What jewels are in movements

Far be it from me to educate anyone but this is worth knowing from a quality perception angle. Note that I say “perception”. There are average and good and god like types. To get a handle on this to any level where you can appreciate what “8 Jewells” means to price, for instance. So whats going on with jewels…

It is I am sorry to tell you its to do with mollecular mechanics. I will dumb it down. Each time the torque vector in any rotational system some level of inertial blah blah blah.. Hmmmm

Metals are made from crystals. Surprise. Like the ones you buy for jewellery. They are not pure and see through like diamonds because all the atoms in, say a ruby, are exactly stacked like eggs in a pallet of eggs. Every single egg is exactly where is should be so you can stick a this stick right through the pallete through the regular straignt gaps. As an aside, thats how light gets through crystal fundementally. Anyway metal is also like stacked eggs but imagine the pallete of eggs in the back of a lorry. You would be lucky to get a long long thin stick,in one go, through back doors of the lorry, to the back of the cab.

So rubys are like massive pallets of eggs, and metals are lots of slightly misaligned pallete of eggs firmly held together. Set that aside.

Brass is lots of palletes of normal eggs, slightly misalligned, MIXED IN with a pallets of ostritch eggs. And this is where is gets comlicated. If you mix up normal eggs and ostritch eggs the brass they produce has a putty like quality in the brass they form. Its still what you or I would regards as hard but when you rub it with anything but plastic or wood, at a molecular level youve spread the butter. And some of it sticks to the knife you were using as well.

So think about that if you have 3 materials to work with and you have to design a stick that goes into a hole and turns round without wearing the hole bigger as it goes round. Lets look at the options.

1. A brass pole in a brass hole. Butter everywhere, lasts about 10 minutes which is all it takes to make the damn thing because brass is so easy to work.
2. Steel pole in steel hole. Ok, massive mollecular problem. In theory its good. You have all you millions of normal egg crates slighly offset but bassically strong and structurally organised. They are formed into a tubular pole. It appears perfectly smooth. Its ISNT, its violently abrasive because you cant make a molecularly smooth curve from straight line geometric metal grains (egg crates). Compounding this is he fact the the hole has exactly the same problem at its surface. Its like molecular sandpaper being rotationaly rubbed together. Oil mitigates the effect but it still happens progressively not matter what. Like us, clocks die from the first tick. So dont waste time.
3. A steel pole in brass hole. Have you ever tried to sandpaler a lemon tart?. It doesnt work. The sandpaper gums up and slides over the tart. This is the anwer for most clocks. Thats why you have steel pinions and brass holes (bushes). Obviously you keep it to a minimum with oil but when you see a deformed pinion and bush you see that the wear is bodiced as if there is some fluidity in the wear which is exactly what it is. Glass is fluid, church windows hundreds of years old are apparently thicker at the bottom as the have sagged over the centuries. Or more probably the cast the thinner glass where it would add less aggregated weight and was less likely to require toughness. Or god ordained it. Hard to know, but with pinions its proven.
4. Steel in jewels. Ok so we have a new egg. The quails egg. Its tightly packed pallets pefectly alligned and as such, any step based curve in its edge is a finer and less destructive abrasive. The steel, when manufactred with super small pallets can form material curved edges with small steps and therefore a lower abrasion rating. Not perfect but not bad at all if the holy grail is zero wear (Ive invented one – later). But here is the thing. The real culprit here is engergy transfer. This is the multiplier and analogous to the size of the stick and the hole. You see if your stick is a broomstick and our hole… a broomstick hole. Then the size of all that add all sorts of extra drag. You are drag with you weak humanoid puny muscles, the broomstick isnt carbon fibre is it, and you didnt even check what the ground was like. Hopeless. Gravity as well. And its probably dark and you didnt even think about a torch. So, if we scale down to a clock it becomes simpler. Our puny muscles are a nice known power spring, our friction is our molecular wear and our pole and hole is our pinion and bush. If its a gradfather clock then the steel and brass works. Its easy to work with, the steel can be very finely lathed and the bushes accurately drilled. Its a common sense manufaturing method to an end, which is a 50 year run with a 100 year overhaul. I have no idea if those timescales were calculated but thats the case. Very human terms if you think about it – for life and as far as can be imagined within reason. And now we have iphones. I digress, so on top of the fact we have good machining for bushes (jewels can be drilled very accurately a a few hairs diameter) we also have scale. If you go watches then the components dont have any appreciable gravitational coefficient to allow for so providing you have oil, jewel bushes and really accurate manufacture you can talk to clock god.

So thats the mechanics of jewels. If your watch is a mechanical without jewels read the above again and go shopping. If you see a mantle clock with a jewelled movement then buy it because it looks nice. By the time it wears out you will be dead and some relative will have to track down clock Einstien for an achaelological repair. I have one. I love it but thats beside the point. Buy something else where the jewels matter. The only clock we did that was longcase was a barometric monitoring control clock with an irridium pendulum. It was 5ft high with an irridium pendulum and had ruby bushes. Unbelievable. Accurate to within 3 seconds a month and we fixed it. To 3 seconds a month. The absolutely most terriffying job we have ever done but a country mile. The bloke had a lift in his house. His wife answered the door and I waited in the hall. This glass tube pod with lights in decended from a hidden opening in the ceiling. All it was missing was cryogenic smoke. We dont charge enough.