CRC 960/21

Description

In the 1970ies, an unknown manufacturer of ebauches came onto the market, the manufactury “CRC”, also known as “Montres Esperanto”, a subsidary of Cupillard-Vuez & Rieme. It produced simple pin-pallet and pallet lever movements. Their “better” one was the CRC 960/21 shown here, which at least has got a true pallet lever escapement.

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The CRC 960/21 has got a diameter of the usual 10 1/2 lignes.

It is a pillar construction where the train bridge sits only on on few pillars, here there are three and a half one. Together with the large height, it’s not really ideal to have all bearings precisely upon each other.

The gear train consists of five gears, which are all under one single bridge!

The construction is a mix between a conventional lever movement and a Roskopf type movement: The shock protected ring balance (in two Antichoc-65 bearings) beats with 21600 A/h and controls the gear train by a pin pallet escapement. The gear train has got a directly driven center second. However, like on a Roskopf movement, minute and hour gears are driven on the dial side only.

For that, on top of the mainspring barrel, there’s a coupling wheel, which drives the minute wheel. Unlike on true Roskopf movement, only the minute wheel is driven; the changing wheel for the hour wheel is a seperate wheel.

Since the center second bearing on the main plate has got no jewel, the important 17th jewel must be used elsewhere. Here, it is used as cap jewel of the lever bearing. Technically it’s of no real use here, since that bearing never uses oil.

Besides that, on the dial side, you can see the yoke winding system.

Technical data

Usage gallery