Per some requests, I did a photo group of the process I have for resoldering the seconds bit to a dial. First and foremost I am still not perfect at this and keep attempting it every once in a while to hone in the skills of it. This is all freehand work, so practice makes perfect. Here is a picture of the main tools I use. I have been using tix solder as it is a low temp solder and melts fairly easily. yes that is a butane torch in the picture. way more than enough heat for the job.

First, I went ahead and grabbed a spare hamilton dial I had for doing this representation. figured no one would miss an old hammie dial anyways . As you can see the seconds area is seperated from the main dial.

Here is the back of the dial.

Please note the buildup of solder on the edge of the seconds bit. This must be removed for good soldering of it.

Crud Removal- The part of the dial that will be soldered is the thin copper plate thru the middle. You will need to take a sharp knife such as an exacto and remove as much debris out from the copper center plate. The more surface of the plate you have showing, the better the solder will hold. Here is a picture after removing as much of it as I felt I could. **Please note this is the hardest part of the process in my opinion. you are working right against the backside of the porcelain you see on the front of the dial, so one hard hit or slip and you could take a chip out of the dial**. Taking time and only little bits at a time is very important to success on this.

Here is the pic of the seconds bit. I used a file angle towards the backside of the bit to remove most of the crud exposing a good amount of the copper plate.

Next you must line up the second bit in the opening of the dial. this is somewhat difficult to do. you have to hold it in the air and get it centered in the opening, then turn it to where the the seconds are in the correct location for the dial. After that its set back down on the plate ready for the next step.

Next step is flux. Tix solder have a liquid flux that works very well for this. A lot of other flux are tacky and can accidently move the bit as you are trying to put the flux on. A lot less chance of this with the tix flux since it is less tacky and more liquidy.

Now on to the solder itself. My tix comes in little pieces about 2" long. perfect for this application.

Next I try to find something as close tot he same diameter of the piece I am soldering in. In this case I found a sharpie marker looked to be pretty close. You then wind the solder around the item.

Here is a shot after I have wound it around the sharpie.

Next take a side cutter and clip right through the ring area in one spot, leaving you a ring of solder.

and as luck would have it the ring of solder fits very well on top of the seconds bit I will be soldering. It basically helps put the solder where it needs to be.

Next is the soldering itself. Since I use a butane torch that can get very hot. I actually do circles above the solder and watch it very carefully. It will start to settle in as it gets hot and melts in. if you get it too hot with either direct heat or indirect heat it will shrink into a half dozen little puddles or so and leave you not happy.... again this part will take a lot of practice. you will see I got it a little hot on the left side and it started to puddle on me a little bit.

I missed a little spot on the left side. Not to worry, a little tiny chunk in there and a little heat in the one area and we are good to go. Here is a pic of the little piece added.

and the after shot of soldering the little piece.

and last but not least, the solder will have a rounded shape that sticks out above the backside of the dial. this will need to be removed. I use a small flat file (shown in the first pic) and run it at different angles across the top until it is basically filed flat witht he back of the dial. Here is a shot after this has been done.

And there you have it folks, a repaired dial. If you are wanting to try this, I would suggest buying a lot of old damaged dials off ebay for 1-2 bucks per dial and have a hack at it. I would not work on good dials until you have practiced on cheap ones and feel comfortable doing it on higher end dials. If anyone has any other input on this, it was be great to hear. The last time I posted on this David Abbe suggested using two different temp solders for a double sunk dial so you could do each part individually without effecting the other. I am going to try this one of these days and will post the results.

Jared

Nice job! Excellent presentation. Think I might try this when I need to. Have you ever got it too hot and damaged the porcelain?

Dave-

I have gotten it too hot before and done this. It hasn't exploded or done anything radical, but when I was first trying this I was heating up the main plate figuring the solder would draw towards the heat just like when soldering copper water lines you heat the opposite side of where you are applying the solder. no such luck. the solder would end up just beading into little balls around where it was put. The heating I was doing to the plate to get it hot enough to melt the solder was causing the dial to expand unevenly and caused new cracks to show up and made some old cracks even more visible. This is part of the reason I haven't tried this on really nice dials as of yet. I have gone to doing a circular motion with the torch above the solder area and just slowly getting the heat closer little by little to the solder until I can see it kind of sink (or settle) into the groove. There is a fine line between it melting into it and it beading. The dial does get hot, but not to the extent it was before. The illinois dial did very well and I found no new damage of any sort when I did it. same with the hamilton dial I did this presentation with. It was already heavily damaged but I saw no new damage. again, i seemed to do more damage trying to clean the crud off the edges of the plaes where i was soldering more than anything. The porcelain is fragile and thin and it seemed like every ther one I was working on I would accidently take a chip out f here or there. Again these were all dials like this hamilton already, so not a big loss but helped me understand what the critical steps were to get a good finished product in the end.

Jared

Well done Jared, I doubt we could find many who have made the effort to develop this skill.

Interesting post Jared I wondered how it was done since I can usually solder copper pipes pretty well. Glad I saw this before trying it as I would have probably applied to much heat and tried to feed the solder as you do normally.

I am concerned about the amount of heat used on the ceramic dials and the possibility of the dial cracking from the heating and then cooling. Wouldnt it be better to use an electric soldering iron with an adjustable temperature control? I know they are available as I once used them to make stained glass windows.
I also have a suggestion, as you are lining up the sub dial you could perhaps take the sharpie and just make a line across the sub dial and the main dial on the back so that you can tell if the little sub dial moves before its soldered.

It makes sense that soldering copper pipes would be a lot different than dials. Copper is an excellent conductor of heat, whereas the porcelain of the dial main plate is an insulator, so heating the dial will produce very spotty results, as you have found.

When you expose the copper backing plate of the dial pieces to be joined and place the solder on top of that and apply heat to the solder, you'll get a good soldered joint to the copper.

Jim-

Thanks for your comments and these are the types of things I was hoping to hear from everyone for new ideas on how to do this. I agree the heat being put on a dial may cause some issues. I like the sharpie idea a lot as that would help with lining it up or making sure it didn't move after flipping it over. I honesty did try to do this with a soldering iron first (please note not a variable temp one). I ran into 2 problems major problems for me with it.

The first was that the solder doesn't want to flow into the groove well, so every thime I tried to run it into the location I was heating with the solder gun, it would get too hot at that one point and the solder would bead up. It would hold for that one spot fine after removing the solder gun, but as soon as you would try to keep soldering beside that bead, the bead would flow into the new area where I would try to solder. I even tried to do a pattern as to give the last spot I did time to cool down without any help. A variable temp solder may be able to counter this issue and be able to do as Rob described just solder your way around it.

The second problem with the soldering gun I had was I could never be steady enough to touch the seconds bit/ main dial area and not accidently move one part or the other before getting the area hot enough to solder it. These sinks in the dial don't fit snug into eachother or any thing, they more just sit on top of eachother. Even the tiniest of a accidental touch or movement with the soldering gun and I would have to stop and re-align everything. This is one problem I was able to overcome by using the torch setup as I have shown.

Another thing to remember is that the Tix solder has a very low melting point of 275 degrees F. Since most of these dials were made by being fired at temps of 1,500 degrees or more multiple times usually. They have already been exposed to a lot higher heat at some point in their lives without acquiring cracks from contraction from those high heatings. Granted that was 100 years or more ago too...

Let's be honest, if you're having to do this kind of repair to a dial, chances are there is probably already a big chunk missing someplace and if you are able to remove the bad section from one dial and add a better section from another, its going to look a lot better than it did before even if it acquires a hairline or two in the process. The dial is basically worthless before and you are now at least making one worth using now. If you are attempting to make a perfect, flawless dial somehow, I would not suggest this, just go buy one. If you are trying to make a couple shot dials into at elast a usable dial, this process can does this.

as always this is a learning process so I am always open to ideas and/or suggestions

Jared

Ed-

To your comments you are correct. If the copper isn't exposed, the solder doesn't seem to hold very well at all with very mixed results...

Jared

Jared thank you very much for the explanation. I have tried soldering with bad results and I will now try it the Jared way. I seem to remember an old jeweler telling me that when they made dials or repaired dials they had irons with circles on the business end that were kept hot and pressed down on solder circles. Of course he may have been having fun with a 16 year old who had a lot of questions! Does anyone know of a liquid crud cleaner that might help remove the old solder?

Jared, that's a great tutorial!...thanks for the well put together demo!

Tom

Jared,
I wonder if something like this would work? I got this little soldering iron thing from a vinyl repair kit. The head on it is a little smaller than a quarter.. Do you know what temp your flux / solder melts at? I can turn this thing on and see if I can get a temp read out (dont tell my wife Ill be using her meat thermometer).. This would give even heat.. Let me know.. If you wanna try it, Ill send it out.. It will cost you a seconds bit fix to be named later

Well, I turned it on, but it never got hot enough to melt some wire solder... I'm thinking, if you could weld this tip onto a regular soldering iron.. That may work... Sounds like a lot of work, when you already have a great way of doing it already...

Jared,
You just moved to the top of my opinion scale. Thank you. You are an asset to the club.

Vince