A 1940s Helios Chronograph - will it run again?

hello boys and girls friends old and you welcome back to the channel today we have this really beat up broken old chronograph on the bench so let's see what we can do with it see the crystal is broken the hands are worn tile looks pretty good actually but the case not quite so a lot of dirt see the crown has a different color the gold plating has worn through quite a few places so yeah a lot of work to do here so let's get moving so we see the watch is not running and honestly if anyone thought that watch would be running then they should really play the lotto but inside it looks pretty okay we see the balance does oscillate so that's one of the most important things whenever we look at old watches like this if the dial is fine and the balance is fine then typically we can save the watch so let's see what we can do with this the movement is an old landron 48 and they have a little peculiar way of using the pushers for the chronograph you can maybe see that the pushers have small grooves in them and into these grooves the ends of the operating lever and the reset lever fit so it's easier to simply open those screws up and take the pushers out that way and we see the dial actually looks pretty okay the hands are a bit corroded and the plating has come off but we can deal with that the dial is secured with this old dog screws which can be a little bit fiddly but we'll manage in the end and then we can put the dial in the hands away safely it's a little bit difficult to see but there's a lot of dirt in the movement you see the barrel wheel is like completely jammed up and that might be the reason the watch is not running we try to let down the mainspring but it's just stuck so i will have to be very careful going forward i mentioned that this movement is londoro 48 and that is one of the most successful chronograph movements ever made i've talked a little bit about let's say the traditional chronograph makers in switzerland before and londoro was one of them founded in the late 1800s they initially made some very high-end column wheel chronographs but then they kind of struck gold with their cam shifted once and uh this one the 48 and its family members 148 248 and so on were produced in millions and this was back before globalization and looking at the movement it's quite simple there are a few parts that do a lot of things like the cam and the hammer in one and the simple springs and not a lot of parts actually i still like giving a very good performance a sturdy movement but it cannot withstand the yarn look at this this is amazing a little piece of yarn in the clutch wheel here amazing or maybe not yarn but my kittens would think so at least let's see if it runs better yeah that looks like it might actually work and this could of course be the reason the whole watch had stopped because the clutch wheel is always in contact with the driving wheel so if the clutch wheel cannot move then the entire mechanism will stop given that the london 48 family was produced in so many pieces it ran from 1937 through 1970 you will still find watches with it oh some more dirt this time on the balance wheel pivot so you will still find watches with it and they might still actually run very well and perform very well see somehow we managed to loosen up the mechanism but something is still not quite right but if we cannot let down the main spring with the crown or the ratchet wheel or the crown wheel then we can let it down as i did there with a couple of tweezers on the center wheel someone's been a dirty watch movement i think we need to uh clean you up a little bit oh dirty there are no service marks inside the case back but there are a few marks here and there so i do think the watch has been serviced but the screws are also very nice so it might be that this watch hasn't been serviced in i don't know 50 years i talked a little bit about the land raw watches in my own collection video the peculiarity with this specific family of valondra movements is that the top pusher starts the chronograph but you're sort of expecting that it also pauses the chronograph but the pulsing and the reset is actually done with the bottom pusher so if you do come across a vintage chronograph with the two sub-dials one for the minute counter and one for the running seconds and the pushers work as i just described then chances are good that it's a land around 48 family which is actually a pretty good thing given that there were so many movements made meaning that there are also parts available and color me surprised now that was actually unintended but kind of like the dramatic effect quite surprising that the barrel is not as dirty as the rest you let's see the parts are so dirty that we're gonna try to clean out most of the teeth with some rotico this is the crown wheel and we are going to pre-clean pretty much the entire movement in the ultrasonic otherwise we'll have to change the cleaning fluids in the cleaning machine pretty much for every jar look at this man 50 years worth of dirt and i guess it proves also that the watch is not water tight otherwise how would all that dirt get in we packed all the dual holes as well so let's get the pre-cleaning going and from one cleaning to the next so while we let the machines do the work for us let's have a look at the case and that is real dirt man the spring bar is very difficult to get off but uh just between you and me i don't think we're gonna reuse them anyway kind of impressive all the dirt they managed to put into this case actually i think i had to change my tissue there like three times we're also going to have some difficulties reusing the crystal so i think we'll just replace it let's also pre-clean uh the case in the ultrasonic and this time i'm gonna spare you the noise sorry spare you that noise because still have another noise we're gonna have to remove what's left of the gold plating turns out the case is actually made by stainless steel so that's kind of a good thing what's not a good thing is that the crown tube is not a tube it's part of the case so that makes it a little bit difficult to polish it uh well so i did polish it a bit better off camera and then we're ready for the gold plating i have this very nice little setup super easy to use so we first cleaned the metal with this first solution and then now we're running it through this uh nickel strike because it is steel as you see this little bubbles and then we let it sit in the gold bath for about 15 minutes and then it comes out nice and shiny and then we kind of repeat that same process with the hands we first get off the old plating and the corrosion and then we run them through the same gold plating process i have to be a little bit ingenious though with getting them to fit there with all that ready we can turn back to the movement given that this is an old watch before um inca block well not really before rinka block but before inky block became mainstream so we have to disassemble the whole balance takes a few minutes extra but it's not that much effort steady steady tiny little screws there you might remember that the mainspring was not entirely new but we have a new one when putting in a new mainspring like this in the packaging then it should actually be sort of pre-lubricated from another factory but in this old watches i do like to put in a little bit of grease the bottom of the barrel i don't think that hurts most things are fine in moderation and with the barrel ready we can oil the bottom capstone as well and then let's see if the balance is willing to rotate and that looks just fine and that beautiful blue hairspring very nice to see all right let's get the movement put back together gonna do what we normally do put the bass movement back together first and then see that it runs and runs well if it does then we can continue with the chronograph module well chronograph parts rather we're using this fixo drop it's something called ethylene inside it and the epilam makes it difficult for lubricants to creep so it basically helps the oil stay where we want it to stay and not creep anywhere else and then we're going to clean the pivots in some pith wood so they don't rub and leave residue inside the mechanism as is common with chronographs from this era the whole winding mechanism so the ratchet wheel and the crown wheel as well is on the underside of the three-quarter bridge so using some d5 oil or hp 1300 to be honest but pretty much the same and with the bridges for the train of wheels in place we can turn the movement around and put in the keyless works and the keyless works is called keyless because there is no key there used to be a key in the old days you needed a key to wind your watch and even to set it but it's stuck with us kind of like in the norwegian when we talk about flushing the toilet we say pull down the toilet and the reason is that in the old days there was a water tank like two meters above the toilet so you have this little rope so when you pull the rope you open the tank and the water came flushing down so still say pull down even though you don't pull down anymore these things tend to stick with the language for a long time as i hope you can see it's a pretty simple mechanism and that is of course a key reason why it's been so popular it is easy to work on so we're almost ready to check that the base movement works as it should we need to lubricate the pellets so what we do is actually lubricate the exit pallet stone put a little bit of oil on its face and then we rotate the escape wheel so that each tooth gets a little bit oil on it and with that fixer drop that oil will stay in place very well all right moment of truth see the balance is so sliding very nicely it's always good to see let's put some oil in the dual holes in the oil sinks and then we can de-magnetize and put the watch on the time grapher and that's a very pleasant surprise i must say we need to regulate it but straight lines and good amplitude so in the end we managed to get it running very nicely very happy to see that so with the base movement running in nicely we can turn to the chronograph i'm going to put in the driving wheel first now we can put in the clutch now not everything that looks like a screw is a screw in chronographs as i pointed out in the launching monopusher video there are always some eccentric screws and these aren't really screws they have a screw head but that's just to be able to rotate it and when you rotate it the part that's connected to it will move a little bit back and forth and that is to ensure that the depth thing so how the wheels mesh how deep they mesh is correct general rule of thumb is that the chronograph wheels should mesh about two-thirds of the tooth depth so one tooth of one wheel should go down to two thirds of the engaging tooth on the other wheel you can see that i stopped movement for putting in this little tension spring whenever working very close to the balance wheel i think it's better to be on the safe side than not yes i learned that the hard way this hammer combined hammer and cam it's a pretty cool design it was changed a little bit in later versions but it's a good design we need to make sure we either lubricate the hammer ends uh or the hardship cams on the chronograph wheels and we're using 9504 there we can also use molecule dx for instance and with everything in place let's start the chronograph and we can check how the minute flips over yeah that looks just fine the dial is in beautiful shape my wife thought i should have removed that little spot at 11 o'clock but uh i decided it's time to show who's the man in the house please baby if you see this video uh that was just a joke all right we cased the watch and we put the pushers back in the same way we took them out and we can put the dial back on and the hands now one consideration whenever you're trying to restore a watch like this do you want it to restore it so it looks let's say brand new or do you want to try to let it look a little bit its age and as viewers of this channel know i prefer to let a watch look its age but these hands for instance were so far gone that we had to do something about them but we didn't go all the way so we didn't make them completely brand new and shiny and a little bit the same with the case i think it looks much better but i didn't want it to look completely sort of fake and shiny so let me know in the comments how you feel about this approach let's start the chronograph and let it run for a few minutes and then let's try to reset it see if both hands go back to zero yeah that looks just fine put in the new glass a new crystal it's plexiglas in all of these old watches and with the watch on the fitting strap let's see if there's any difference between then and now all right let's put it on the wrist and see how it looks there that is a pretty fine vintage chronograph i think i hope 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Channel: Vintage Watch Services

Views: 71,781

Keywords: vintage watches, watch repair, watch servicing, mechanical watch, old watch, vintage watch, horology, watchmaker, watch services, watch restoration, watchmaking, old watches, oddly satisfying, relaxing video, legendary watches, mesmerizing videos, Helios Chronograph, Landeron 48, case restoration, full restoration, wristwatch revival, nekkid watchmaker, red dead restoration

Id: 4tDtUKR5kgk

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022