um, now the question is, can I get access to the very small pin that's in there?

[00:19:48]Like, I'm not absolutely sure if I can get access to that.

[00:19:52]Just to move that hair spring in a bit.

[00:19:55]If I can remove that hair spring in a bit, then there's a small chance of being me being able to adjust the uh the speed of the that's provided by the hairspring.

[00:20:08]So, let me just see if I can move that up a bit. Not sure if this is this is probably too too big to me it upward here right now.

[00:20:32]Let me see what other device do I have that's even thinner than this. I don't think my thinnest screwdriver will work.

[00:20:40]Although it is pretty darn thin, isn't it? Oh, yeah, it is. So, that works. So, I can push that up a bit.

[00:20:47]Which gives me a little more real estate to work with, if you want to call it real estate.

[00:20:57]And now I'm squeezing that in nice and tight.

[00:21:01]And now I can see see the uh the studded hair spring here. So, I I think I'm going to have to bring out the microscope camera to show you what I got here.

[00:21:14]So, I have the stud of the hairspring chucked up inside the Burgon 3007 device. Great device for holding that stud in place, for removing the hair spring first and then replacing the uh the pin that was in there and lengthening it just a bit.

[00:21:35]Here's a side view. And here's the stud chucked up in the 3007 tool. All right, there's a closeup of the stud on the hair spring that needs to be adjusted. Um, I just realized that somehow the audio was off on this and hopefully I don't have to overdub, but the audio is back on again.

[00:21:56]But that's the hairspring stud. There's a my smallest screwdriver pointing at it right there. So that's it right there.

[00:22:04]right there. And somehow, and I am not sure how, I've got to unstud this and then move this hair spring up ever so slightly so that it can adjust the speed that the hairspr is producing. So, I want to speed up this watch. So, I want to shorten the hair spring. And there's the hair spring going into the uh the stud from the other side. And there's just a small anchor that keeps that in place. So, I'm just curious, can I push that out? Is that am I able to push that out to move that hairspr? And I know that the hairspring has almost no u no volume on the other side of that stud. So, if I push it out a bit, I can measure how far it is. I'm not sure how far. So, this is going to be a bit of trial and error. But I also know how far the regulator pins move um on the watch.

[00:22:55]So, these regulator pins uh that are on the balance uh don't move very much to actually effectively speed up or slow down the watch. So, the hair spring would not have to move that much.

[00:23:10]And that's another angle of the hairr going into that stud on the watch. And I again I got to see how I can get that the pin out of there to move that hair spring over. So, that's going to be done under a microscope. I can't actually show you how I'm doing that because I can't I've got a portable microscope here, but I need to get into my uh my actual uh stereoscopic microscope to give me depth as I'm doing this.

[00:23:38]So, as you can see, I successfully successfully pushed the stud out. And now I've got the hair spring here with no stud.

[00:23:48]But I have the stud still captured.

[00:23:51]The stud is still captured. I'm going to try to move this over and see if it will actually focus.

[00:23:58]Still captured on this device here. So, there we go. So, now I know this the hair spring goes into the stud um in this direction here. So, the flat part has to be on this side. It goes in this way. So, I have to put the hairspring back in and then get a very small copper, probably copper stud and push that in place to keep the hair spring in place, but allow the hair spring to ride out ever so slightly.

[00:24:27]That's going to be some tricky ass work, let me tell you.

[00:24:32]Under the microscope. And I use this very small sewing needle that I had, right? And I clamped that up like this.

[00:24:43]to enable me to push that stud out. So now, as you may be able to see, the hair spring is now inside the stud. Let me just see if I can focus downward here.

[00:24:55]There we go.

[00:24:57]So, the hair spring is inside the stud there. And yeah, so there's a small length of hairspring protruding out right here.

[00:25:08]And I'm going to assume that's enough.

[00:25:11]And now I've got to get a uh a small piece of brass to stake this hair spring inside the stud. See if I can do that.

[00:25:23]So in this container, this vial cked off. I have a whole shitload of pins that I could use to stud that. So I've got to pin it, stud it, and cut it. So we'll see if I can do that. I need to do that under a microscope. I can't do that um with eyeglasses on. So now I have it pinned in there and I've got to remove the leftover. I can't have this giant chunk of metal. So I got to snip it off on at least one side. So just so it doesn't interfere with the operation of the watch.

[00:26:03]So now I've got the hair spring repinned and it's shorter by just a bit.

[00:26:10]I'm going to reassemble this and see what it does with respect to the amplitude.

[00:26:16]So I think I'll end this video at this point because I've actually successfully moved the hair spring out just slightly.

[00:26:22]So I've shortened the hair spring. I've recalleted u the hair spring. So, I put the collet back in and I used um these very small I think they're brass pins to to pin up that hair spring inside. So, that was successful. Then, I cut off all the extras. So, all I really need to do now is reassemble it and test the watch and see if it gave me a great improvement. But, you see how I did that. And the thing was this tool that I have right here was really useful in holding all this in place while I was doing that. It held it steady while I was doing that job. So, so anyway, MJD, please um subscribe to my videos and hope you like them. Give me some comments if you want and I'll let you know whether I was successful or not.