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Regulating a Vintage Chinese Watch Movement

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On a previous post i presented a graph about my watches movements performances. One of them was a ZJS Chinese movement that i found, three years ago, inside a fake 'Rene Valentine' mechanical watch. It was forgotten in my father's old stuff for many years ( probably since late 80's ) though it start running again when i winded it. The watch case condition is very bad and the performance of the movement was very disappointing (+83 sec/day). Though, recently i realized that most of these watch 'engines' features an accelerator! So i decided to take this 'old Chinese gentleman' for a ride...
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Over the balance wheel of the movement there was marks ( + - ) and two adjustment arms isochronism and regulator. It's strongly recommended to Not move the isochronism arm and only adjust the regulator in + or - direction. This will speedup or slowdown the watch! These arms are very sensitive and at the beginning of my adjustments the watch got 'crazy'. I was manually calculating and observing the watch performance by using the atomic watch application. After some time and several very small adjustments i managed to 'drive' this thing more 'smoothly' and noticed that the line angle on my graph became more horizontal. There i decided to stop the regulation and let the movement run again for a 24 hour test...
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Next day after the adjustments i observed the ZJS speed again and realized that my operation was successful! The movement's performance improved from +83 to +8 sec/day and this is a quite good accuracy level. What i like in this watch is the age, the size ( 36 mm ) and the style of it's dial & hands. So my next mission will be to find a new suitable case for it and turn it into my 'weird' Vintage watch! Keep in mind that this was almost a 'garbage' so not a big risk for me to experiment with it. There are professionals that can regulate your watches in a safe way and much faster than i did but well... That was a fun ride :)
(Edited)
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It's a great feeling of accomplishment when you get an old watch to work correctly again. Years ago when I began my watch hobby, I would time watches using the exact technique you describe here. With a good time reference, patience, and a steady hand, you can actually regulate a watch incredibly well unaided. A piezo pickup with a simple amplification stage and a bit of computer software can help you time a watch on the cheap. That was my next step when I built this thing:
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It cost around $30 in parts and "worked". (Though I foolishly one time had this in my luggage and it caused a bit of a stir with the TSA.) I believe today you could accomplish the same much more easily with a mobile app. Eventually you might cave in like I did and buy a timeographer for the convenience. The Chinese models are actually pretty good and not too deep of a pocket, and have an input which is useful if you have a stable reference. I started mostly on Russian and Chinese movements. They tend to be very cheap on eBay, so it's good to experiment. But fix enough of them, and suddenly you've got more perfectly amazing Poljots, Molnijas, Raketas than you can shake a stick at. Incidentally, your ZJS looks to be one of the first or second generation heirs to the Chinese Standard movement. Enjoy it, it's a piece of history!
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nsdesign
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Nov 21, 2019
leopadronThank you! Very interesting information, impressive what you did with the pickup.
RayF
22210
Oct 22, 2019
Excellent work, I'm sending you all my Rolexs' to you for their annual tune up!
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