The word "wheel" to a watchmaker is what the common man would call a "cog" and an engineer a "gear". As the patentee stated in the early part of his description, this lathe was of "ordinary construction" and broke no new ground in that respect. But, it did introduce a method whereby the teeth of gears (he uses this term interchangeably with "wheels") could be cut and then rounded off. The blank, to be formed as a gear, was fixed to the lathe's headstock spindle "in the usual manner" with its indexation, one tooth at a time, taken care of by the standard method of two or more circles of holes drilled into the front face of the headstock Pulley (F) The holes were engaged by a spring-loaded point (b) at the end of a pivoting arm (P) that could be locked by a screw passing through a quadrant-shaped slot. To give the most factors, and hence the most extensive range of teeth able to be cut, the number of holes in each circle would have been 60 and 120 .
The whole gear-cutting assembly was referred to as "Head G" in the patent and mounted on the lathe's bed - this is called 'shears' in the patent and labelled as (B). The upper part of G was formed with two rectangular and parallel arms (d) these carrying, near their ends, adjustable pointed screws to act as pivots for a "swinging frame" (H.) The swinging frame carried a shaft driven by a pulley (J), on which the cutting tool (I) was mounted, ground to the profile of the tooth form required. The pulley would have been rotated by a round 'gut' rope, using some form of 'overhead' that picked up its drive from a foot-treadle-driven flywheel  similar in arrangement to this. With great optimism - and neglecting any mention of the complexity of arranging such a system - the patentee blithely suggested that the pulley could be turned, "by hand or any other form of power".
With the swinging frame adjusted so that the cutter was level with the centre line of the blank, as the cutter rotated, the frame could be swung back and forth to generate the gear profile. There was no adjustment available to feed in a cut, on the lightweight material used in watches the cut would have been made in one pass..