15-Year-Old Found This (Really Nice) Watch at a Flea Market

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wristatch Revival my name is Marshall thank you so much for coming along this time on the bench we have this beautiful vintage record watch company watch from probably the late 1940s at least that's what the uh research suggests from the owner of the watch and the owner of the watch is really interesting his name is maximilan and he sent me uh an email talking about how enthusiastic and excited he was was about watchmaking and watches and how much he enjoyed watching the channel and I thought that was really cool it turns out he's 15 years old he's from Denmark and uh he's very very into this stuff the way that he got into it was actually interesting and it's also the way that he got this watch is he would go to flea markets with his grandpa he said his grandpa has been going to flea markets for a long time but you know after you find out that they might have some watches there you might just uh pop down there with Grandpa and he says that they've made it a bit of a tradition to go and one day they had gone to a a shop uh and there was a watch that he may want to go back and look at so he convinced his grandpa to go down they couldn't find parking so he just hopped out and ran inside and sure enough he found this in the pile of watches it hadn't been there the day before and he was really really excited let's take a look at how it's running on the time grapher uh before we finish the story here he said it was not running well in fact he said it was running very very quick and and yeah that is exactly right maximilan had it exactly we've got a snowstorm plus it's over 900 seconds a day fast so that's not going to work at all and in fact taking a quick look here this is another way that you can uh do timing basic timing on a on a watch is you can set it next to a known good source so at one minute which is right there this watch was running at 42 seconds per minute so hugely fast and there's definitely something going on that we're going to need to take a look at there so that's what we're going to do this time uh for this project thank you so much for joining me I really appreciate you taking the time and let's take a look at the movement oh my look at that movement wow that has some really nice finishing on it and it's beautiful I I can't lie I I'm a little surprised at the the quality of this movement in this watch uh Max ailan said that his grandfather bought him this watch and cost about 350 as in $3.50 for the thing so I think they got a really great flea market find with this watch assuming that we can get it running correctly CU I'm impressed this is a legit awesome looking movement in here and uh and the watch has all the cool Vibes and everything going for it as well so let's see let's take a look at it and see if we can't uh get it going what we'll do is we'll completely take the watch apart and we'll service it and while we do that we'll also look for any potential issues that may be going on with the watch and then you know when I get a watch in like this I'll contact the owner and we'll talk about some of the different choices that they may have as far as Aesthetics go do you want to have the case polished up so it's looking brand new or not now one thing that I do want to test here though is this is an old uhoh uhoh yeah okay well it looks like my uh assumption was true this is an old dial from the late 40s this is before tridium Loom which is very very minorly uh Radioactive this is radium now I noticed that the hands don't have any Loom on them and they have like none and that usually means that somebody took the loom out and the reason to do that would be because it's deteriorated too much to be functional and also people will often take radium loom out because it is dangerous it is a toxic substance uh and so you have to be careful with it in this case it's actually the loom plots that's the little dabs of loom that they put around the edges of the dial so that there's one next to every hour marker even that tiny amount is what was triggering the Geer counter there you can see those dark dots around the edge and uh yeah so even that can put off uh enough radiation now these are considered generally safe for day-to-day wear as the type of radiation that emits can have a hard time getting through even just the plastic crystal that's on top and let's just do a quick test yeah so as you can see it just spikes up when the Dial's there but nothing from the movement it is just from that luminous material on there I'm not surprised uh you know the the watches be pre say mid1 1950s if they have a glow-in-the-dark or a luminous element to them they're usually radium and you do have to be careful with that okay what we're going to do first here is we're going to let down the main spring and what that means is we're going to let the power out of the watch you don't want a bunch of tension built up in the watch when you start to disassemble it just because you know something can go flying off or something could break if it uh very suddenly loses that tension so it's best practice to just take the power out and then start the disassembly process and that's what we're going to do here as you can see I'm going to start by taking off the balance and we'll set it aside and that's just a precautionary measure yeah I love seeing stories like this the the one from Max ailon he sent me a bunch of emails he's super excited about this and what he actually did was interesting he he he really wanted to see his watch get serviced and so him and his Grandpa took this watch to a number of watchmakers in the area where they live in Denmark and the watchmakers you know they would work on the watch but he wanted to ask if he could watch like if he could you know look over their shoulder and watch him do it and they all said no and that's a little disappointing but you know I I get it like they're they're they're working and they they have to do a bunch of work and maybe they just didn't you know couldn't work under the distraction or whatever but you know when you have somebody so excited about something like that and a young person you know I think it's it's pretty cool to be able to show him and you know he thought what maybe Marshall will do it and then he could watch every step and that's exactly what's going to happen here so I think that's pretty cool that he gets to see exactly what's inside of this watch and what was going on with it and I think I'll take a little bit of extra time to explain some of the more common things that we see on these watches as well like you know the main spring and how it all goes together too just as a little learning experience uh taking a part and putting back together a watch like this by the way if you're interested in taking apart and putting back together a watch like this you're going to need some tools and uh that can be the really big hard part to get into this Hobby and so what I did is I actually started a website where I curated tool kits for people who want to try this as a hobby specifically it's called Sutcliff hanson.com there's a link down below and uh yeah that that is you can find kits for you know beginner intermediate advance and it can be your first steps into the world of watch repair and watch restoration because it can be very intimidating when you don't know anything about what tools to get yet so I went through and picked out the ones that I felt were the best uh compromise in some case sometimes it's just the best of the best because you need the best stuff and and it's worth it and uh you know sometimes for some of the more simple tools you can get something that's a little more affordable and I tried to find the best combination of that I'm actually uh going to send one of our we we have a it's called the watchmaking starter box and it comes with just the be bones tools that you need to take apart and put back together a movement and it also comes with a movement that you get to do that with and I'm going to send one of those to Max amillion as well just as a gift they make a good gift uh they're kind of made for that you know for if you know somebody in your life who wants that and hopefully Max Million will enjoy it and maybe even give me some updates this is the type of uh you know for me it's a hobby but you know for many people it's a profession that uh I mean it's at risk this is the type of thing that can go away right uh if if people don't teach the Next Generation how to properly work on restore service movements like this that is the type of thing that can kind of disappear to time and and I don't want that to happen I think horology in general watch repair restoration watch making is a super fascinating subject I mean it's the reason I started this channel is because I started going down that road myself and I wanted to show you what I found fascinating because I figured I can't be the only one who thinks this is cool right and as it turns out there's a lot of people uh who who think this is cool even people who don't own watches or don't really care about watches you know kind of want to see what's going on in these little mechanical Wonders that we wear on our wrist every day as you can see I've got this one almost all the way disassembled and it's coming apart beautifully it it actually is in excellent shape this movement is in such good condition that it makes me wonder if perhaps this watch had been sitting for a very long time um you know watches that lead long life of services and being opened and maybe something goes wrong with them you can tell even on the inside and this one is just gorgeous it's nicely finished across the board too it has all of the kind of traditional uh finishing types that you see right here these uh overlapping circles is called peage and on the other side you saw those stripes on the bridges and those are called Geneva Stripes this watch was actually made in Geneva as well although Geneva stripes are used in watches from many different places okay and we can take apart the keyless works here as we finish up the disassembly for the most part watch is running so fast let's take a look at the uh at the main spring when you when it comes to the working on the main spring on a watch you've got different options there's a little bit of grease in in there but nothing too bad that's pretty typical oh oh no God uh I was trying to take the barrel Arbor out and the spring flung it away okay it looks like it uh it just bounced onto the desk here so not a huge deal gotta be careful with that whoa um what I was going to say though is you can either reuse the spring or you can get a new main spring and it's always kind of a decision that you have to make I'll take out the crystal here oh that's tough that's actually usually Crystal come out quite easily what is going oh oh I see yeah so this is an armored Crystal do you see that metal tension ring on the inside that actually pushes out against the edge of the Crystal and means that the crystal needs to be pressfit into place and it makes it a little bit more waterproof by doing so it's also why it was difficult to uh remove but yeah with the main spring you can uh replace it or you can uh reuse the same one that you've got and if you reuse the same one that you've got you've got find a way to get it back into the main spring Barrel safely a lot of times people if you can find a new main spring that fits they just go with that because you don't need the main spring winders that way and it's also not a bad idea to replace the main spring most of the time so if you're just starting out it's totally okay to just replace the mainspring every time oh look at that so this has one of those gaskets that's like a clear plastic rather than what we use now which is like a black rubber you know an O-ring now now this looks like one of those kind of flatter clear gaskets it actually held up reasonably well but we will need to replace it uh to make sure that the waterproof uh capabilities of this watch is at least as high as we can get it I would like it you know to get to the point where Maximillion can wear this watch every day and part of that of course is going to be cleaning things so what we're going to do now is take every single part and put it into these little mesh baskets where it can be put into the watch clean machine this is an absolutely vital part of servicing a watch this removes not just dirt and debris but also any leftover lubricant or oil that was on the watch that had since dried up and it's really important to do so and the way that I do it is I use this watch cleaning machine that has three different stages this first one is the actual cleaning solution it's like a solvent and the next two aren't they're uh they're just rinses but I mean they're pretty powerful rinses as as well and by the time the watch goes through this thing all three stages it usually comes out pretty darn clean with that we'll let it go through its cleaning cycles and uh and while that's happening I did want to say thank you to everybody who supports me on patreon it's basically the place uh where you can support your favorite content creators so people that make videos here on YouTube or uh songs or podcasts or artwork or anything like that and you can support the people directly and it can really provide like a a useful foundation for Content creators because that way you know you're getting it directly from the people who are watching it also gives you a direct line to the people that you are watching for messages or for posts and things like that so anyway I just wanted to say thank you very much to everybody who supports me on patreon and if you do decide to do so you'll get a wristwatch Revival sticker in the mail as well as a thank you card for me for whatever level you uh choose to do it really means a lot to every each and every one of you who supports me and I just wanted to say thank you okay the other thing we need to clean up is the case and the related case items and I'm going to use some distilled water here in my ultrasonic cleaner and this is my preferred method for cleaning these things I also use a specific cleaner for Ultrasonic cleaners in here and then I can just put the case and all of the case Parts in and what will happen is I'll run it through a cycle the water gets warmed up and in then the ultrasonic waves are going through it as well and uh with that it will safely clean up everything and take a look at the parts here out of the watch cleaning machine looking all nice cleaned up and ready for reassembly now let's take a look at this main spring situation here and I want to show you kind of how it works I thought maxilon might like this as well so the first thing that you'll notice here is there's a little tiny hook on the outside do you see that little extra piece of metal right there that's a hook meant to grab onto the inner coil of the main spring itself which actually has a little slot cut into it for that hook do you see that slot on the inside left part that those two interact and it'll grab onto it so that when you wind the watch it'll start to turn it from the inside now you might be wondering though well what holds the the main spring steady you see that Groove in the outer edge of the barrel if you look at where the main spring actually itself actually rubs up against the barrel it's right here with that little extra tab that tab will grab onto that Groove and that's what you feel when you get to the end of the wind where it won't let you wind it anymore and that's it in between it's just a whole bunch of tension now in order to get this main spring back in I'm going to use main spring wiers now do you see that little hook right there that's meant to replicate the same one as on the inner diameter or I should say outer diameter of the barrel Arbor so it does the same thing it grabs onto that inner coil and then allows you to wind that main spring in and as you can see I put the main spring over where that hook is down at the bottom and that hook will grab onto the inner coil of the main spring when I turn the handle so this is basically just replicating what's happening anyway in uh the main spring barrel and this part goes over and there's a little slot on the side so that when you wind it everything can stay flat and then once you start winding boom you can see the main spring just starts going into the tool here and I have to wind the the whole entire thing now when you get to the very end though you do have to be a little bit careful because that little tab at the end can get stuck and so I'll usually just use a pair of tweezers to kind of ease it in there we go just like that and that puts everything inside of the handle there and now this is actually the trickiest part of the whole thing is to remove the handle with without having the main spring go flying out but you get used to it and you can see the main Spring's nicely nestled and for all our hard work we get this it's it's a great feeling when that main spring just snaps into place and it's uh and then and then it's ready for you to put the arbor back in as well and again this has that hook on the outside so it needs to sit on the inner coils of the main spring and I'll use a little bit of medium visc it oil here too where that Arbor interacts with this lid and this is the last part of a main spring Barrel they call it a barrel complete when it has everything the spring the arbor the uh the barrel itself as well as the lid and there we go that little tool just helps me snap the lid into place and then I can set the main Spring right where it goes in the watch and as you can see it spins freely and it's in really good condition as well now I do need to reassemble the seconds pinion here this type of watch has a center second hand meaning that there's a second hand in the middle of the front of the dial right old watches had them off to either the side or down at the bottom as their own separate hand but this is one of the ways that they figured oh look we can actually put uh second's hand on the same axis that the hour and minute's hand is on and this is one of the ways that they do it so this is a little tiny tension spring that just holds that pinion in place we'll put we'll install that later but I just wanted to get it uh put back together for now we can do the train wheels and these are the wheels that take the energy from the main spring barrel and put it down to the escapement which actually uh regulates the watch on on how fast or slow that it actually runs as you can see each of these wheels represents a huge gearing ratio difference and if you were to look at how slowly the actual mainspring Barrel un winds it's very very slow and then the SEC the center wheel which I just put in and then there's the third and the fourth and then the escape and when you gear it down like this over and over and over the end result is that the last wheel on the train spins very very quickly and uh you turn that very slow moving motion of the main spring barrel and by the time it gets to the Escape wheel it spins so fast you can't see it anymore you know with your with your naked eye okay now we can put the barrel bridge on this is this one happens to have a jeweled Center bearing for the center wheel and then it has the normal non for the uh for the mainspring barrel itself some watches do have a jewel there as well it does move so slowly though that many of them don't now we can put the train wheel bridge on and this one will have as you can see uh jeweled bearings for the uh third fourth and Escape wheels and there I already got it into place and by the way that's a sign of a really well-made watch too when that train wheel Bridge kind of just falls into place and you don't have to wrestle with it for half an hour that's a very good sign so another quick test and if you look in the lower left you can't even see the the Escape wheel until it stops now we can put the click and the click spring into place The Click is a very simple device in fact there's numerous ways that that watch uh companies accomplish this goal this the way that you see here is the most common among the Swiss Brands especially of anything in this era or even up through the 70s uh this was the very typical way to do it it's a little bit tricky as you can see but there's this is called The Click spring and it just provides a a small amount of tension on this item here which is the click itself and then all that does is bump up against the ratchet wheel which is attached uh to the arbor which attaches itself to the main spring Barrel I know that got a little bit complicated but it's the thing that spins underneath and all that does is say you may spin one way and you may not spin another way a typical ratcheting type of situation you know think about maybe like the bicycle you had when you were a kid you know if you had one of those bikes where you could spin the the wheels the pedals one way but not the other I'm going to use a little bit of medium viscosity oil for in between here as well and what I do is I just kind of wedge the oiler in between and then just wait and the capillary action will actually pull that oil directly into that surface and I'll give it just a quick spin to make sure that it gets spread around properly I'm using a little bit B of medium viscosity oil on the bridge itself here you can see there's a little bit of wear where the rodium plating has actually worn away and it's revealing a little bit of the brass and that's because every time you wind your watch by hand which this is a hand a hand wound watch so you have to do it every time um that Crown wheel is what it's called it does Spin and it is up against the uh the bridge there okay two tiny screws here to hold on that Center piece and that'll allow that Crown wheel to rotate around it there's again a number of ways that you can hold that Crown wheel in place many Brands choose to do this which is to use two offset smaller screws um some Brands choose to use one screw in the center but if you do that they will almost always make it a reverse Threaded Screw so that the screw doesn't get backed out by the natural winding motion of the watch because that goes the same direction that would unwind the screw if it or a normal one okay so this is now the ratchet wheel and as you can see it has a square center hole and that lines up with the top of the barrel Arbor which is sitting in the barrel underneath it sort of attaches them together like a sandwich so that you get this uh ratchet wheel on the top and then the actual Barrel underneath and as you can see when I wind it it'll actually start unwinding as well now we can flip the watch over and uh take a look at the keyless works here and this hasn't changed in a long time again this watch is from the late 40s and everything looks basically identical to how watches are have been made since uh this has really become the typical way to do it and it uses what called what's called a clutch wheel and a sliding clutch to accomplish two goals uh the number one goal is so that you can wind up your watch but the other goal is so that you can set the hands on your watch but using the same input in this case it's this it's the crown and stem and I'll use a a little bit of this blue grease on each of the components of the stem the blue grease tends to stick a little bit better and it's for heavier components like this and the reason to put the crown and stem in right now is that I'd like to put this part in and this is the setting lever and it actually engages with a slot on the stem and uh lets to kind of lock it down so that you can actually start to use it and test it out while you're reassembling as I go through I'm going to go ahead and just put on the Canon pinion now this is friction fit so just a good firm push over that Center wheel will'll get it into place and then a little bit of medium viscosity oil on the post where these next two wheels will sit just to make sure that they can spin smoothly and not have any issues down the line that's just an intermediate wheel and this is the minute wheel here these are just geared so that they turn at the appropriate number of times which is you know a minute wheel once a turn full rotation once per minute little bit of medium grease excuse me oil once again on these posts and then this is just the other side of the barrel and I'm going to use the same technique that I used before where I just let the oil kind of seep in now I got a little bit too much so I'll use some Rico to clean that up you just don't want oil just sitting around on a movement again same uh viscosity oil for inside of the sliding clutch because that's actually where this part right here which is called the Yoke it it interacts with it and again you know whenever you have metal on metal you want to have a little bit of uh of lubrication there just to make sure that there's no shavings or that things don't deteriorate over time now this is the Born to Fly spring this is the one that's jumped away on me the most as you can see it's a tight fit and it's a pretty beefy spring because you really do need have serious pressure on that yolk but I got a pretty decent technique for getting it in there now you know um pinning it down with a stick or a piece of pegwood and then using your tweezers to kind of drag it into plac has really worked well for me and here I'm going to use some grease for where that spring meets up with the yolk and then on the other side where the yolk meets up with the uh setting lever and just make sure that this is you know properly lubricated and then again same issue I have a little bit too much sitting on there so I'm just going to use the Tico to clean up any excess okay now we can put the setting lever spring on and this is a two-step process um basically you set it into place you put the screw in and you screw it down but you don't have to screw it down all the way because you do have to make sure that the spring part is actually properly engaged and you just do that like this see and now it's it's stuck over and engaged and now I can finish screwing down this part and make sure that it's actually secure a quick test just to make sure that it's working and once again I can use the grease to make sure that it uh any of the parts that are actually metal on metal uh get proper lubrication and again if there's any extra Roo which is kind of like Silly Putty but for grownup is people it'll clean it up for you now I did not put the uh the pallet Fork here into the watch cleaning machine you can usually do so but it is the pallet Fork Jewels are actually held in place by an organic material called shellac that you heat up and then it dries very very hard and very very dense technically the chemicals in the watch cleaning machine could soften it so I leave it out and I clean it in a solution called one dip where you just put it in give it a good slash and then dry it off and it so you reduce that risk of of softening the shellac to basically zero I have put pallet Forks into the watch cleaning machine and not had issues as well so it's not a huge deal uh either way I don't think but it's just you know better be on the safe side okay now we've got the pallet fork in place and that means that oh and by the way this is a similar process too where you make sure it's set and then you finish screwing them down but now we can put in the balance and we'll see if this watch wants to run for us remember it was running very very fast oh it's close it it does definitely want to run and it is running but it looks like it's kind of barely going yeah just a little bit of a stopper there now it's important to remember a I haven't even finished you know installing the bridge yet and there it looks like it actually kicked up after I got it screwed down all the way it does look like it's running a little bit slow still low amplitude not a lot of power there but we haven't actually oiled the watch yet so let's do that part now and I'll show you how to do it for some of the jewels particularly this one we use the medium viscosity oil this is a center Jewel so this is uh one of the bigger heavier Wheels in in the watch the rest of them we're going to use Mobius 9010 which is the thin viscosity oil and you want to use a very very very small amount of it where it just coats the inner part of that pivot if you use too much it's interesting what will happen is it'll actually flow down that pivot and it'll go down into the watch now there's not enough there to like screw stuff up but what it means is that that oil is no longer suspended in that pivot and doing its job because it all drained out to go down to the bottom part so you do actually want to use a very very very small amount if possible now this is actually really cool so this watch even though it's from the late 40s has what they call an Inca block shock protection system on it which is what you see here it's a it's a brass spring that means that if the watch were to get dropped it won't necessarily snap that pivot where watches from this era and before it was very very common for the balance staff to break it uh basically if you dropped your watch hard you could pretty much guarantee that you have a good chance of having a broken balance stuff but as a feature it came out now it's ubiquitous nobody makes watches without shock protection but at this time this was pretty new uh Inca block was some tech again I'm really impressed by this watch like this movement in this watch was a high-end movement for its day it really somebody you know that wanted a really nice watch that could last them a very long time as the one who bought this as you can see this jewel is now flat and reflective and no longer has any dried on oil on it and that means that I can replace the oil again with the Mobius 910 that thin viscosity oil and as you can see I just put a tiny droplet right in the center and then I can put the jewel setting on it and it'll actually stick together because the capillary action from that oil but yeah I'm impressed by this watch uh you know most watches from this era don't have shock protection system at all and they even put it on the dial of the watch that it has Inca block and on the case back as well like this was a a feature that people wanted and that they understood that this would increase the longevity of their watch by quite a bit and it really does by the way okay now I can just replace that Inca block setting and after I finish oiling everything else let's see how the watch is doing hey that's pretty darn good much better time much better amplitude but there's a pretty significant beat error there 3.8 milliseconds you know that's a little bit high and I would prefer to remedy that rather than leave it my tolerance for a watch of this age is I want it under 1 millisecond perfect is zero milliseconds that that's what you really really want that can be very difficult to achieve on a watch like this but you know at least to get it under one it'll run fine it won't affect the timee keeping and everything will be good but 3.8 3.9 like that that's actually pretty far out so so what I can do here is yeah we have to go backwards a little bit and I'm going to actually just let down the main spring and take apart the balance and take out the pallet fork and stuff and then I can put the balance back into place and this will allow us to get at least an idea of what direction we need to go so if you take a look at the two metal posts at the bottom and then the jewel that sits in between you can get an idea for which way it's facing in this case it's facing off to the right a little bit which means that I need to move the whole balance assembly over to the left by two de I don't know three something you know some fraction of a tiny amount and the way that I do this is I disassemble the entire balance and then the the hairspring is actually held on by a metal call it and if I take a tiny tiny screwdriver I can actually turn it you see how much I turned it that was it like that tiny little amount over to the side in an attempt to get that Jewel to rest between like that so if I give it a quick flick and see where its natural resting state is I want it between those two posts about as close as I can get and that looks pretty good actually that was a a decent shot at a first adjustment so let's take a look and see how it does now hey that's much better 8 milliseconds in fact 7 and uh it's still running at plus 1 seconds a day and 234° of amplitude so I am thrilled with that and we're going to call this a runner now take a look at the Crystal it's got some pretty deep scratches on it but I wanted to keep the crystal original to it cuz it's actually in good shape over all so I'm going to refurbish this Crystal instead of uh installing a new one this time so I've got these sanding sticks that I like to use I like to use these for multiple different purposes you know it gives you a kind of a hard back to use on it and it comes with eight of them so there's like this nice progression and I'm going to start off with the the coarsest one that I'll use here and the idea here is to knock down those scratches this Crystal is made of acrylic it's a fairly soft material and so you know it works pretty well uh when it comes to getting refurbished it is a amenable material for that it is a process however so I'm going to have to go through probably four or five maybe six of these sticks you know one at a time and then we're going to finish with a liquid polish as well as you can see the the crystal gets very Smoky and cloudy when you're still in the early processes of this but as long as you get those major scratches down with the first uh sanding stick then you can wet sand all the way through the rest of them uh one at a time until you get to what looks like a pretty darn smooth surface by the time it gets to the the second to last step and the last step like I said is actually using like a liquid polish that's made specifically for crystals like this so as I clean up a little bit here take a look pretty good right you can see the fundamentals are good no deep scratches or anything like that but it's not crystal clear and that's what this polyat does this is a great little product if you have any watches with um with acrylic crystals on it this can really do wonders to help bring them back to life you just use a little bit of the polyat and then a cloth like this and you just go to town I mean I'll you do this for 5 minutes give it good pressure and you know you can repeat the process once if you want as well I like like to repeat it because uh once again we're doing like a full Crystal refurbish on this thing but it works wonders on these crystals so quick clean up and let's take a look at how it came out and look at that I mean what an incredible Improvement right so much better and I'm telling you these crystals if you just take your time they really come back to life okay now we got to deal with the hands now I uh had a chat with maximilan about what he wanted to do and he decided he did want to do to reloom the hands he didn't want to leave them empty like this and I've got a loom kit that I got that uh kind of imitates old loom loom turns into a a light creamy color than like a darker color and then kind of like a pumpkin color and then it turns kind of brown and black as it ages the good Loom radium loom turns into this kind of dark nasty color and so I'm going to pick something in the middle this has a a slightly orange-ish Hue to it but it's on the little bit darker side you can get a feel for the pigment color right there it looks a little different when it's actually dried and everything but something like that and what I do is I take the glow-in-the-dark pigment and then I mix it with a binder here and a binder is just a liquid that allows me to dissolve that pigment in it spread it onto the hands and then it will dry up and leave behind a structure for that pigment to kind of live in and so I just put some of the binder in my little mixing cup along with with the pigment and then get to mixing and that's it I mean it's not that hard to do you but the key here is you want to get the right consistency and this is too thin so what do I do I add a little bit more pigment to it and you just go back and forth until you get the right feel for how the pigment should be and how the the total uh mixture should be you don't want it too thin it'll run through and kind of get everywhere and you don't want it too thick because then you can't use capillary action to help keep it between the space es in the hands and it'll do it by itself if you get it right and you're careful about it okay so there's our pigment now I can take the hands as you can see I've used two little sticks of Roo to make some bridges for it and watch just a little tiny bit on an Oiler and if I pull it across it just goes right into the grooves of the hand automatically and I can do that same thing here and you can see how you need it to be liquid so that it can actually fill in those gaps on its own how liquid does if it's a little too thick it won't do that and again if it's too thin uh you won't have enough material there for it to be properly glow-in-the-dark okay so while that's drying we can uh replace the Crystal and as I mentioned this is a little different than normal because it's a tension ringed Crystal so this needs to be pressed into place uh and I just mean press fit like squished in there and so I'll use a a base on the bottom of my Rober press here that just fits the the case itself and then I can put the crystal nicely refurbished thank you very much uh in I can just seat it gently into place and I'll just use a little protective film here just so there's no scratches and then I can use my Rober press to pretty gently actually uh pop the crystal back into place you'll you'll hear it and feel it when it goes in there just like that and it'll seat itself and again that metal tension ring will push out against the Crystal and make sure that uh it's as waterproof as it can be so that looks beautiful in fact it looks like a brand new Crystal I'm pretty happy with how that turned out and one last thing before we uh do the final assembly we need to change the gasket that's in the crown here and there's a little cover that needs to come off but as you can see the gasket it's it's actually full of dirt and grime and then there's also a rubber gasket in side and I'm just going to use this pick oh yikes uh to uh to take the gasket the old gasket out you can see it's pretty well worn and ready to be replaced and there's a bunch of Gunk that's still inside so what I'll do is I'll get it a little bit loose and then I'll put this Crown into the ultrasonic cleaner and this is what it comes out looking like after much much better and in order to help make it as waterproof as I can for maxilon I'm going to use some silicone grease here to help kind kind of keep everything together and then I can replace it with a new gasket and after that we can put on the little cap that keeps everything together and then we can get ready for the final assembly and we can do the final assembly on the movement I mentioned this part before this is the center seconds that I had put back together but I haven't reinstalled it in the watch yet so a little bit of uh of oil there and as you can see it goes right through the center wheel there's actually a uh a hole through the center wheel that that uh pinion can go through the question is though how does that pinion turn the pinion is what the hand the second's hand the one that tells you how many seconds have gone by is actually attached to so how does it turn and this is how it turns this wheel attaches to the top of the fourth wheel pivot and then it turns and then it turns the second's hand so what that means is I just need to make sure that it's properly aligned with the pivot and then I'm actually going to use my hand press to put this into place you can use a staking set you can use a bunch of different tools but this is not a complicated process you just need to give it a good firm press and uh it will go into place like that that's that's the beginning and end of it right there now we can finish assembling the watch itself uh you know I need to put the dial on I need to put the hands on I need to case up the watch and then we need to pick out a new strap for Maximillion as well and there's that dial again got to be careful with it those Loom plots the dark Loom around the outside are uh are radioactive so you know you want to wear a mask for something like this you want to make sure that you're in a well ventilated space and if you don't know what you're doing with it I would not work on these for what it's worth okay this is a silicone grease applicator here so we're going to replace the gasket for the case back since we're almost ready to put this watch fully back together and a little bit of silicone grease makes it a little bit more pliable it makes it last a little bit longer and it makes it a little bit more waterproof as well so there we go now this is an interesting thing that I've never actually dealt with before Max amillion made a special request so often times watch makers will carve numbers or something into the back of the watch when they work on it this one actually has a couple watch makers marks I don't that i' I've always felt like it I didn't feel right about you know carving my name or whatever into somebody else's watch but Max actually asked me to do it and so I said okay and I actually I'm going to go with my my dad's initials we share the same name group his name was Lee Marshall Sutcliff and my name is Marshall Lee Sutcliff uh so we're kind of named after each other and uh I didn't do a great job with it but Max ason so I went for it let's take a look at how the hands came out o that looks nice yeah I like that color see if you use brand new loom it's very very bright white and it really stands out against an age dial like that and I don't like that this I do like though I think that's a really nice color you know for an older watch like this uh down to the 40s you know from the 1940s so now we can put the uh watch hands back on I also think it'll go well with how this style looks overall as you can see it's got that age oh yeah that's cool I could have matched I actually gave maximilan the the choice to match it up to the loom plots on the outside I wouldn't recommend it because radium Loom plots look dirty and kind of worn out um but you know everybody has their own opinion so I asked him he he agreed with me though he said no I don't I don't want it to look like that I'm hope that he's happy with how the loom came out here as that was his decision I am this is what I would have done too so I think Max amillion has good taste okay and there's the second hand that I was talking about before and I can just again gently put that into place now what I like to do is use a microfiber cloth to just clean up the uh interior of the Crystal and then uh an air blower just to make sure that there's no fibers or anything on the dial or on the inside of the crystal before I go ahead and recase the watch and here you know you can kind of get it place and then turn everything over before you get everything kind of lined up because you do need to make make sure that everything's lined up so that this part can go in here and there went in just fine no problem and I can uh make sure that that's good and then as you can see there's a movement ring here as well this is very typical this takes up the space between the movement and the case and make sure that nothing can move around inside and then we can put the case back on I can't wait to see how this watch came out I mean the fact that it still runs so well after all this time and it needed just a good service is really impressive and as I said whoever bought this watch they got a nice one waterproof Inca block all of it and yeah the crowns like a little stiff but that's sometimes normal and it looks like the hands are setting just fine and take a look at this thing what a beautiful watch and I can't believe it Max Million found this thing at a uh at a flea market for $33.50 from his grandpa what a great purchase from Grandpa to grandson there we're going to throw a new strap on this watch as well hopefully it'll help accentuate the dial and the patined nature of it let's see how this thing came out overall oh that is awesome I love this watch this to me is exactly the reason to do this hobby is you find something like this at the flea market for a few bucks and you can turn it into a watch you could wear for the rest of your life and maybe even have some good memories of a family member as well now before I sign off I did want to show you the uh glow-in-the-dark section the loom and see how it does you can see the hands in the Middle with the new loom are really glowing where the ones on the outside that are radium are mostly dead and they won't glow at all under normal conditions either that's going to do it for this video I just wanted to say thank you so much for hanging out with me and going on this journey I really appreciate that you take the time if you want to find me on Instagram I am wristwatch Revival I hope to see over there and I hope to see you on the next video we'll see you then

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 127,638

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Id: eCWJ_GbGEck

Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2024