Buren 1000

Description

The late 1950s were the high time of mechanical watchmaking. The movements from that time could still draw from the full, but were at the same time so advanced, that even today, they don’t feel old fashioned.

From that time, the Buren 1000 origins. It is a very flat microrotor selfwinding movement with 12 1/2 lignes diameter, from Dugena used as Dugena 1000.

With its red gold plating and the golden toned Glucydur screw balance, it appears of very high quality.

The base plate shows, that all important bearings contain rubies, except the center minute wheel and the mainspring barrel, which both rotate so slowly, that there’s no real need for a friction-reducing ruby bearing.

The fully integrated selfinding mechanismus, however, uses only one single jewel. This is not really perfect!

In the late 1950s, most movements still used a directly driven center minute wheel. The Buren 1000 was no exception here.

The gear train uses the conventional construction: The mainspring barrel drives the center minute wheel, followed by third wheel, seconds wheel and filigree steel escape wheel.

The indirectly center seconds indication is driven by a double third wheel, which reduces fluttering with its two wheels.

As escapement a swiss pallet lever escapement is used. It is regulated by a Glucydur screw balance, which is beared in two Incabloc shock protections.

The effective length of the hairspring can be adjusted with a long regulator arm and scale.

The mainspring barrel is located under a small bridge. The ratchet wheel is not directly driven by the crown wheel, but with a sliding wheel in between.

In order to decouple the manual winding from the self-winding movement, the ratchet wheel of the barrel has a two-tier design. The lower wheel is driven by the self-winding mechanism, but has no direct connection to the barrel core. The upper wheel, which is connected to the barrel core as well as to the sliding gear of the manual winding system, and which is engaged by the pawl, has a multi-plate clutch with which it engages the three holes of the lower ratchet wheel in one direction and in the other direction is running freely.

The selfwinding mechanism is pretty complex: The (here not yet mounted) microrotor sits on the axle of the innermist wheel and engages with an exchange wheel, which engages with a sliding pinion. This flying beared sliding pinion is reponsible, to either drive the inner or the outer exchange wheel, which are both connected. No matter in which direction, the oscillating wheel revolves, the upper exchange wheel always turns in the same direction and winds the mainspring with an additional reduction wheel (at position 12 o’clock).

As spectacular the view of the movement side is, as boring is it on the dial side. Of course, you can see a youke winding system (here with a broken and thus missing setting lever spring), and of course you can see the Incabloc bearing.

Of the selfwinding system, you can only see the sliding bearing of the sliding pinion at 1 o’clock and the outer exchange wheel (at 11 o’clock).

The Buren 1000 is probably the most popular movement from Buren (besides the Chronomatic series, which was developed together with Hamilton, Breitling and Heuer). Especially Dugena used this movement quite often in the top level “Super Automatic” series, which at least for Dugena marked their technical peak.

Since the 1960s, when the quarz watch became visible on the horizon, the red pencil was pulled out everywhere and so, this expensive movement was taken out of production pretty soon.

Technical data

Usage gallery