Why is It Not Advisable to Clean and Oil the Mechanical Watch by Yourself?

For some watch lovers who are familiar with mechanical watch mechanisms, they all want to take a look at the movement, and even want to clean and oil it themselves.

In fact, the matter of washing the watch oil still has to be handed over to a professional watch repairer, because washing the oil is not as simple as opening the cover of the watch and then putting it back. And it involves not only knowledge, but also practical experience. Today we will share with you some details of the process of oil washing by watch repairers.

Ⅰ. What are the ways to wash oil for mechanical watches?

At present, there are two kinds of washing oil:

1. The advantage of using an oil washing machine is that it is simple and fast, but many fine parts of the movement cannot be cleaned by the machine.

2. Traditional hand-washing oil, all-round and meticulous cleaning. Time consuming and risk of operational errors. It can be seen that the traditional hand-washing oil is only limited to experienced watch repairers, who can send it to do this oil-washing maintenance.

Ⅱ. The specific process of traditional manual oil washing of mechanical watches:

The first is that the tools will use 120# gasoline, oil washing dishes, brushes, anti-magnetic tweezers, screwdrivers of various specifications, soft willow sticks (one sharpened and one flattened), blowing balls and so on.

The mechanical watch movement is fixed on a professional clamping table, and the movement parts of the watch are divided into two parts according to the severity of oil pollution.

When cleaning, it is also necessary to wash the small parts with light oil contamination first, and then clean the parts of the movement with serious oil contamination, so as to avoid the light oil contamination parts being polluted by the heavy oil contamination parts.

At the same time, when the mechanical watch is disassembled, it is necessary to keep in mind the screws removed in each position to avoid oil washing and wrong installation. For example, short screws are installed in deep holes, and they are not fixed in place, resulting in loose parts. Or the long screw is installed in the shallow hole, and the screw is too long, which hinders the operation of other components.

Most of the cleaning of the movement parts can be done by soaking in high-grade gasoline and then cleaning with a brush. Serious oil stains can be ground off or cleaned by soft willow sticks. At the end, the cleaned movement parts are taken out from the clean gasoline pan, placed on clean white paper to dry, and then sorted and put into the parts box.