Lord Elgin 770
I recently purchased what I thought would be a fun project on ebay. The seller couldn't find it after I paid for it so they refunded me the purchase price and gifted me a Lord Elgin 770 as a "sorry about that" along with another movement that I will crack open later. I wanted to get into this Elgin sooner than later because it has water damage and well... it's not good.
At first I thought I was going to save it but at this point its more about finding a donor movement with better guts. I will say that I did manage to save the balance and a number of the gear train but the destruction is pretty extensive. There is a screw in the keyless works that is fused to the plate, I destroyed several screw driver tips trying to get it loose. The barrel arbor is toast, the bottom of it was fused to the main plate. No idea if the mainspring is salvageable that would be nice. Some of the gems will become spares and what not. I'll post up pictures of what it looks like once I get the gear train separated from the center section. The stem, and keyless works, clutch and all are pretty well toast. I soaked it in rust remover, 2 trips to the ultrasonic cleaner and a lot of the schmutz is gone but that just revealed more cancer and missing teeth and other damage.
At this point I'm looking for a donor movement. There are a few on ebay, I went a little nuts the other day and bought a couple lady's Omega's with 48x movements because I murdered my 484 but that's a post for another day. Suffice it to say, ladies movements are frickin insanely small. I thought the pallet fork was in and slowly tightened the little bridge down that holds it and *crunch* pivot smashed :( If you have never taken apart a movement of this size, I don't know if you can appreciate the smallness. We're talking stuff so small that fleas be like "it's too small I can't see it..." like screws half the size of a sesame seed. Like impossibly small. The 484 makes the bigger mens size movements feel massive in comparison.
Anyhow, that's all for today. Happy New Years! I hope to turn over a new leaf this year and actually post more stuff.