WatchTech

Rainer Nienaber showed me these pictures of a mainspring barrel he had on his workdesk. He said that this seems to happen sometimes, but nobody has an idea why a mainspring would break instantanously not only in one spot, but practically into many fragmen...  

Hi Marcus, That is definitely a first. I've seen mainsprings messed up by watchmakers and reinstalled in barrels (some of the final services performed in a facility that was being shut down and the watchmakers were NOT happy about it) and I'd have to gues... 

..with the intial breakage flailing around and causing further breaks?

But I have access to information (directly and indirectly) about hundreds of thousands of repairs and I've never heard of such a thing. Just saying.

Unless someone really did snap the spring into many pieces and then carefully arranged it back into the barrel? Sounds like the infamous tales from the dark (were there any lightones?) days of British Leyland. ..

New thing. I have seen this happen a number of times over the years in both new white steel mainsprings and the old blue steel springs. Regarding the blue springs I feel it had more to do with slight surface surface corrision than anything else. I have fi... 

:-)

and was fortunate/unfortunate enough to watch it as it happened. I have never seen this is a watch before but when I was in my first watchmaking school we used to also service clocks. I had this happen on 2-3 mainsprings that has mild surface rust. These ... 

... without the image of a shattering mainspring in my head! Regards, Marcus