Hello,
I am very early in my watch repair journey. I was able to succesfully do a full service on a 7S26 movement (would run for a couple seconds and then stop).
However, success came with a bit of turmoil. The balance wheel that came with the 7S26 was beating very slowly (low amplitude) and at an unreliable rate. My first thought was I did a poor job lubricating. However, I went very much on the light side of lubrication. My second thought was to toss in a balance from an NH movement (I have a few of those sitting around) and it started working nicely. 240 amplitude which while not IDEAL was solid for a 10 year old movement with a novice person working on it.
That was working great but the beat error was poor on it. So I adjusted the beat error and everything was fine but then all of sudden it started having the same issue as the last balance. I put the balance back in the NH and it had the same issue which helped me narrow it down to another balance error. With a third NH donor balance it has been working great not for a few hours (I will let it run over night and check again in the morning)
I have two questions:
- How did i screw up the hairspring? i have regulated probably a dozen watches. Never once did I slip and touch the hairspring (to my knowlege). Is this even a hairspring issue?
- I have attached two pictures of both balances (one from the original 7s26 and one from the first donor NH35). Both look like the hairspring is not evenly centered of spaced out. What can cause this? And how do I fix it? I did a little research and folks mentioned playing with the elbow. I want to first make sure that I am actually looking at this correctly and infact the hairspring is no good.
If I need to send better photos let me know. I do not have great means of taking magnified photos.
Thanks in advance for any feedback or help! I also have not posted much on reddit so please do let me now if I am breaking and rules/doing something wrong.
