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lift angle

 

Hello nilomis.


Lift angle is the angle within which the roller jewel is interacting with the pallet fork, so is the portion of the "swing" of the balance where it is not truly free, but subjected to exterior influences.  Lift angle contributes to escapement error (a complicated subject in itself), so a smaller lift angle is desired as a generality, but practical limitations related to manufacturing tolerances and the suitability of the resulting component systems for real world wear and tear usually keep the lift angle for high beat watches pretty close to 50o in practice.

The lift angle is manually entered into a timing machine in order to allow it to approximate an amplitude measurement. The timing machine is recording the escapement sounds and measuring how long it takes from the first to the last sound of each tick and then applying a calculation to that measurement based on the supplied lift angle to establish the angular speed of the balance and deducing from that the amplitude.

_john  

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