Behold the mighty Bulova 5AR: No it's not mighty and no you've never heard of it. Bulova made them from '61 to '63. This one is a '61. Bulova is cool because once upon a time they were American. Lindbergh wore one across the Atlantic. They produced the first TV commercial in history and people still use the Bulova School manual as the go-to guide for watchmaking. They were bought by Citizen in 2008 and now who cares. This is all I have of my little Bulova friend. Band and case are gone; probably melted for scrap decades ago, or at least discarded. Little miss 5AR is 13x15x3mm. You could, in fact, fit the movement inside a Tums and none of it would show (except the crown, maybe). This is probably why it still exists: she ticks. She's been adjusted to the max range to slow her down and she's still about 5 minutes fast in 4 out of 5 positions (she's a minute slow in pendant up) which fundamentally means her mainspring is kaput. Her mainspring is 1.3mm wide and fits in a toothed barrel prolly 5mm in diameter. And ain't nobody around what wants to change that out even if they could but bloody hell - 13x15mm. Because she's running well enough to time I threw her on the timing machine and because it was time to tweak I threw her in one of my movement holders. But then she stopped after about 7 minutes. Which is about where you go "wait a minute that's weird" and you wind her again and she starts up and you go "hmmm.... magnetism?" and you throw it next to a compass and it's magnetized to fuck and you go "okay let's get this out of the movement holder because it has about 18 times as much metal" and then it's no longer magnetized and then you go "wait a minute" and it turns out that your movement holder has decided to become magnetized and then you go "okay it's about time to buy a degausser" and you're inches from dropping $40 on an ancient K&D on eBay rather than $30 on any of dozens of cheap shitty Chinese crapfests on Amazon or eBay because they last seconds as does 90% of the Chinese crapfests on Amazon or eBay these days so you know what? K&D are bloody American and you can buy them from a bloody American retailer and they're only $70 and really, it's about time to buy some other stuff too so I have $180 worth of watchmaking tools showing up Priority Mail and other than the demagnetizer they'll fit in a ziploc baggie with room for a sandwich. I would have gotten further if I hadn't spent most of the week configuring a new computer with three accounts and eight email accounts per user account on an OS that was never ready for prime time using apps developed in Slovenia and supported by underpaid teenagers found on Mechanical Turk.
Update: spent two hours pretending to teach myself Illustrator and decided that was boring. Dive into Miss Bulova and discover that it's time to order new screwdrivers as my current smallest is a 0.8mm and ain't no way that's gonna get the dial off.
Oh yeah - the decent movements are absolute works of art. Thing is - how much can you really add? "Watch parts earrings" is already a category; if you type "watch parts" into Etsy's search it will give you twelve autocompletes. Taking something that was once functional jewelry and turning it into something that is no longer functional jewelry is kind of the hallmark of shitty crafts. kill...meee.....
Oh shit you just stepped in it Friend of mine: Another friend of mine: One of my "happy place" videos, which you are now required to watch in its entirety: It is fair to say that I have an interest in automata. It's also fair to say that I've done presentations on automata. More than that... I'm not interested in saying just yet.