1964 US Military Vintage Watch Restoration

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wrist watch revival my name is marshall thank you so much for coming along this time around we've got kind of a cool military watch from 1964. i know that because even though you can see the front is a bit beat up and perhaps a little bit rusted and the keyless work seems to be at least somewhat intact here the back of the watch actually has some engravings it says mike rogers it also just says mike looks like mike had a little bit of time to plow away on this thing and it's you can see at the bottom it says november 1964. and this was apparently issued by the us military because it also says that on it as well down at the bottom and uh yeah a little looking around and yeah apparently these were used by the us military and this one belonged to a mike rogers so um i got this one off of ebay it was listed as not running uh and when i got it it would actually work a little bit so i figure we'll give it a service and then we'll figure out what's going on with it from there a lot of times the services all these watches need interesting thing about this is that the i try to get the case back off but it's solid the whole entire case back is solid and what that means is in order to get to the movement we need to take the crystal off of the front and so i've got this crystal tool crystal removal tool and as you can see the way it works is pretty straightforward it uses those kind of claws in the front to grab on the side of the crystal and compress it and boom it comes right off just like that now you can definitely see there's some wear on the crystal as well some rust on the inside of the watch looks like a little bit of water may have gotten in there at some point the dial is in pretty good shape though you can see the loom on the indices is pretty well worn and let's see if we can just pop this well pop this movement out it doesn't really want to come out and i realized that's because the winding stems in but also i can't get to the part on the back of the movement where you loosen the winded stem but it feels way looser than normal so my guess is that it's one of those two-part winding stems and we'll find out now otherwise i just broke it and yeah it is so this uh the crown and the stem actually click into another section of the stem that then goes into the movement so movements out of the case let's get underway here again we're just going to be servicing this watch and then we'll we'll figure out if that fixes it a lot of times when you buy these watches off of ebay that aren't running they just need a service and that's you know kind of the that's kind of what attracted to me to starting to repair vintage watches in the first place because well then you can get some pretty cool deals on some old vintage watches if you know how to repair them i know how to service them rather okay hands come off and now we can remove the dial you can see it's got a 24 inner dial ring and then a regular one on the outside there we go i'm gonna take off the canyon pinion first but it's actually kind of stuck so not really sure what's up with that and you can see it's actually running now kind of strange according to the ebay listing it would run for a little while and then stop when i had it it was fully wound and it would only run under a weird circumstance when i turned the crown to wind it even though it couldn't wind anymore it would run then i thought that was a little strange first things first let's take the balance wheel off and we'll set that aside and then we can take a look at this movement and get working on it i'm going to try to get to this canon pinion there's a little cover plate here for the hour wheel and the minute wheel quite a bit of gunk inside of this watch also kind of strange it stinks it doesn't smell very good i'm not really sure what to make of that and as you can see the there's kind of an interesting canon pinion setup here it's not actually friction fit there on to that post it's actually a two piece thing and then i can set those aside take out this intermediate wheel just because it's going to fall out anyway and now we can flip the watch over and start to disassemble the movement side here so the first thing we'll do is take off this bridge that covers up one two three four of the pivots of the train wheels is an eta or eta movement these are widely used back then and now they're probably the most common movement manufacturer that you'll find and in fact many of your favorite brands today either use them today or used to use them including basically the whole gamut the swiss watch industry used to be set up differently where different companies would specialize in different things and eta was one of the ones for off-the-shelf movements and so most watch manufacturers would say well i'm not going to build my own movement that costs way too much money in r d and the pain process of actually getting it right so i'll just buy movements high quality ones from other companies like eta now the trends have shifted and consumers actually want the companies to build their own watch movements they call those they call those in-house movements they feel more special you know they they feel like a a more unique experience i i suppose for the buyer but often times they're actually worse than the off-the-shelf movements these are tried-and-true movements that have been used in many different watch brands over years and years that have been really refined down they know exactly where the pain points are and they fix them when you see a company come up with their own movement and release it oftentimes there's issues with the first run of it so it does add to kind of a unique slash coolness factor but it isn't the most practical it usually costs more as well the other benefit to using these type of movements is are that they are almost universally serviceable you know to even somebody like me an enthusiastic amateur you know i've never worked on this particular eta movement but it's i get it right i see it right away and i know where things are i know how eta does their stuff and i'm like okay this this is straightforward never even worked on this particular movement it's always an interesting discussion to be had around movements when it comes to to watch making and which watches you decide to buy all right well we've got most of the trainer wheels taken apart here and i think i'm just going to leave the rest in place as i turn it back over and i can take apart the keyless works and as you can see we've got a problem here so first major issue detected the setting lever spring is broken it is uh no longer with us as it were this is the yoke spring coming out and that lets me take out the yolk as you can see once again there is a little bit of rust damage here though it doesn't look catastrophic but you know this this thing saw a little bit of water so hopefully it'll clean up now i can take apart the main spring first the barrel that houses it and then the spring itself will come out it's also always worth noting when you do this which direction the spring is turning as you can see this one goes in a certain direction but if you put the spring upside down it looks the opposite and you want to know that beforehand because you got to wind it back in the same way that it went in and i've done it the opposite way before and the what ends up happening is the barrel arbor that the little circle in the middle can't catch onto the spring and the watch won't be able to be wound so you want to make a quick note of that if you don't know already most of them are right-handed as they call them most movements but some aren't and there comes the mainspring out and you know it doesn't look too bad it's probably pretty old but that could be a lot worse than that so let's get this thing back together after it's been through the cleaner and to get the mainspring back in i'm going to use a little bit of grease and when i mean a little bit or when i say a little bit i mean it i'm actually just using this to kind of put a very thin film i don't think you want very much of this uh in in my studies if if you will i've found that uh putting too much oil on the mainspring is not a good thing it actually attracts dirt okay now we can use our main spring winders to wind the main spring back in if the mainspring is in decent condition then these are really great to have they're expensive tools but they mean that you don't have to buy a mainspring for every single watch you work on some watches just need a new mainspring and that's fine but some don't and this main spring looked okay it can always be tricky to get this little tab in at the end but we got there and there we go gotta love that feeling spring back in the barrel and now we can reseat the barrel arbor and one thing that happens from time to time and that i don't always show on the channel but i figured i would this time is well we need to get our oils ready the lubricants that we're going to use to oil this watch of course they're really important but also you know i keep them in this this little tray thing that lets me get just a small amount but they run out right and you also want to change them out every once in a while too just in case anything is accumulated in them and this is how i refill that i actually take the little tiny oil thing and then i use tweezers to gather some and then just put some in the grease actually comes in a syringe like this so i don't do it for this and then the oil that i use on the pallet fork jewels is also a little bit more firm so i just sort of scrape some off now we can get back underway but that's how i do that now we can put the barrel back together a little bit of hp 1300 on the top that's a medium viscosity oil so you don't use it for the finest of uh pivots but you use it kind of for the middle ground and this little tool pretty cool i got it off of ebay for cheap and it works just as well as the expensive version which is like 30 bucks or something okay so let's get underway with uh putting this thing back together and see if it'll run it's always the first step and of course the most important thing to do here are the train of wheels and this one's a little bit of a tricky setup because it does have all four wheels under one bridge and that means that we need to get the pivots lined up both top and bottom all at the same time which is yeah it's a little tricky there we go and now we can try to fit the bridge on here and see if we can get these pivots lined up so i'm going to start by kind of laying the bridge on top of all the pivots and then what will usually happen is one or two of them will engage with pivot holes and kind of fall into place but then one or two aren't and so i'm just going to very gently use this stick to kind of keep a very slight pressure on the top and then i'm going to just very slowly move the wheels around underneath until they all fall into place and it looks like they have here and yeah if i move the barrel as you can see everything's spinning so that's really nice because uh again that isn't always the case but uh these movements they're well made they go back together pretty easy and now once again i'm going to be extra careful to use this little stick just to keep that pressure down because now that i'm screwing down this bridge over the top if one of those pivots were to come out before i screw down the screws well then that pivot would break because i would screw it down and it would be out of position and it would snap and so what i do is i screw it down gently with the screws and make sure that everything looks good before giving it the final torque down now i'm going to put the setting lever screw into place before i put on the barrel before i theoretically put the barrel bridge on there we go and this one goes on much easier it actually only has one proper pivot there that's the top of the barrel bridge so we can get this installed now the click spring goes into place and this one's actually kind of cool it's not held under any particular tension because the click which is what i'm putting in here actually just bumps up against it and i'm still just going to be careful by using a little helper stick here just to make sure that nothing goes flying but as you can see it actually sits with some room there normally those springs actually hold it under tension but as you can see this one has a little bit of a different design okay that means i can get the ratchet wheel into place there we go and that means that the crown wheel can go in there's always this little washer that goes on the outside of where the crown wheel is and remember this is a reverse threaded screw so you always have to be careful with that now you can take a look at the setting lever spring here it is broken here's the broken part that was floating around in the movement that could have been causing some of the issues that we saw and this is what a new one looks like or at least one that i found off of ebay i don't know if it's brand spanking new but at any rate a certainly intact one and that means that we can get to working on the keyless works now so first we're going to get some grease the blue stuff is is actually grease so that's the hardest core of the oils or lubricants that we use inside of a watch meant for high friction areas and uh the keyless works is absolutely a high friction area that of course is the part of the watch that's responsible for letting you both wind it and also set the time you can put that intermediate wheel on and now we can go for the winding stem and it's a little bit of finicky because i have to kind of lay the crown in there and it doesn't really click in but we'll make it work now i can go for the setting lever this is always tricky as well because you're going to want to pick this up and apologies for the blur but it's two-handed operation there and then i can screw that down while holding it with my finger and we can see okay it's engaging and it's working now i can go for the yoke and the yoke spring there's a pretty big yolk spring and there's not a lot of room so once again i'm just gonna try to make sure to keep everything held down the best i can and of course i immediately fling it across the table but thankfully that i had that black helper stick there that that actually kept it from really flying off and now i'm going to be even more careful and i just need to it came out of its hole but i just need to get this spring bent down up against that yoke and there we go all right so that's business i'm going to put a little bit of grease here between the spring and the yoke because when you pull out the crown to set the time those actually rub against each other and that's a high friction part okay here's a new setting lever spring going in so that replaces the broken one and again the fact that the actual arm on that had broken off and was kind of floating around and the keyless works well who knew who knows what that could have done to the watch and how it runs again any of these high friction areas some grease gets applied where it's metal on metal and can see i'm just getting some into the loop here and a little too much you almost always want to err on the side of less than more when it comes to greases and oils inside of a watch so i like to clean it up if i feel like i've gone a little bit too hard now i'm gonna take off a cap jewel and i'm gonna put that in some one dip it's a solvent that cleans it and now i can put on just a little tiny dot of oil right in the center of it and then i can take that very carefully turn it over and set it into place and that was probably the best shot i've had i'm actually getting better at this but oftentimes it'll bump up against something move the oil around on the cap and you've got to throw it back in the one dip and then re-oil it and try again but this one went really well so that cap jules in place and now i can start to put together the motion works on the other side here this is a little bit of a finicky operation because it's kind of like a sandwich the minute wheel here actually fits between two wheels on that center part so i have to kind of put them both in at the same time i guess is how you could say it like that and then there's just this little cover plate that kind of keeps everything in place okay so main components together now we need to oil the jewels and there we go you can see just a tiny bit of oil when possible that's okay and not the best work with getting it on the side a little bit but uh yeah at least we got the right amount in there and once again now it's time to get to these cap jewels for the balance now this is kind of a cool setup this uh spring actually has a little metal rod that you can see at the top that it kind of keeps it in place and that it runs along and i'm just going to use two sets of tweezers here to rotate this until i can flip it open to get to the cap jewel and the jewel setting which need to be cleaned yeah it's kind of a nice little setup that way the the spring can't go flying off so i'm going to use some radical and that gets the cap jewel but the setting is actually still stuck in here so i'll use some radico to take that out as well this is what it looks like that circle in the middle is dried oil you can see some residue on there as well and what it's supposed to look like is this that circle you can see in the middle is now oil that i've placed in the middle between the capsule and the setting the oil is then suspended between those two jewels and then when the pivot is in there it has a kind of a perfect set of oil that it sort of floats in if you will and that way it kind of suspends that oil right where the pivot needs it and now it's time to close up this spring and then i can just sort of nudge it around in a circle to lock it back up just like that it's just your nice little spring setup and that brings us to the other side this is actually the top if you look behind my tweezers you can see the balance spring gently open this up and then we'll grab the cap jewel with some radical and see if we can't get the setting out of here as well there we go and now that that's been cleaned and again has a drop of oil in the middle which you can see there that middle circle is actually oil that's suspended we can put it all back together and done deal all right so here's the moment of truth we can go for the pallet fork now get that in place and then we can put in the balance and see if this thing's going to run for us interestingly the the pallet doesn't get oil all the other pivots spin continuously but the palette actually just goes back and forth it doesn't spin all the way around it just goes pink back and forth and what that means is it has a much less friction overall so you they don't recommend that you actually put any oil on it at all okay there's the pallet fork in its place and now we can try out the balance and see if we've got a running watch or not so we're going to get the balance roughly situated here i'm not going to put the screw i'm not going to screw the screw down until i know that the wheel's in the right position and right now it's not this is what they call it over banked it's basically not lined up with pallet fork properly so i have to get it kind of over the hump and there we go we see life ah it's a beautiful thing isn't it really is the best part about this hobby no doubt about it and it looks like it's kicked up to life pretty well also so i'm pretty excited for that i'm gonna and this is without a full wind in the watch which i'm going to try to do here it's again it's a little tricky because of the the way that the stem kind of mates together it just makes it hard to keep it in there so screw it i'm just going to use a pin vise and we'll wind it up on a pin vise and then we can see how it's actually running with a full wind on the time grapher so let's see how it's doing okay minus two seconds a day at three 300 plus amplitude what's the beat error zero well this is just fantastic this is just the best possible outcome all right so i'm feeling really good about this because i apparently just needed a servicing and a new setting lever spring but here's the problem when i wound the watch this is an uh not an automatic it just kept spinning there was some point at which the mainspring was slipping so i had to actually take it all apart and look what happened there's a tab at the end of the mainspring that holds it against the barrel wall and it broke i may have broken it when i put it back together i'm not 100 sure but it has to be addressed so i have to take apart that part of the watch and order a new mainspring which i've got here you can see this is for the 2370 which is the model of the movement and we're gonna have to just replace this with a brand new mainspring after all so either it was fatigued too much or i did it when i put it back in or a combination of those but it has to it has to go because this watch won't hold a full wind even though it's good enough to run for a while what it means is it won't run for very long on a wind you know it could take it from a normal one which by the way you can see here the little tab at the bottom is missing and on the one in my tweezers it's still intact that's on the new one and so i just wanted to show you that which is why i took it out of the thing but we'll put it back in and do it but anyway what it means is sure it can run for a few hours that way but it's supposed to run for a couple of days off of a wind and it'll probably only run for a few hours with that part broken and that's just unacceptable so we're going to have to do this here get this barrel back together with the new mainspring put it back in it's always frustrating to have to go back and do work you've already done but it is also part of the troubleshooting experience with these watches and yeah it just is what it is so now we got to put it back together luckily i've been able to keep most of it intact you know you can see that i only had to take the barrel bridge to be able to get the barrel out so i can put that back on fairly easily here i'm back on with a click in the click spring yeah it's strange when you wind up your watch and you know you can feel it when it gets to the end if it's a manual wind watch um it should stop you at some point and this never did i could just keep turning it and turning it and if you listen closely when when a watch does that you can actually hear it slip because it'll bring up tension and then it'll kind of let go and that's what was happening with this now i'm going to give it another wind here and make sure that i can actually get to the end of the wind and i just did so that is fantastic now i feel good about this watch and like i've got it running right so now we can put the dial on as well as the hands minute hand going on now and that just leaves seconds in and that means that we can get the case ready i put the case through the ultrasonic cleaner just to to give it a cleaning this isn't the type of case that i like to do any polishing work on this is a military watch it's supposed to look like it's seen a little bit of time and i'm not going to polish it up scratches are a good thing they're a feature not a bug on a watch like this but a new crystal is needed because that crystal was way too beat up and it also i like replacing crystals because it lets you see the dial which is the most important part of the watch visually and as you can see there's a little holder that i have to put this in and then once again in order to put the crystal in the front i can't use my normal rubber press the crystal press tool that i like to use i have to use this hand tool to do it and there we go and you can see you want it to grab around each of the edges here so i'm double checking that that it's not crooked and then yeah you need to use some air here to make sure that there's no dust under there before replacing the crystal and then you just simply undo the tool and then the crystal expands into the slot just like that and again just doing a little cleaning work on it just to make sure that there's no dust or anything around and it's a nice looking little watch i'm sure it served its its prior owner mike rogers well and uh whoever ends up with it is gonna have a nice a nice little military watch from the 60s on their hand and just double checking everything looks right now what ended up happening though is i figured i'm done here this thing is great it's running perfect i'm happy but then it stopped and it basically did the exact same thing that it had done before where it run it had ran for a while but then came to a halt and i could not get it to run any further so while it was running well and i knew the mainspring was now in order i had to do more troubleshooting and again this is tough on these things because it means taking the crystal off taking the thing out of the case and doing it all over my first stop was the canon pinion the canon pinion is what drives the hands on the other side of the watch and this one has kind of a unique setup with this clipped on bottom wheel and then the canon pinion and after taking it out as you can see there's actually quite a bit of rust on there these two parts actually are supposed to be separate so i decide okay well i'm going to de-rust this and see if that helps because if the canon pinion gets mucked up then it will stop the whole watch the the part that made me curious and this is after de-rusting by the way um is that it would be a little weird for it to be able to run for a while and then stop but it was my first choice and so i looked i replaced that it still stopped so then i started looking at every single wheel under the microscope and can you see the issue here it's so subtle it's honestly difficult to see look at those teeth the top of the frame now do you see how they're worn down those ones right there that's enough to stop an entire watch those teeth got damaged at some point and what that meant was i needed to reorder another part so i got that part that was on one of the train wheels and now i can once again reassemble this watch for the third time and uh get it going i'm not gonna make you suffer through the full uh drawn out reassembly so i'm giving you kind of the quick version here but everything going back into place from scratch once again this time i put it on the time grapher it was running great and it ran all night long no problem i've been wearing it for a couple of days no issues at all and we finally have a fully functional and fixed watch this has been one of those journeys these ones are tough right that troubleshooting is hard it can be very difficult to sort out exactly what's going wrong and this one actually had three separate issues right it had two parts that needed to be replaced plus the main spring replacement as well and at the end of the day though we got a nice little watch here and i'm really proud of the work i've done on it and the fact that i brought it back to life and that somebody can enjoy the watch i wanted to say thank you so much uh for joining me for this video i really appreciate that you take the time to hang out with me and explore this awesome hobby of watch repair and watch making um if you want to see more you can follow me on instagram i do post some posts on there in between projects and and a few things like that um it's wristwatch underscore revival over on instagram and if you'd like to support what i'm doing here on wristwatch revival you can head over to my patreon it's patreon.com wristwatch revival you get some cool benefits and it's a way to support some of your favorite creators i want to say thank you to everybody that supports me on patreon and particularly trevor robert mitchell mikey james george erica dustin brenton brett alex melissa and brad thanks once again for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 28,370

Rating: 4.9624929 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: InepkSTGces

Length: 36min 40sec (2200 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021