Earl M. a good friend and local IHC185'er has taught himself to dis-assemble clean and restore most American-made Pocket watches. To that end, he has visited with me from time to time with an issue to see what I would do about it. Last week Earl brought over an early Russian made (copy) Swiss type pocket watch that had him completely over a barrel as far as where the wind and set stuff goes. This was due to Earl's inexperience with the Swiss Stem Locking system that they used from the 19th Century which was finally copied by Elgin in a baffling and useless fashion for the Elgin 57X series of their last 16s runs.

Previously, when working on a watch at my shop (in the learning stages) where the wind and set was not clear to him, I showed Earl some basic pictures that I had taken in my early days of “watching” BEFORE removing the parts from the watch.

In this case, Earl and I played the "parts shuffle" for about 3 minutes and got the parts back in. Then I took a couple pictures and gave them to Earl so that would be less likely to happen in the future.

What I am saying, if you gotta take it apart, Take some pictures first. Something about pictures and thousand words . . . .

Dave - I took my digital camera with me to the FSW301 class like you suggested. Unfortunately, something went wrong with it and I was only able to get one picture taken before it gave up. That one picture was of great help, but I wish I had been able to take more.

Taking pictures is a great idea as there are so many movement variations!