My Edox continues to serve its sentence in the drawer of doom

My Edox had been giving me horrible accuracy issues. It would run about three hours slow a day. I tried everything I could and made many discoveries.

My biggest discovery was "you get what you pay for." A 25 USD equivalent Edox isn't much.

My first actual discovery was that the hairspring slipped out of the regulator arm. That's very odd; certainly something I haven't seen before. It likely cane about as a result of some watchmaker not knowing their stuff when fitting a new hairspring. There is also some surface rust on the arm which I still have to clean off. I got the hairspring in the regulator arm, but the watch still ran slow. Granted, it was running twice as well, but an hour and a half slow each day is still appalling. I couldn't understand it, the beat error and amplitude was perfect, well, as perfect as can be, seeing as I measure that with my ear.

Then it started running worse, way worse. It ran at -86 400 seconds per day. In other words, the seconds hand was moving, but the hours and minutes hands stood in place. Aha! Loose cannon pinion!

I got to the cannon pinion and almost broke its retainer plate. I'm used to cannon pinions simply being held in place, but this one had a small cover plate over it. I'm sure that if I blew on the cannon pinion it would've flown off. It was so loose that I can't think of a metaphor that isn't terribly misogynistic to describe it.

That was yesterday. Today, I got the tweezers out and tried tightening it. It wasn't working. Then it worked too well and my cannon pinion was reduced to crumbs of steel. I'm going to have to run to my watchmaker and see if I can't get a spare. If I can't, well, it's going to live for many more years in my drawer or get donated to the donkey sanctuary.

For the first time since I started watchmaking, I've been confronted with the age-old question: Is it even worth saving? Maybe I should just cut my losses and accept that I lost a bit of money. Anyway, you can never be the greatest horse rider without falling from a horse.