Hi Folks

I seek your advice on the oiling of a cleaned pw.

The books I have looked at and on the net fail to give an idea of oil quantity to apply. They specify oiling in terms of how full you fill the jewel cup. But surely there must be a rule of thumb in terms of number of drops per size of oiler to where you are applying it. I have a black oiler (finest) and a green oiler (medium).

Using an oiler as an indication, how many drops of oil do you apply to various places, like jewels, mainspring etc, using which oiler?

I am using Syntalub 9010 and for the mainspring 9020. Are these the best oils to use?

Gordon

The answer is "very little".

Another way to look at this is: if you can easily see the oil, you've used too much!

For plate jewels without caps: put the smallest amount of oil you can on the tip of the fine oiler, and touch it quickly to the junction between an exposed pivot and the jewel. You may find that you can oil more than one jewel for every dip of the oiler.

For cap jewels, load them with a small amount of oil, and then "push it through" with a very clean, very fine wire so the oil is in contact with the cap jewel.. You can look through the top of the cap jewel and see the puddle of oil as a circle around the hole of the hole jewel. If it's very large, you used too much. If it doesn't center, the jewels are inclined to each other (i.e.: the jewel faces aren't parallel). If you see this, stop right there and correct the situation or you will not be able to bring the watch to time.

The problems with over-oiling include attraction of dust/dirt to the oil and "migration" - the tendency of the oil to move away from where you want it to someplace else, where it doesn't provide any useful lubrication at all.
A small bottle of watch oil lasts a long time.

Gordon
I think Harvey did a great job explaining how to oil a watch..

I have a dvd i bought on ebay a copule of years about the Hamilton watch Factory and one thing they talked about was oiling a watch...at each work station in the assembly room there was 1 drop of oil put in their oil well in the morning and 1 drop after lunch ,don,t know how many watches they put together in a 8 or 10 hour shift but i would think several..

I use a bit of oil on key parts of the winding mechanism. I oil 2 sides of the stem shaft, under a couple of the key screws and where the lever (in a lever-set) contacts other metal parts. The rest gets watch-grease.

I find that I use far more oil in lubricating the wind/set system than I do to oil the jewels and pivots.

Go to https://ihc185.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/frm/f/7576090143 and read the TM9-1575 War Department Technical Manual on watch repair. It is a great free text on watch overhaul. It has a very good section on oiling.

You use several types of oils and grease on a watch. You use watch oil on the pivots. Some use a special escapement oil on the pallets, others use normal watch oil. You use clock oil on the large winding and barrel arbors. Clock oil or mainspring grease on the mainspring and non-migrating grease like KT-22 on all setting springs and setting mechanisms (things that slide over each other).

Don

...Harvey, in my opinion is 'spot on' w/the oiling of balance and plate jewels...I personally use heavier clock oil on the winding setting parts however...Jim

I thought I would add this on the subject of oiling a watch. I borrowed this from John Davis's page called " A Day in Watch School".

"Properly lubricating the power train of a watch is something that really must be learned from experience. While any amount of lubrication, from nearly non-existent to swimming with oil, will probably perform adequately in the short term, the long term performance of a timepiece relies on precisely allocated amounts of lubrication, applied with great precision and scrupulous cleanliness. One of the best ways to see if a pivot has the right amount of oil is to remove the bridge and inspect the underside of the jewel bearing. A clean looking "doughnut" of the appropriate size in the middle of the jewel is a good indicator. The problem being, once the bridge has been removed, the jewel and pivot must be cleaned of any remaining oil before the bridge can be reinstalled and then the pivot can be lubricated again. What this means is, there's no good way to tell if a pivot has the right amount of oil without disassembling it and starting over, so that's what we did; over and over again.

After doing this umpteen times, one begins to understand how much oil on the oiler will translate to a doughnut of the proper size on the jewel and one can confidently leave a bridge in place with the knowledge that the amount of oil around the pivot will protect it for many years without running down the pinion leaves or slopping onto other nearby surfaces. Of course, confidence on the part of the student does not necessarily translate to confidence on the part of the instructor, so oiling was the focus of our first test of the quarter."

I tried to leave the URL to Johns page on my original post,but I couldn't get it to work. I'll leave it here and see if it works this time. If not I give up.
http://www.tp178.com/jd/watch-school/5/article[1a].html

Hi Folks

Thanks one and all. I will follow up the links.

Gordon