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Making Carbon Steel Hairsprings for Watches, Clocks and Other Small Mechanism.

🕑 Added 2024-02-20 07:56:27 +0000 UTC

Comments

Niek Lammers

You absolute magician.. amazing stuff!

Duncan Luddite

...aaand it's now out of stock.... XD I shall have to keep it in mind for the future.

Duncan Luddite

Sweet. Thank you.

Clickspring

Thank you mate! That material is a stainless foil for heat treating, I get it from here: https://www.artisansupplies.com.au/product/309-heat-treating-foil-tool-wrap-0-5-metre-sheet/ - Cheers :)

Duncan Luddite

Beautiful work Chris, and a *really* interesting method of reducing the wire to dimension. Leaves the 1700's method in the dust :) Question: what is the metal envelope you're sealing the wire up in for tempering? It seems to cope with repeated folding and unfolding. Cheers

Clickspring

Great work Leonard, its a lot of fun getting the lathe to do things that are a little bit out of the ordinary :)

Leonard Solomon

Beautiful video, Chris. I greatly enjoyed it. Your videos are a constant source of inspiration for me. I wound a set of compression springs once, for the keys and valves in a little pipe organ I was building. It's not to be compared with making hair springs, but it was an interesting job for me. I used spring-tempered music wire, and wound it around an appropriate sized mandrel mounted in my lathe. It took some trial and error to find the the right size for the mandrel, and the appropriate tension for feeding the wire, and then I was able to run a nice uniform set of springs. I made a handle to crank the lathe by hand, for greater control.

Clickspring

Chheers mate!

Clickspring

Thank you mate, so pleased you enjoyed it :)

Clickspring

Cheers Paul :)

Clickspring

Enjoyed reading that detail Andy, thank you :)

Clickspring

Yes!

Clickspring

Thank you mate!

Micheal Malsed

DUDE - so amazing. When you got to the spherical, my mind got all twisted trying to figure out how you got threads on there! LOL You're one of my absolute favorite machining channels. Thank you a TON! (or a few grams. . . depending on the work! :) )

EVAN WINES

Once again Chris…..brilliant…brilliant work!!!

Paul Busby

Just brilliant. As always.

Andy Pugh

As someone who spent a couple of years researching the rolling of spring steels I found it fascinating how different this process is from the commercial process using exactly the same material. (0.8% carbon steel) The hardness in spring strip and wire is created entirely by rolling or wire-drawing and no heat-treatment is done afterwards. What is important is the heat-treatment prior to the drawing / rolling process. This is called "patenting" (probably because it was once a patented process) and involves heating the material above the transition temperature and then quenching in molten salt to force it to transform to fine bainite. Molten sodium hydroxide at 420C works well. After that, with enough rolling or drawing reduction you can get the material up to 4GPa tensile strength with some remaining ductility. The microstructure at this point is very different to what you would find in a quenched-and-tempered spring, a fine drawn-out lammellar structure of bainite, rather than a homogenous martensite.