0 CommentsThey make him tick
The watch he liked was out of his price range, so T. H. Rogers eighth grader Sam Herman decided to design his own.
I found watchmaking when I was looking around the Internet and discovered an interesting watch called a Zenith Zero G Tourbillon. It looked really cool. All of the gears were set in a sphere attached to a gyroscope rotating in every direction. I found a video of it being built, start to finish. (If you go to YouTube and type in “zenith zero g Tourbillon Z,” you can see the video that inspired me.) I loved this watch and how it was made, so I continued to look into it until I found more information. After a short look on Wikipedia, I found out the watch costs $275,000, a little out of my price range. It costs this much because of the detail that the individual watchmaker, building it by hand, has to put into it. Although I could not get the watch (for the obvious reason), I was happy to have discovered watchmaking.
My birthday was a few days later. My grandma decided to get me a watchmaking kit and an old watch to take apart. When I first started to tinker with the watch I had no idea what anything did. After a little bit of taking apart and putting back together, I learned some of the basics, such as how the crown interlocks with the closest gear so that the spring winds in only one direction.
My (somewhat optimistic) goal is that at some point I will be able to put together my own watch, with my own designs and my own parts. I would also like this watch to be a mechanical watch. That means no battery – it would run entirely on a wind-up spring that would keep time for about 24 hours on one 15- to 20-second wind.
Most windup watches can run for that long if not longer on one wind, but the designers who build them have years of experience. My goal may not be met for some years, but I believe that if I stick to watchmaking and keep learning about how these watches tick, I can do it.
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