I have an Egin BW Raymond Model 1 key wind with a stop works on the barrel. I was wondering if this is common as I have not encountered one before on an Elgin. Thanks for your input.

Robert, Stopworks were employed on chain drive fusee watches to maintain chain tension at all times (otherwise the chain drive came unhooked and fell apart). Later during the late 19th - early 20th century, without much fanfare Elgin (and other US Watchmakers) included stopworks on a few of their watches to reduce mainspring related isochronism error. Sadly, these stopworks were too often permanently dismantled by service people too lazy to spend a few extra seconds to reassemble those components leaving a fully stopworks equipped watch quite rare. There is some discussion about this and a parts source at;

https://ihc185.infopop.cc/eve/f...=424107913#424107913

If you want to research other IHC185 stopworks discussions with more details click "find or search" next to "new topic" at the top margin, enter stopworks, click go and you will find much much more about this subject.

In another post I discussed a very fine Elgin Stopworks watch not far from yours (probably).

The one I have is a serial number 70197. It is a 15 jewel. It's a nice movement. I am cleaning it as we speak. Database puts it at circa 1871. It has a National Watch Co dial.

That is the grade 69 which began with serial number 101 (the first Elgin made) and was RR grade for the entire 29,154 grade 69 watches made from s/n 101 - 898000.

Please post pictures when you can.

Will do. I will put some on in a day or so. Thanks.

That is way cool....

Thanks for the photos - Dave...

Need to keep my eye out for one of those!

As Dave points out, fusee's must have a stopwork in order to prevent the chain from unwinding off the drum, but (at least the ones I have encountered) they are very different than the maltese cross geneva stopworks in your Elgin. In the fusee as the chain rises on the fusee cone it lifts a finger into the path of a snail shaped cam which stops further winding.

Roger's detailed description of the other stopworks is important, and also I must add that when I "discovered" the amazing family of swiss design cams and related mechanical framuses, these enabled me to add more reliability, versatility and service free performance to the automated machinery I helped design for manufacturing (and sorting) everything from Cassette Tape recorder heads (10,000/day), Hydraulic Valve lifters (30,000/day/machine), Carbide well drilling bit inserts (5500/day), and 5.56mm (m16) cartridges boxed, belted or clipped (12/sec = 44,000/hour).

Even Harley Davidson uses a swiss cam as a shock absorber on the "big twin" crankshaft to connect it via the Primary Chain drive to the transmission.

Dave, this is actually Robert's wife, Barbara, posting this morning. I am hoping you can point me to instructions to assist me in downsizing pictures to post. I also thought you might like to know about the rest of the watch. We knew that it had been a very long time since it had been touched but I was still shocked to find half a dozen or so reddish brown horse hairs in the case springs. Having grew up with horses I have no doubt that is what they are. It also has a liberal coating of what I am sure is coal dust in every nook and cranny. The dust cover ring was still in place also. The case is a great 4 oz Warranted coin silver octagon in great shape. I was set to clean the case last night but stopped when I found the horse hairs. I have been toying with a new camera for a while and I will try to go "Super Macro" today and do some before pictures of the case. Thanks for your help!

Robert/Barbara on your camera you can go to menu and resize or picture quality and set to 640 and you good to go and yes use the super macro setting as well

Barbara, you are a brave person indeed! When I asked Marjorie to help me sort digital camera work all I got was a hard stare!

The picture processing program I use is Picasa, a free download from Google which allows just about everything you can think of to massage digital pictures for use here, family and in my case eBay.

Probably the greatest advantage picasa gives you is to easily adjust the download size to create pictures with <200k size to use here on IHC185 posts and on e-mails.

Picasa handles direct downloads from your camera to your computer and then it can automatically erase the camera memory for you too.

As a failing student of "Windows for dummies", I did learn to use Picasa in an evening of practice.

If you have any questions or want a "walk-through", please contact me at my email david@glopar.com with a phone# and time we can go through it.

Dave, I will download Picasa this afternoon. I have heard of it before. That shouldn't be too bad. The camera is intimidating. I can use regular macro with no problem but I have to set everything manually to use super macro and every time I have tried to read the book that came with it I just got a headache. I need to overcome that anyway. I did get a pretty good picture of a piece of the horsehair with regular macro but I know I can do better. I will work on that this afternoon and get some pictures posted.
Barbara

Barbara, I leave the Gazillion bit stuff to the experts with unlimited time on their hands.

If you have a video camera like my Canon DCRSR62 you can get a fine product using single frame pictures with the video camera in Macro-Zoom mode. (for closeup stuff). The regular pictures are easy just point and shoot.

The following is part of a recent post on this;

Light boxes like the one I use are available all over the web for $40-$90. They include 2 Quartz Halogan lamps and some background choices and even a tripod acessory. The camera I use with mine is a Canon video camera because it includes a remote shutter control and "Macro-Zoom" that allows taking pictures of micro parts with the camera about 4 feet away from the object. The "still" camera can be very effective so long as you learn how to manipulate the "Macro" setting.

Dave,

I figured out how to do everything in Picasa except resize to 200k.

I'm still uploading to Picture Manager to resize.

What do I click on in Picasa to find the resize function?

Thanks,

Pault

Well, I might be figuring it out. Here is one. I will work on some more later. Amazing how complicated I can make something.....

Paul I don't really know what I am doing but I was able to resize when I exported to a file on my computer. I selected a picture and hit the export button at the bottom. There was a sliding button to choose the size. Hope that helps.
Barbara

All,
In Picasa you can click "file", "export picture to folder" and it pops a box where you pick the size. Just remember to look at the folder name and location so you can find the picture after it's all done. (It's also done with "ctrl + shift + S")

Here is a rough picture of the case. I seem to be getting better at this.

Bigger picture of the stopworks.

Rob and Barbara, With that "killer Coin Silver Case, and the full stopworks equipped movement, you have a major collectible!

Regarding Picasa use, the last picture you posted at 144k is well inside the IHC picture bit limit, but it is best to keep it under 100k whenever you can. In the Picasa toolbar at the left end is an icon what looks like an open end wrench. click on that and you have options to crop, straighten, add words, etc., then go to sunshine icon and you can lighten, shade, add color, and brighten and then you can go to the first Xacto knife thing and you will see at the top a "focus" feature which will help you clarify the picture. Play with it. it is fun to learn and gives you very realistic pictures. This is how I "fine tuned" that last picture you posted; (see the short tutorial below)

When you hit Picasa, you will see the camera in the upper left corner, click that and Picasa with autodownload your selected pictures and auto erase only the downloads if you wish. Then when you select a picture to work on, picasa gives you this screen with the toolbar at the left. It is clicked on the wrench icon now;

Then when you are finished cropping and straightening and making notes on the picture, you hit sunshine and get this; (shadowing and some highlighting adds depth to the picture)

Then you click on the Xacto knife (paintbrish?) and the upper left icon is focus. That helps and is adjustable. There are also choices to change to Black & White (nice sometimes) and fiddle with focus and shading.

Than finally you do the upload and choose the picture density and size. Choose your destination, (desktop usually or a folder on desktop) and hit "export". Picasa will report to you the file it is in and the picture size. If it is over 200 (for IHC stuff), re-do it with a lower pixel number . . .

Thank you Dave. I will practice in Picasa and this weekend we will have it back together and I will post some good pictures. It is keeping perfect time right now in a movement holder on the bench. It is one of the most untouched watches we have encountered and we are pretty excited about it.
Barbara