Bestfit #111, better than ever.

One of the more useful resources for people who work on older watches are the catalogs by American company BESTFIT, which used to be a major supplier of watch parts. It's an excellent source of especially cross-references where you can find out that that balance wheel you're looking for is in fact the same one that is sitting in a watch in your spare/broken movements bin.

Hard copies go for quite some money on eBay, and are invariably worn. Luckily, scans are available; I got mine from watchguy.co.uk but since learned that there's still a rights holder so I guess I have to send US$9.95 to Wm.S. McCaw.

In any case, here's what I did: got the PDFs and rearranged them a bit so I had two PDFs of roughly equal page size (essentially, I moved a hundred-something pages from vol.1 to vol.2). Then I uploaded everything to Lulu, a self-publishing/print-on-demand service that I'm a happy user of for my book, and orded them to print them and do a ring binding (now you know why the rearranging was needed: they have a maximum page count of 470, much more than the page count of the first part).

The result just arrived:

It came out cheaper (I think CA$75 or so?) than buying old copies on eBay, the letter-size format is nice and large, it is "new", and it will lie flat.

While the BestFit system is still available online (various outlet sell lifetime subscriptions for US$99.95), I prefer to stay away from computers for my watch stuff; they're too distracting. This will serve me just fine for many, many years.