Cement Brasses
American Watchmaker and Jeweler (1892)
Attachments to a lathe to which work is fixed by means of cement. These brasses are made in various shapes and sizes by tool manufacturers, or the ingenious watchmaker can make them for himself during his leisure hours, Figs. 53 and 54. The watchmaker should have a supply of these brasses, varying in sizes from-one inch to the smallest size necessary. Should you have a watch that has a broken cock or foot jewel, and among your supply you are unable to find one that fits both the pivot and the recess in the cock or potence, you will find these brasses very useful. If you find a jewel that fits the pivot nicely, and the brass setting is too large, select a cement brass that is just a trifle smaller than the recess in the potance, cement the jewel to the end of the brass, with the flat side of the jewel to the brass, so that if the brass setting of the jewel is too thick it can be turned to exact thickness of the old setting at the same time that the diameter is turned. Bring to an exact center by the hole in the jewel, by means of a pegwood, and as soon as the cement is hard, turn down with a sharp graver. With a full set of these brasses a watchmaker can utilize odds and ends, without waiting to send for new jewels. The above is only one of many uses to which these brasses may be brought.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The tool itself survives: cement or shellac chucks for the 8mm watchmaker's lathe are still made and sold, and horologists still warm a chuck, seat a small part in shellac, centre it and turn it down with a graver much as the American Watchmaker and Jeweler described in 1892. What has gone is the daily need for the trick it describes. From roughly the 1930s jewels were made as friction-fit rings pressed in with a jewelling tool such as the Seitz set, in standardised diameters ordered from a catalogue, so a repairer no longer turned a jewel's brass setting down to match an odd recess; the arrival of quartz movements after 1969 shrank the trade further, and the work is now largely restoration and high-end service rather than the everyday improvisation of "odds and ends" the 1892 writer assumed.
Written for this edition, 2026.