I watched a lot of youtube before I dove in. There’s a LOT more content on watch repair now after covid so it should be easy. Pay specific attention to how the seasoned watchmakers use their tools. You should never have to force anything in a watch. Go as slow as possible and really savor each movement.

If you don’t have a camera with good macro abilities, grab some of those cheap clip on macro lenses for your phone.

Take a pictures at every step until you don’t need them anymore. I specifically was interested in 2-3 movements but you start to see the commonality between them if you’re just working on a simple hour/minute/second/calendar watch without extra complications.

I really suggest buying one of those little plastic trays with a clear dome on top that have dividers. With that, I divide the parts and screws by the aspect of the movement. ie I’ll use one compartment for the automatic winder components, a compartment for the stem and winding mechanism, one for the main drive, and another for the date complication. I repair a lot of misc things so I have a decent memory for where parts/screws go. If you dont, take pictures of the screw next to the hole you took it from so you can compare scale. Screws inside watches are usually at most 2-3 sizes, if not all the same but its good practice to ensure you put the right screw in the right hole.

Also check out the forum watchrepairtalk. Its an international group of old men who love to help out. It has a completely different atmosphere to watchuseek and is an endless fountain of knowledge.

God the sovteks. I also like soviet watches and two of my interests are directly fucked from the war.

I mostly play acoustic stuff now, I have an alright manouche style guitar that I play more than most of my guitars now.

I struggle with frontend too, it was a super basic jinja templates with html and a plotly js applet that I just fed data to. Its ugly but functional.

I Started to re-write the server in Go, I have like 90% feature parity with postgres instead of mongo, but I need to figure out vue when I have a chance to make something a little nicer. I have an old obsolete ipad with a bunch of touch deadzones I’d like to load up in kiosk mode for a nicer data display.

I really liked the ESP32 ecosystem. I figured out the ESP-idf and really liked the build system and freeRTOS. The examples given are really exhaustive and super useful. I basically did format strings into static HTML headers to send the data to the server since it only has like 3-4 readings.

Interfacing with any common hobbyist sensor is mostly a matter of finding a basic C driver and adapting it for the ESP build system.

Do you ever have odd volume behavior? For example, I’ll turn it on one day with the clean volume around 2, it will be loud. Then another day I’ll turn it on, settings unchanged, and it will be half volume and I’ll have to bring it up to 3 or 4, which normally is enough to shake the drywall, just to get a normal level.

I have so many old tubes, I’ve considered turning them into Christmas ornaments by soldering a hook onto the feet. They’re too cool looking to toss but are no good in the amp.

Life is also a lot better with an attenuator between the power out and the speaker.

Absolutely, I’ve decided to accept my amp is just haunted when i hear reverb with the knob turned to zero.

I’ve had to reflow connections, replace load resisters, replace all the tubes and re-bias the amp. Broke out the schematics and went through test points and everything.

Its an awful little goblin amp and weighs 50 pounds but it was the very first big thing I bought when I started working as a teenager and I cant seem to let it go.

Its really relaxing after a couple drinks. My #1 tip is don’t cheap out on the basic tools like tweezers, screw drivers, and oils. A lot of things you can find cheap, ie pith wood, finger cots, a little squeeze blower, etc. The tools you use to manipulate the pieces are basically an extension of your hand and makes a worlds difference.

What kind of home automation?

I recently rolled my own environment sensing, from the ESP32 C code up to the web front end. I basically got it functional and have been using it daily.

I love fixing watches. I used to do full disassembly and servicing on old soviet watches until I moved somewhere 100% carpeted.

Also several factors absolutely fucked my supply of cheap Russian watches. Between COVID and the war, all my sellers are MIA on both sides.

I think you helped me with camera advice so message me if you need any amp repair advice. I’ve got a HRD III that is constantly trying to end its own torment and I’ve done a bunch of little things to it.

By arguing for the lesser of evils, you are arguing for the legitimacy of the establishment.

One thing paper helps me with is free-form thought externalizing.

When you limit yourself to text, markdown, or sometimes even a digital pen/drawing app, I feel like it requires a bit of effort to use which allows ideas to slip from my mind.

With a pen/pencil and paper, I can write, draw, and connect about as fast as I can think. I can crumble the page and refine the idea over and over until something I like is there.