Timex M32

Description

The Timex M32 is part of the first series of mechanical movements (windup and selfwinding). It is the version with a date indication.

Since all the wheels, the lever and the balance wheel are located under a single bridge, disassembly, or rather, reassembly, is not trivial.

One small challenge is that the gear train bridge and its pillars are bolted together from below(!).

A two-leg anular balance beats with 18000 A/h and controls a pin lever movement. There’s no conventional shock protection, but the massive, v-shaped bearings and axle make this movement very robust and immune against shocks.

The selfwinding mechanism consists only of an oscillating weight, an excenter changer with two pawls, a driving wheel, and axle, which goes through the mainspring barrel to the dial side, where the planet reduction gear and the ratchet are located.

The oscillating weight with its excenter is mounted with two screws on the gear train bridge.

On the yet empty dial side, you see the ratchet, the rocking bar winding mechanism and the indirectly driven time indication works, of which the cannon pinion engages with the mainspring barrel.

The cannon pinion consists of two concentrical gears, connected with a slipping clutch. The lower wheel engages with the mainspring barrel, the upper one with the change- and hand setting wheel.

Here you can see the planet gear of the selfwinding mechanism. The lower part engages with the mainspring barrel core.

The hour wheel is also double executed. The lower part engages with the changer wheel and the upper one drives the switching wheel of the calendar mechanism.

The calendar mechanism is as simple as possible: At position 8 o’clock, there’s the switching wheel with its tiny pin, that slowly advances the date wheel.

A constructive oddity of the movement is, that the date wheel is beared flyingly between four pins. It is held vertically in position by the dial only. That means, when only one foot of the dial is broken (which happens easily), the date ring can no longer be held in position.

In the lab

Timegrapher result

For a pin lever movement, which only got a non-professional service, the rates are pretty OK. A true revision should have resulted in higher amplitudes and this better rates, but for obvious reasons, a full teardown of the movement was avoided.