Mechanical Watch: Exploded View
In May 2022, someone posted to Hacker News Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog post explaining how mechanical watch movements work. Since then, his blog has been my absolute favorite corner of the Internet. His posts are not just well written and easy to follow, the accompanying interactive illustrations are magnificent.
The first illustration in his blog post about mechanical watch movements allows you to "explode" a ticking mechanical movement and rotate it to inspect its every component from any angle. I owe my foray into the hobby of watchmaking to Bartosz, but that's not what this blog post is about. Instead, I want to scratch an itch I've had for years now: How cool would it be to hold an exploded view of a real mechanical watch in your hand?
Screenshot of the exploded view render from Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog post.
Apparently, nobody builds such models
I figured that surely, someone has had this idea and built it before. On eBay you'll find cubes of resin embedding various random components from mechanical watches, but they are typically sold as "steampunk art" and bear little resemblance to the proper assembly of a mechanical watch movement. Sometimes, you'll find resin castings showing every component of a movement spread out in a plane like a buffet---very cool, but not what I'm looking for. Despite my best efforts, I haven't found anyone who makes what I'm after, and I have a sneaking suspicion as to why that is. Every component making up the movement of a beautiful 1960's Longines Flagship wristwatch I worked on recently, laid out "buffet style". Building an exploded view of a mechanical watch movement is undoubtedly very fiddly work and requires working knowledge about how a mechanical watch is assembled. People with that skillset are called watchmakers. Maker, not "destroyer for the sake of art". I guess it falls to me, then, to give this project an honest shot.
...how do you build such a model?
Here comes my favorite part: jumping head-first into a project requiring a set of skills I don't even know exist, let alone possess, following a process that develops as the project evolves. So how would one go about building a real-life exploded view of a mechanical watch movement?
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