Within 3 months the motor had destroyed itself due to the stresses of rotating both the watch disc and the rollers in order to achieve enough rotation to keep the watches wound.

The barbecue motor rotated slowly and a "drive band" was used to rub against the rollers while the disc rotated. This provided enough velocity to keep the watches wound, but was really noisy and overloaded the motor.

Since the original idea worked I decided to use the same principle, but redesign the drive system. This page outlines the modifications to produce Version II.

I looked around a little more and found a couple of pulleys and a toothed belt which would give approximately a 50% reduction in shaft speed. The small pulley fit the 5/16" motor shaft perfectly.

Conclusions
The system was tested and proved to be VERY quiet and have enough torque to rotate about 25 lbs. of watches! The final speed turned out to be about 27 R.P.M. It appears that about 20-30 R.P.M. is the ideal speed to keep most watches wound.

The watches that were tested were; Rolex Sub, Rolex Pres, Invicta Sub, Longines Admiral, and 2 Seiko Kinetics. the Seikos were the only watches with a power reserve indication so my final watch winding routine was determined on the basis of keeping these charged.

I settled on a twice daily routine of 1 hour of winding 6:00AM - 7:00AM and 6:00PM - 7:00PM. At 27 R.P.M. that is about 3240 turns per day. This winder is not as violent as the commercial orbital winders (which usually require about 900 turns per day) and thus requires more turns to achieve complete winding.

This version of the winder has been running for 4 months (2 hours per day) without incident. It has not developed any noise or looseness and all watches stay wound.

This type of winder is not reversible for rotation so watches which are uni-directional winding must be put on the winder with their crowns either facing the disc or away from the disc depending on the direction the watch winds (usually found by experimenting).