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Slightly Off Kilter Display

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abem

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Slightly Off Kilter Display

Post22 May 2014, 07:39

Hi.

I just got a nice Omega TC-2 and I noticed something ever so slightly odd about the display:
DSC_9733 (900x600).jpg


Anyone see it yet? Here's a hint:
DSC_9733 (Closeup, Annotated, 900x600).jpg


I was just curious - has anyone noticed other Pulsar/Omega/Hamilton P2/P3 type modules where the first segment is at a stronger slant than the rest of the digits? I wonder if it was designed this way or if it was a tiny manufacturing anomaly.

Cheers,

-abe.
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bruce wegmann

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Re: Slightly Off Kilter Display

Post22 May 2014, 08:38

You have to bear in mind that, when these were made, the vast infrastructure of robotic assembly we have now, simply didn't exist. Every single LED chip in these displays was hand-placed, and the wire bonding done manually, one connection at a time. Every other component on the circuit board was similarly installed, by human beings using tweezers and binocular microscopes. Allowance had to be made for human error (there are two bonding pads on each LED chip; sometimes you will see a wire broken off short on one, and the second one had to be used). Also note that this entire display sits conspicuously below the center line of the glass, due to a slightly-off-the-mark placement of the circuit board on the plastic carrier. Obviously visible tilts of the entire display to the left or right are also occasionally seen. This particular one happens to be a Monsanto display; similar manufacturing slip-ups also occur on those made by Litronix.
And yes, I have seen this same thing, on different digits, on several watches...an artifact of the primitive state of the art at the time. The LED chips were selected for color and brightness match by human eyes, chip by chip. Given the limitations of the technology, it becomes even more remarkable that Time Computer managed to produce more than half a million watches in just five and a half years.
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Diginut

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Re: Slightly Off Kilter Display

Post22 May 2014, 18:04

In my giant box of dud modules I have some spectacularly bad examples of poor assembly work. Take a look at the Chronex module below ..

This came out of a dead watch from bulk buy on eBay. It must have been produced by a worker on a Friday afternoon after 28 pints down the local bar - its laughably bad !!!

(edited to add that we had a wonky LED display thread some years back, hence the photo date credit)

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Re: Slightly Off Kilter Display

Post22 May 2014, 22:00

Here's the Monsanto spec. sheet for the display discussed. No way on God's green earth that these displays could have been hand made to hold the tolerances stated. Frontier Semiconductor alone had approximately 1 million modules in the manufacturing cycle at any given time. Monsanto supplied this display stick plus several others to us. It would have been an impossible task for Monsanto to hand make the number of displays used by just Frontier alone, much less numerous other watch manufacturing companies that Monsanto was supplying at the time.The luminous intensity
of the displays were checked as per the test description outlined at the bottom of the first page, NOT by human eyes.

I don't know how other watch manufactures produced their modules, but every module made by Frontier was AUTOMATICALLY wired bonded by a facility in the Philippines, so robotic equipment did exsist and was used at that time. I'm sure that Frontier wasn't the only manufacture utilizing automatic equipment at that time.

Now the picture posted by Diginut is obviously a classic example of a "hand made" display by human beings using tweezers and binocular microscopes. Nothing I've ever seen produced by Monsanto or Litronix came close to looking that bad.
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Re: Slightly Off Kilter Display

Post26 May 2014, 09:25

It seems unlikely to me that automated machinery would produce the kind and degree of variation we see in these early displays. No one tools up for million-unit production unless there is an established million-unit demand; anything else would violate fundamental laws of economics. At the beginning, at least, before the market established itself, these were put together the most expedient way possible without machine assistance...by hand. Later, when it became clear the market would justify the investment, automation became the rule (there is no other way Texas Instruments could put a plastic-cased LED watch on the market for $12, and make money, and that was what this was all about...volume). It is an incontestable fact that every discreet component on the P1, P2, and P3 circuit boards was hand-placed; there are pictures and factory videos of it being done by Time Computer technicians. The P4s and beyond, on the other hand, were certainly largely the product of automated assembly; there are virtually no variations in the parts placement (the displays, in particular, show the kind of uniformity I would expect of something that was machine-assembled). The suggestion that human hands and eyes would be incapable of holding the specified tolerances is on shaky ground, at best. With my binocular microscope at 60X, I can position a part to .0005 inch (.01mm) without too much effort; closer if I take my time. The guy who engraved the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin would probably disagree with you, too. Somewhere I have seen pics of the most incredible sculptures done on grains of rice. No technology bursts fully-developed into the world; things are always more human-labor intensive at the beginning; automation is an artifact of a maturing state of the art, coupled with an expanding market.
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abem

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Re: Slightly Off Kilter Display

Post26 May 2014, 15:34

The micro-sculptor who is most often cited is Willard Wigan from the U.K. - a truly amazing guy with a pretty inspiring story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Wigan
http://www.willard-wigan.com/gallery/

-abe.

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