Well, that's kinda the thing- it wasn't. The notes to the video explain
that it came to this company,
Parmigiani Fleurier (a major independent watchmaking company) heavily
abused and with many (6)
bodged previous repairs done to it. They had to totally restore the thing
to make it work, and look
this nice again. It took them a solid year to do it.
Parmigiani isn't a large company either- they probably had 4-8 people
working on this at least 40 hrs.
a week for that year, probably 2/3 of their staff in the restoration dept,
a guess from what I know
about them.
Kind of like the lathe- they had to find all the problems in it, and all
the stuff other people added on
over the years thinking they were "fixing" it, when they really just made
it worse. What we are doing
with the lathe is a simple version of this- finding and correcting all the
existing problems from what
it came factory as.
Nothing that old is ever untouched- almost all the old stuff has had a
handful of people work on it,
usually incorrectly. Hence the need for restoration watchmaking
departments. And automata restorationists.
But yeah- end result- soooooo cool! My jaw drops everytime I watch this
thing work. The bird alone is crazy
complicated even for a singing bird automaton, and even more so with the
special retract mechanism.
-Andrew
On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:24 PM, Joachim Hall <jjoachimhall@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
That's so awesome!! So amazing that it is in such good condition even
though it is 200 years old.
-Joachim
On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 12:42 AM, Chad Elish <chad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
WOW! That is beautiful!
-chad
On Apr 17, 2016, at 8:45 PM, Andrew C. <soshumasamune@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For mechanical lovers, I had to share this.
Circa 1815. The kind of thing I'd like to be fixing someday for museums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW6aMh_B3DA
That is ridiculous, all made by hand.
We have all the tools at the shop to eventually make one of these.
Anyone want to have a go? :D
-Andrew
