Lemania is known for their quality engineering. Mostly known for their chronographs, they also have some very nice base movements like this calibre 3000. This watch is running like Dachshund in a dog race, but I’m sure we can change that;)
The watch is ticking, but the Timegrpaher is letting me know it’s not doing very well.
The movement looks to be in good condition besides being dirty.
Here you can see the winding/setting mechanism after removing the dial.
Very straight forward design, here you can see the gear train after removing the wheel bridge.
I notice extensive amounts of wear in the upper barrel arbor pivot hole. This causes two main issues: The most obvious being the ratchet wheel scraping against the bridge when being wound. The second issue is the barrel tilting to such a degree that it hits the centre wheel and seizes the movement completely. This needs to be fixed now before getting any worse.
First step is centring and enlarging the upper barrel pivot hole. I do this by eye using a standard five sided broach.
Secondly I have made bush on the lathe. I make this bush slightly concentric so it gets a snug fit with the hole. I now solder the bush in place rather than punching it. I do this as it minimises the risk of deforming the material and in the future the bush could easily be replaced with heat.
I machine down the bush to create a flush surface.
I now broach the hole from both sides to the size of the barrel arbor pivot, before using a soothing broach for final finish.
I go very slowly to make sure I do not overshoot the hole size until it fit’s nice and snugly with no extensive play.
When I’m happy with the barrel bush I remove the old mainspring.
The movement gets a new shine to it after being though the cleaning machine.
As always I see the balance moves freely when fitting the cap jewels.
Here is a shot of the underside of the new bush.
Here you can see the barrel bridge back in place and there is no more extensive play in the barrel arbor.
Movement almost back together.
Winding/setting mechanism back in place waiting for the dial.
The old varnish on the dial was very flaky. To prevent any of it coming off I have covered the dial with a super thin layer of new varnish binding it all together. When dry it’s almost impossible to tell. I would not clean this dial as I like the patina.
Hands and dial are back on the movement. I replaced the compound on both the dial and hands as the old stuff was coming off by it’s self and did not look very nice.
Now that is considerably better then before!
It is easy to do the mistake of looking at this Timegrapher image and think that this watch now will keep -/+ 2 seconds a day. Closer to the truth is that the watch will keep something around -/+15 seconds a day. The performance will be affected by different positional variations depending on how the watch is sitting. When being worn the watch is exposed to additional G forces and random shocks. The amount of tension in the mainspring also effects the movement’s performance. Most of the time the Timegrapher shots provides us with a pretty good indication of the condition of a movement and how fast it is adjusted.
Now that is a nice looking watch!
I think the patina looks great on this watch.