A letter from one of our readers in Pavia reopens the discussion on the use of rotors to keep mechanical watches wound.
The question is: "can these devices damage the clock mechanisms over time?".
The answer is not as immediate as you might think and takes up no less than seven columns of our newspaper, which will be on newsstands throughout Italy from Friday (although in some places it will arrive a little later than in the main cities). I will therefore not repeat it in full here. But it is interesting to go into a little more detail here on the issue closely related to this question: that of lubricants. One of the advantages of rotors (such as those produced by Time Box o Underwood), in fact, is to keep the lubricants well distributed within the watch, to the benefit of its smooth running. In this regard, it should be remembered that the lubricants used in a mechanical watch are of many different types, more or less dense depending on the type of friction between the parts (sliding or rolling) and the speed of the components in play. In addition, it should be borne in mind that although great importance is attached in recent times to the lubrication of the escapement, any good watchmaker knows that any anchor escapement works most of its life in almost total absence of lubrication, since oils 'run off' easily and 'fairly quickly' from the fast elements such as the balance, anchor and escape wheel. It is a different matter for components such as the barrel, for example, inside which friction is particularly high, as are the forces at play. In the barrel, therefore, very dense oils are used, which rest longer than others and thus tend to settle in all available crevices, 'fouling' the surfaces and so on...
A solution to barrel lubrication comes today from Denis Flageollet, a talented watchmaker from De Bethune, who in Basel showed us (in the little time available, unfortunately) a device of his that is in the patenting phase and that involves the use of ruby elements inside the barrel itself, to reduce friction and to channel excess oil or grease (and debris) to certain points on the drum.
Another, much more radical solution to the problem of friction and lubrication is that of Jaeger-LeCoultre, which presented the first totally lubricant-free watch at SIHH. The Compressor Extreme Lab employs several materials that are completely new to watchmaking, starting with the escapement, made as light as possible to minimise friction. As for the barrel, the Jaeger-LeCoultre replaced the traditional grease with a graphite powder, which, unlike grease, retains its lubricating properties over a long period of time and under all temperature and humidity conditions. The company has tested the watch at extreme temperatures (-40°/+60°) and found it to work perfectly, as it is independent of changes in lubricant viscosity as the temperature changes.
We will be taking a closer look at the Compressor Extreme Lab and will return to it at length in The Watch.
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