Watch Cleaning and Repairing

“There is a purely mechanical cause for every vagary, and a search will reveal it.”

Learn to make that search and a stopped watch stops being a mystery. Bernard E. Jones assembled this handbook in 1918 from hundreds of questions answered for readers of the weekly journal Work—written for people teaching themselves at the bench, where no training is assumed and a keen desire to learn is enough.

You will strip, clean and reassemble American, Swiss and English movements, and diagnose what comes across a bench: the watch that stops only when hanging up, the one that stops at the same time every day, the one that stops when shaken.

Fitting a mainspring, putting in a new pivot and curing a watch that gains or loses are set out step by step, with more than seventy figures showing what to look for. Equally valuable is learning to judge which repairs are beyond you for the moment, and better placed with a professional.