A cracking English watch By Rotherham.

I rarely buy in solid gold watches at auction as they are impossible to value accurately without close examination and are very high risk but I suspected this was by Rotherham and I was right!

It is a fairly rare survivor because although for such a premium English movement a reasonable number were made to be sold into the trade (particularly to J.W. Benson), a large number have been broken up for scrap, mainly I suspect because as a size 12 they were popular in a solid gold case such as this.

 Despite being made in 1925 it is a true English Lever and has 19 jewels.

A classic English watch.

 

Hamilton 992B

Fortunately, with English watches are in very short supply, I can still get some premium American watches, this is a fairly late Hamilton 992B 21J Railroad watch from 1949.

SOLD OUT!

Well, sold out of English watches, it is the first time it has happened. Decent ones are really hard to come by at the moment although hopefully I will have one or two shortly, one of which looks very special :).

Important information for Customers outside of the UK.

From 1st April 2014 the recently privatised Royal Mail withdrew their international "AirSure" service, the means that the maximum insurance available through the mail is now £250. Fully insured postage over that value is now very expensive (e.g. £70 to Japan!) full details and options available are on the web site.

UK customers are unaffected, their watches will continue to be shipped by RM Special Deliver, fully insured.

Waltham Colonial Riverside, 21J, 1936

Another excellent size 12 Waltham, this time a "Colonial Riverside" with 21 Jewels including the mainspring barrel.

The Swiss Lever escapement has a Breguet Sprung screwed balance with double roller, the hairspring appears to be elenvar to reduce temperature variation and the movement is adjusted for temperature. The serial number dates it to 1936.

The Colonial movement is particularly slim and in its case is only 0.4" / 1cm thick.

A perfect watch to wear with evening dress or military mess dress but equally suitable for day to day wear.

J.W. Benson "Ludgate" 1886, which had an interesting repair.

The is the top grade watch made by J.W. Benson at their Ludgate Hill factory in London, hence the branding "The Ludgate".

It was in a sorry state when it arrived and needed quite a bit of TLC to get it back into good condition including  fitting a new mainspring,  finding and fitting a replacement setting arbor (the time could not be set), a few adjustments, a lot of cleaning and the removal of a previous repair which is the subject of this post.

The movement has a true English Lever escapement with an over-sprung cut-compensating balance and 13 jewels. From the picture you can see the patented ring that sits between the case and the movement and which hold the dust cover.

After opening it up I found that some serious damage had occurred

in the past. The picture to the right shows the under-dial as it is now, after I removed and made good the previous repair.

Notice the large gear too the right is pinned to its "shaft" which is in fact the mainspring arbor, the winding key is applied to the other end of the small gear wheel which turns the larger gear which winds the spring, this is done so that the watch can be wound anti-clockwise as was normal for the Fusee watches still then in production (just).

At some point in its career, probably pre war by the condition of the watch,  the mainspring winding arbor had broken, probably by a watch repairer trying to lever off the gearwheel when the retaining pin had stuck in - that will work with the brass pins most people use but not with a steel pin, finding one of those is bad news as they will rust and jamb.

To rescue the watch he then had a lot of work to do, probably to avoid a difficult conversation with his customer! And its because of this sort of potential problem that I do not do work on other peoples watches.

After grinding the broken end of the arbour flat but leaving just enough of the square shoulder to locate the gear on the arbor, he drilled into the end of the  arbor - a tricky operations as the small hole is over half the diameter of the arbour, tapped it and then screwed the gear to the arbour as shown.

I was very tempted to leave this repair but the attachment was a little precarious and as I had a spare arbor from a scrapped "Ludgate" which would fit, not as common an occurrence as you might think, I replaced the arbour and gear wheel.

A very rare Waltham 1894-Riverside Maximus, 21J 1903/4

In a previous post I described the Waltham S16 Riverside Maximus and mentioned that the grade name was also used on premium grades in other sizes. Here is one in size 12 and it is pretty rare.

The Waltham production records show that about three and a quarter million 1894 models were made of which about 83 thousand were "Riverside" grades but only 10,063 Riverside Maximus grades were made of all types - and that number will include rejects and movements planned to be made but not.

Of these only 2,801 were recorded as Open Faced 21Jewel movements the rest being Hunters or of different jewel count.

The general design is very close to the larger 1899 & 1908 models which followed and has moved away from the captive winding stem of the 1888 model. It has a Swiss Lever escapement with a Breguet  sprung cut compensating balance.

This grade also has a double roller, micro adjuster and steel escape wheel as found in railroad grade watches of the period.

Apart from the escape wheel the train wheels are gold and the top plate jewels are screw set in gold mountings. There are diamond cap jewels on the escape wheel and the Balance.

This example has a rare dial signed by Bailey, Banks, Biddle Co. Philadelphia - a very prestigious jewellery maker and retailer.

The case is by the Illinois Watch Case Company of Elgin and is rolled gold.

More pictures can be found via this page of my web site.