Hi Henry. I wouldn’t recommend using a bicycle spoke! The thread will probably be the wrong size, the steel is the wrong type (too springy), plus about a thousand other reasons. Don’t worry though you might be able to get one from elsewhere.

Try , as they sell a lot of parts for old and obsolete watches, or else try who are the biggest supplier of watch materials

Thanks for the reply Peter. I’ve moved part of your long reply to great-british-watch.co.uk/designing-my-first-watch/, as you gave some really useful advice.

I have a similar approach with gravers:
a large 3 mm square HSS for roughing the work, and a small square tungsten carbide (or “métal dur” as they say in Switzerland 😉 ) for fine work/getting a nice shiny surface. Then I don’t have to resharp the carbide very often, or a couple of strokes on the diamond plate, that’s all.

The parting off tool I used is a ground down carbide drill bit as you mentioned. For the normal diamond end graver I also used a piece of shaped tungsten held in a pin vice

I tended to use a lot of tungsten when making the winding stem as at the time it was new to me and seemed novel, but now I’ve gone back to High Speed Steel as I just feel that its behaviour is more predictable and it doesn’t chip when it breaks.

Thanks again

Colin

Just a question: as a hand graver, are you using a broken/grinded carbide drill bit in a bergeon pin vise ? Clever.

Keep up the good work