A Scammer Almost Got Her Gold Rolex...

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 on the bench we have this beautiful gold Rolex datejust from 1984. as you can see it's been well worn by its owner and um she did report to me that it will run for a little while and then stop uh it also may have had some moisture in uh the crown may have been opened in a little bit of weather nothing nothing too terrible there but uh I think it's going to be definitely in need of a service and we're going to be doing the just that on the channel here today as you can see it has a beautiful presidential style bracelet with no visible clasp and uh what a lovely watch this is just an absolute beaut um this one belonged to the owner's mother and it was a anniversary gift from her father to her mother it was the last one that she ended up receiving before she passed away and so it has very special sentimental value in fact this has what I would say incredible sentimental value based on my uh Communications with the owner of the watch and part of the reason that I know that also you can see by the way that the the crystals crooked that's probably not the best case scenario can see if the quick date just uh date adjustment is working on it and it looks like the hands will go yeah a little bit weird feels like it's a little gummed up too yeah this watch actually came to me via kind of bizarre circumstances I got an email from her actually to my personal email not even the one that I use for the watch stuff and she was desperate um she was asking me to return her watch and almost right away I figured out what had happened which is that she was scammed it is an unfortunate fact of life on the internet these days that there are people out there that will take advantage of people and that has happened uh for for my channel and many others here on YouTube and and elsewhere let's take a quick look and see how this watch is running before I finish the story well it's okay I mean the amplitude's low the rates a little off the beat errors are a little off but that's far from disastrous the more concerning thing is that it will stop periodically and that's something that we're going to have to deal with I'm going to take off the bracelet here so that we can get in and get the movement out but as I was saying uh she was unfortunately the victim of somebody who was posing as me and that does happen sometimes here on YouTube as well as on Instagram and I've done a bunch of things to try to fight it it's been a real kind of battle for me but um yeah and she had sent her watch off to this person the only good news is is that it was to a dummy address here in the United States and she was actually able to get the watch back um back in her hands after having sent it to that address and you know through the course of our conversations there she asked me if I would be kind enough to work on the watch for her and I said sure um so she sent it to me and then when it arrived for me it also got lost uh the the post office lost track of it for almost a week I think she was emotionally distraught after this I think I was too uh but I was able to finally track it down and we've got the watch safely in our hands and uh we're gonna restore it now for her so this has been a bit of an emotional Journey with this one um and with regards to the scam stuff I did you know I just wanted to remind everybody who watches to be extra careful not just with my stuff but anywhere on the internet any email you get any text message any website that you see you should always be extra vigilant to make sure that you know who you're actually talking to and um and do your best to protect yourself there so let's get into this we've got the case back off of this watch let's see how the movement looks inside I'm really hoping for not a ton of rust based on what she described I figure there could be some um no that's actually not too bad there's a little bit of corrosion you can see uh on the rotor there and that is likely the result of a little bit of water getting in but it doesn't it looks like maybe there was a moisture problem rather than like a water you know it's one thing if the Crown's open or if one of the seals isn't working properly for to have the water the watch submerged in water where water can flow into it versus whether moisture is able to get in you know in the air they're both bad but one is way way worse than the other and it looks like we've got the Lesser evil here so let's see how this movement looks we'll take it out of the case and we'll take the dial and the hands off now as well we'll have to take a look at that dial a little bit later you can see it also may have been the victim of a bit of this moisture you can see that kind of almost like corrosion on the surface of it sometimes we can get lucky and that will be surface level dirt that has basically been able to adhere itself to the dial because of moisture and sometimes it's the more common one where those dials actually have multiple layers on them of lacquers and paints and you know treatments and stuff and a lot of times the moisture can get underneath that in which case you can't clean it off and you're kind of stuck with it so we'll take a look at that in a little bit but for now we'll just put it in a little dial holder here and make sure it's safe as you can see this is a datejust and that indicates that it does have a date function on it and that date is right there on that date disk kind of cool it's got a the center part where it actually turns around is is jeweled there's a clip that holds the date disk in place here so we'll just remove that first not sure when the last time the watch was serviced it had been that had some writing on the inside of the case back so it's it's been service it's just probably been quite a long time she told me that she uh wears this watch all the time it's really a true Keepsake for her I really want to get it running well I also want to try to make sure that we can establish how water resistant it is if we can get it back up to the standard then that would be fantastic but even if we can't I want to be able to tell her name's Denise I want to be able to tell Denise this I want to be able to say hey don't wash your hands with this thing you know you're not jumping in the pool with it no more gardening with it but if I can get it back up to the standard that it was originally then she can do all of those things with it so that's one aspect that we'll be taking a look at here but again first we'll take apart the movement if this is your first time coming along with me from one of these Restorations this is kind of the basic of what we do as watchmakers we completely disassemble every single part of the watch the movement particularly here all the parts come apart and then we'll put it through a pretty comprehensive cleaning and then after that we'll reassemble it and while we reassemble it we'll also use modern synthetic lubricants to make sure that the watch is running not only up to its potential as far as time keeping but also for the longest period of time that we can if you're wondering what kind of time periods you should be thinking about if you do have a mechanical watch and how often you should get it serviced well most manufacturers will recommend somewhere in the five to seven year range you can absolutely get away with going quite a bit longer for that but you do start to take on risk that parts or either individual parts or you know things like how water resistant it is or whatever we'll we'll start to fade over time and if that happens it can break other things in the watch but more more often than not it's just a matter of uh replacing the parts that get worn if they do so you can risk it and go longer if your watch is running great and you're tight on money that's okay you can do it it's just you're taking on a bit more risk most of the time if you bring in your watch um you know like every five years or maybe even seven most of the time it's similar to if you bring your car in for an oil change like when they actually recommend you know which is somewhere around 3 000 and then some cars go all the way up to 10 000 miles now depending on what kind of oil in the engine and stuff but you know if you do it on the early end of things say like three or five thousand miles and you do the if you actually like watch them do it you'll see that the oil is generally in quite good condition as well as the engine you're playing it quite safe there and that's a usually a good thing to do because once things start to go wrong at that point um is when you get broken engines and it's similar with watches you need to replace the lubricants just as much as they need to be cleaned and inspected and all that okay almost got this thing apart you'll note that that is a reverse Threaded Screw you turn that one to the right to undo it they'll use screws like that anytime there's a disc or something that spins in the direction that a screw would normally unscrew that way it doesn't nudge it along as it turns and in this case this is a disc that operates on the calendar itself and as you can see there's actually a little jeweled kind of donut style Jewel here that I need to take off as well that way we can make sure that that part gets cleaned and in between and all that as well all right it's a beautiful watch Denise told me that um she she really liked Rolexes since she was very very young she said she didn't really know why she didn't you know fully understand high-end watches or anything at a young age but she was always fascinated by them so it's another reason why this is such an important item in her life it's also very motivational for me you know because it's one thing to to repair a watch that just tells the time but it's another thing to repair a watch that really means something to somebody you know okay take off the train wheel bridge that will reveal the train of Wheels right here looks like the wheel in the middle there is stuck so I'll take out the barrel and maybe I can remove some of the wheels around it and try to get an idea of why that might be are you going to come out no you are a little bit stuck interesting I can take out the Escape wheel from underneath this um could be the result of a little bit of rust let's see if I can oh there we go okay so it came out now so so that's good but uh yeah the fact that it was jammed in there a little bit is is an indicator that there could be some corrosion there's a bridge here I'm going to take the screws off of this there it is this is a fairly small movement it's not tiny we've worked on smaller here on the channel for those of you that have been following along for a while but this is definitely smaller than the average Swiss watch movement as I said this uh this model came out in 1984. but it continues to this day they change it they tweak the design of it and that type of thing but this is a particularly nice one all gold for the case with the diamonds on it it's pretty fancy okay this is the bottom of the barrel Bridge so normally this doesn't have anything going on on the bottom but as you can see there's a little tiny train of three gears here in a row and these uh are used to use the automatic winding works these type of watches in fact most watches from Rolex are automatic and that means that they are as you can clearly see still mechanical they're they're not um you know a quartz watch that would be one that takes a battery uh but they do wind themselves and they do so via the movements of your arm as you move around through your day and there's a rotor and I took it off at the beginning um and we'll put it back on later of course but it swings around there it is right there it's attached to the uh automatic works but that bottom part that half circle is a rotor and that rotor has a weight at the end of it if you look you can see that it's thicker at the end than in the middle and that's so that it can swing around and when it swings around every single time it does it turns those wheels that you see there in the middle those are called reversing Wheels they allow it to swing either direction and still wind the watch it'll wind it up just a little tiny bit oh do you see the rust in the center there yeah so yeah so that wheel in the middle should just come free and it is stuck and the reason that it stuck is because of rust so that does confirm what Denise thought that maybe a little bit of water had gotten in over time that does seem to be the case here the good news though is that we should be able to work with this because there's not too much rust there I want to be able to separate out the rotor from the plate that it's attached to but it doesn't look like it wants to come off because that part is held on so we'll have to deal with that in a little bit in the meantime I can still take the main spring out and take a look at it um looks okay let's take it out of the barrel yeah it looks okay this is probably going to be worth replacing this is a commonly replaced part it does hold every bit of power that the watch has and every time it gets wound up it loses a little tiny bit of its resiliency and it's usually a good idea to replace the mainspring if you want the watch to run really well and I want Denise to be able to wear this watch a lot you know some of the family heirloom type stuff that I do on here is more about keeping the history alive rather than owning it and wearing it but I know that Denise actually wears this thing and I want her to be able to wear it with confidence so I think we'll probably just replace the mainspring on this watch as you can see I'm putting everything into this basket that's for the watch cleaning machine so we'll put it in there in just a minute but let's take a look at some of the parts up close before they go through and as you can see there's rust now that is a relatively small amount of it but it's created some debris and it's probably jammed everything up and here is that Center Post and as you can see there's rust right around where it meets that Gear meets the post so I'm going to need to try to pry after scraping away some of the rust to see if I can get it to come free yeah the tweezers look like they're not the right tool for the job here maybe I could try a screwdriver oh there's a little bit of movement just a little I just need it to come free and then I can clean the rust out after and there we go okay so that should be a salvageable part and as I mentioned there's some amount of corrosion or something built up on the inside here and this is also because of the liquid that was able to uh to get in so a quick rub of that with some Peg wood just to get the big Parts knocked off and we can put the rest into the watch cleaning machine and this is a fairly straightforward three-step process this is the cleaning here and then there will be two rinses as well as a drying cycle and while I let the parts get nice and squeaky clean I do want to say thank you to everybody on my patreon that's how I fund the channel that's uh you know where the people who really love this stuff can go and get a little bit of extra content I put up the videos a little bit early the rough cuts of the videos over there and they get some other cool perks including a thank you card and a wristwatch Revival sticker in the mail I just wanted to say thank you teaching every person who supports me on patreon it really does mean the world to me and I really appreciate it and if you'd like to check that out for yourself it's patreon.com wristwatch Revival there's a link in the show notes for it there's no limits there's no you can do it anytime you want any amount you want any time period you can stop anytime you can come back anytime that's one of the reasons I really like patreon it's very open and clear about how that works and while the parts are cleaning in the watch cleaning machine we can also go ahead and put the watch case into the Ultrasonic Cleaner as well and this is a really great way to clean up the case and the bracelet and you know you saw some of the dirt and grime that can accumulate on those parts and this is an important step again because one of the things that I want to be able to do is to get this thing back to waterproof or as close as you get within reason and you know everything needs to be clean and we need to be able to replace gaskets and do all that kind of stuff so this is uh what the what this machine is for now you can take a look at everything after it's out of the cleaning machines of various sorts and there it is those are all the parts is that a lot does that look like a lot to you or a little I to me it's like Ah that's not too bad and take a look at the parts after doing a little bit of manual de-rusting as well you can see we've got basically all of it off of there same thing with this post here and you can see this is well remember that was the one that was so hard to take off and it was kind of covered now I've got a bit of an issue here yuck so in order to make this thing waterproof we have to replace the gaskets and it looks like there's just a bunch of Gunk and hair and you know however long this thing has gone before it's been serviced of a build up in there so that's after by the way going through the cleaning machine so of course we're going to have to just dig it and take out all this stuff and after doing so you can see we did get down to the bottom where this gasket is and now we can remove the gasket as well but as you can see it basically just falls apart and the tweezers and there's a little bit of Gunk at the bottom but we can clean that up as well and get this thing ready for a new one there's also a gasket on the crown tube this is where the crown enters the watch and as you can see similar State here these are supposed to be Supple right they're they're rubber gaskets and instead they just immediately fall apart with even a little bit of pressure from the tweezers now that's okay because we're going to be replacing them but I would like to be able to please come out to get these out cleanly cleanly please yes oh that feels so good and I can clean up the little bits that are left over and there you go a nice clean spot for the new gasket to go in once again now taking a look at this the first thing that we need to do is we need to replace the crystal now I'm going to use the same crystal again but I'm going to make sure that it's straight this time and then that means putting the crystal down and it has a gasket around the bottom and then we'll put the bezel on as well and the bezel actually creates pressure around the outside of the crystal it does have a useful function it's also beautiful this is a machine bezel where you know it's got this it's called fluted is what they they call that a fluted bezel and it looks really pretty it especially when it's brand new it kind of catches the the light but it does have a function as well of holding this Crystal in place and making sure that it's tight so that water can't get in so I'm going to use this press to put that bezel back on again as well as the crystal okay so that looks good and then Rolex is like this and most watches have followed suit but Rolex is like this one they have three gaskets that keep the water out there's one on the crown tube remember when we took that one out there's one inside the crown itself you definitely remember when we took that one out that was kind of the gross one and then there's one on the case back that we'll replace as well so what I'm going to do is use some silicone grease to make sure that it's a good solid seal and it keeps the gasket in place and then I can simply replace these with new brand new gaskets which won't just fall apart from being touched I might just use my finger to seed it yeah there we go that's what we want to see and now I can put again a little bit of silicone grease around the base of the crown before putting in the crown gasket which is right here and there we go so now we've got that seated and then I as I mentioned before there's one more that goes around the case back itself so that when you tighten that down it creates a watertight seal at least theoretically we're going to find out right now because I'm going to do all this before we put the movement back together just so I have an idea and also it's a little safer to do it without the movement in the watch and you'll see why in just a minute so now I can tighten down the crown tighten down yes you do have to make sure that it's down to spec as well the case back and I'm going to use my case back removal and replacing tool to do that and then we're going to do a pressure check on this bad boy and see if our gaskets in grease are enough to hold it at base so this is a watch pressure testing machine and what we do is we hang the watch case in the upper half where the water isn't and now I'm going to pump up this machine and what this does is it puts it'll put three bars so three atmospheres of pressure into the case then you leave it for a little while and what happens is if there's any leaks the the air will be able to get into the case and it'll pressurize the case then we put it in the water and now what I'm going to do is press this button to release all of the pressure and see what happens hey this is good news so what should happen is this what happens if there's a leak is that you'll see a bunch of bubbles coming out as the air equalizes back out again so this one actually passed which is awesome because it means that Denise can wear this watch wherever the heck she wants you know this is a type now that you could jump in the swimming pool now taking a look at the case you can see it's quite well worn and generally speaking I'll leave them like that but I talked to Denise about it and I said look you know it's an option if you want I can restore the case and the bracelet and she said you know what I want you to do that I I think she wants it to be back to its former glory like the day that it was handed over to her mom all those years ago so I'm going to do that now there's two ways to do this I usually do it this way which is by hand I have these these sanding sticks that I really like because they give you this feel where you can really get a sense for what the metal is doing you can also use a machine like a Dremel or a Polish machine they can be a little bit aggressive they're much much much faster but especially for me like I haven't restored a case quite like this one you know a solid gold case before so I really wanted to be careful and I decided to use my sanding sticks these range in um grain from 400 up to 7 000 the higher the number for sanding uh the finer the grit and I don't actually use the four or the 600 on this one but I would use I think starting at about eight and work my way up to seven thousand and then there's this polishing compound that I like called flitz um and there's also one called semichron that I Chrome that I like as well but I'm going to use flits here and this is how I can kind of finish it off after having gone through all those steps and look how much better that looks isn't that incredible really beautiful stuff you can get great results it just takes a long time so I'll throw on my favorite movie and off I go and it's it's kind of therapeutic to sit there and and do this anyway but I do need to do more than the case I need to do the case back I need to do the bezel and I need to do the bracelet as well so we're going to walk through the full case Restoration here as well so I'm going to start by going around the outside of the case here because that part needs to be polished um shiny and then I'm going to do just a little bit on the back but it needs a graining on it you know you can see it has the the lines there and so that's the look that we want for this type of thing in order to do that we need to do a couple of things so first we need to tape off any area that we want to remain full polished so that's the whole outside Rim here so I'm going to take this heat tape and carefully build myself a little barrier around the edge just like that and then we can apply the graining back to the watch using Scotch Brite there's multiple ways that you can do this but I found that Scotch Brite tends to be the best performer and so you know you can gently pull it along and it will reintroduce the grainy so that it's not all super super shiny which is kind of the look that we're going for here okay we can take off the tape and take a look at how it came out hey not too bad you can see the edge is shiny and then the middle has that grained look to it now as well we'll also run this back through the Ultrasonic Cleaner just to make sure that everything's looking good now this one's going to be a little bit tricky um I don't want to knock down the edges on this so what I'm going to try to do is kind of go one Edge at a time so see flat Edge not running over multiple speed bumps if you will I think that that would create a softer look and I'd prefer for this to still have a little bit of that that shine to it so this is going to take a while because I got to do one Edge at a time over multiple of these sticks probably going to do you know six of them or maybe five of them but as you can see it's already starting to look a lot better and then that will leave us with the bracelet and the bracelet I'm going to use my sticks to kind of knock down everything to the same um level of Polish but I for this type of thing I do want as you can see that the outside ones are brushed and the inside is polished that's the original look and so I've applied a brushed finish to the outside as well speaking of brushed with polished this watch also shipped with the sides being fully polished but the top is brushed it creates a really nice contrast and that means once again I have to get this heat tape out to carefully tape up as you can see the part that I want to cover and then I can once again go back to the Scotch Brite here to apply the uh the graining finish that I want on the top of the lugs but not the side there's a little bit of Art and Science going on here um you know how much do you do there's two different strengths or whatever of Scotch Brite but here's the end result watch this foreign it's so satisfying to peel that off and do you see how the top has the grained look where the sides have the the shiny finish that's exactly what we were going for here and I think it came out beautifully and I think that Denise is going to be really happy with that as well there's one more look at the difference between the side and the top as you can see right there okay so the case looks good everything's looking nice and that means we can start putting this thing back together so we've got to get the movement going again again it was running as you saw at the beginning of the video but it wasn't running very well and I want to make sure that that intermittent stopping isn't a thing anymore I'm pretty sure it's because of that amount of rust that got in there that probably is why it would stop the automatic Works may not have been performing well with that rust on the bottom and there was the one on the seconds wheel as well so here's our new main spring we're going to replace as I mentioned before so this is going to be a brand new mainspring going in this watch that you know is the power source for all things that you see on the watch whether it's the hands turning to tell you the time or the calendar and they do fatigue it is a piece of metal that gets wound up and then Unwound wound up and then Unwound and over time metal of course will fatigue eventually and it won't have quite as much power built into it and so that's probably a good time to replace this is now so we're going to do that all I have to do is put the new spring in like I did and then a little bit of lubrication before putting the cap back on and then we can get to the movement itself this little tool just allows you to press the cap back on it easily you can do it with tweezers as well but just one little snap and boom it's in shape and ready to go now before we start the main part of the movement I also want to get this Barrel Bridge put back together mainly because the barrel bridge is one of the pieces that we'll be putting on shortly and of course I need to have this all fully assembled again before before I can install it so if you remember this was that kind of three gears this operates part of the automatic winding works but they're just hidden on the bottom of this bridge foreign how these things go back together that's always a big challenge although a lot of people wonder how me and other people that do watchmaking uh remember where all the parts go and the answer is it's kind of interesting it's split down the middle at least for me um most of the time I can remember from having done it a bunch of times but some percentage of the time I can't or I get stuck on oh is this one this one or this one because there's two parts that are really similar and the good news for me is that I have a very nice video that I can take a look at any time I get stuck it also depends on how often you work on a watch or a type of watch or a brand of watch you know I I have a better feel for Rolex now that I've worked on quite a few of them but I remember when I worked on my first one which by the way is on the channel you know I hadn't and they do things a little differently than some other Swiss companies and you have to kind of figure that out for yourself okay the center Bridge can go into place now this is a lovely Movement by the way you can see that it's decorated but not overly done those ingrained circles you see on the surface of the plate those are called perlage they're done using a machine looks like a drill like a drill press and it is done by hand well is it done by hand if it's using a machine at any rate there's somebody operating the machine yeah this looks like it's a coming together much much better than when I took it apart I do need to make sure that each of these wheels is mostly lined up because I will be putting on the train wheel Bridge after this Barrel Bridge goes on and that pivots that's the the kind of the name for the axle they all need to be lined up okay so we'll start with the barrel Bridge though and that'll kind of secure that half of the movement and as you can see I'm using this pointer stick here to just hold the Barrel in place or excuse me the bridge in place so that it doesn't dislodge itself and then I screw it down and it breaks something that's that's the disaster that you're hoping to avoid okay that was pretty easy is it is it actually ready to go wow okay here here for Rolex I mean geez like normally those uh bridges are quite finicky to put on but it just fell right into place they really do make working on these things such a joy and just a quick check shows us that yes everything's looking good and that means that we can flip over the movement and start with the keyless works this little part is called the sliding clutch and then this is the clutch wheel these two engage with each other they can only uh they engage via friction but they can only be turned against each other one way the other way they just simply click like think of on your bicycle when you were a kid when you rode the the pedals backwards and it just made that clicking sound it's like that but when you engage it forward it actually grabs on and does something these are similar to that and I can put on the Yoke and now the setting lever this will poke all the way through to the other side of the watch and it'll give you a place where you can push down on a spring that I'll put on in a minute that holds that in place and that allows you to remove the crown and to put it back in it's spring loaded a lot of movements especially from this era use a screw but Rolex during this time especially they used a spring-loaded version you see both of them companies use both okay this is the this is the Yoke spring this is the one with the Born to Fly tattoo these bad boys will jump and when they jump they go far they're very heavy spring for a watch so you see I'm using that stick to secure it all the way and even then I don't really want to let go here's the spring I was just talking about that presses down on that post so that when you push it from the other side it clicks back up like I said that there's you know multiple ways to do watch movements and given that these have been refined over a few hundred years that you do see similarities but there are still a couple of different methods for different things that have endured for different companies it's it's not they're not all identical they're similar but they're not identical the time when the watch was made affects it the place where it was made also affects it I've worked on some Seiko watches on this channel from Japan this is Rolex from Geneva in Switzerland and you know you can see some design philosophy differences between those two companies and and you know based on I don't know cultural stuff or area or history or whatever okay so now we can continue with the dial side of the movement here that's well I guess it's obvious why it's called that and uh I can keep on putting on the rest of what we call the motion works that's the gears and wheels that drive the hands themselves it's kind of funny because I don't think people think about it you can have a watch that's keeping perfect time but can't show you that time right like if I take off the dial in the hands I can put this watch on the time grapher and it'll say and it can say hey you're keeping zero seconds a day but you need the motion Works to be able to display that time to you accurately and properly even if the watch itself is running just right maybe I should design a watch that keeps perfect time but never tells you what time it actually is okay we can switch the watch over now and I can put in the pallet Fork this is one of the last few things that we put in before we put in the balance wheel and we actually get to see if the watch is running and if so how well okay make sure that the pellet Fork is snuggly in its home and then we can go ahead and Tack this down now one thing that you don't want to forget I know it looks small but that's called a hack it's a balance hack and a hacking mechanism on a watch allows you to stop the watch from running while you're setting the hands and that means that you can set it to the exact second if you have a reason to do so most people don't but it's a nice feature to have okay here goes the balance so first let's make sure that it's running again it was running before so it darn well better but you know you never know okay oh there it went it fell right into place and it started up immediately I expect nothing less from a Rolex even if it was made in 1984. it's not even 40 yet better start running okay so that is a beautiful sight to see in exactly what I was hoping for also just at first glance it looks like the amplitude that's like the power that's getting through looks pretty good so that's uh you can tell usually if it's really low you know the thing barely runs basically and that lets you know oh the amplitude might be a little bit low we could have some troubleshooting but it looked fine and we'll get the exact number later when we put on the time grapher for now though let's uh let's rebuild the automatic works so again these are called reversing Wheels they're that kind of cool purple color on Rolexes that I was told that they're coded in like a Teflon for um less resistance for Less friction I don't know it feels that might be the case but also they just look really cool and then there's this wheel that goes in between them and this is the one that actually reaches down and engages with the watch movement itself and there's that uh that one rusted gear that we had to take off it looks like it's held up just fine though okay so we can get this put back together this will be the last thing that we put on the watch I'll probably wait until the watch until the movement's even in the case because this just attaches on with two screws it's not very difficult and then I can just finish putting on this little cross section here that holds this clip in place that's what attaches it to the watch and make sure that it stays on if you want to take it off you can undo that now the last step for the automatic works here is to lubricate the pivots so this is just using a synthetic lightweight oil that will sit in between the metal and the Ruby jewels that you see there and create as little friction as possible so that it can run again not only just well but for a long time okay next we need to actually do the same thing but on the train of wheels so this is the same oil this is the this is called 9010 that's just the company's name for it it's a synthetic oil that's a very light viscosity you use a very very small amount the stick that I'm using here is called an Oiler and it's made specifically to grab a small amount of oil and again it'll just sit between the steel of the pivot and the Ruby Jewel and there's another one here that you can see this one has a special spring on top it's called a shock protection system right there and if I can just wedge it out of the way I can get to the two piece jewels that lie underneath I'm using a piece of radico here to help me remove those pieces the radical is like this putty that you can use to clean stuff grab stuff picks up grease it's really handy but as you can see we only got half we need this other half as well oh there it goes and now we can put this down and I'm going to clean these by hand they're going to go in a solvent called one dip I'm going to use my peg wood to make sure that they're perfectly spotlessly clean as this is the highest friction part of the whole entire watch this is where the weight of that balance wheel spinning is transferred into a small tip of metal that's held in place by one of these Ruby jewels and then what I can do is take my Oiler with a little tiny drop of that 9010 put it directly in the middle of that capule and then I can put this what they call it the whole Jewel or the setting underneath and it'll stick together because of capillary action from the oil and then I can grab it gently gently and I can replace it back on top here just like that so now as you can see the pivot is spinning in between and there's a drop of oil that's suspended above it to help it run the best it possibly can now I do need to replace this or put back the shock protection system as well just like that and that will hold everything nice and snug so I need to do that for all of the rest of the jewels that require it but after doing so I can continue on with the build and next is this calendar part and it has a few pieces on it that make this a little tricky because it's got a spring-loaded arm that keeps tension on the side of it and only gets released when the date clicks over at midnight and so it can create kind of an awkward situation when we uh when reinstalling everything because it wants to push everything up and click it out of the way so I have to use this black stick see right here boom to pull that out of the side so that I can get everything seated properly also making things difficult is that that arm right there that I just put a little bit of oil on that also holds that little donut Jewel as well if you wonder what that's for you know Jules and a watcher are used because these are synthetic rubies and they're actually nine on the hardness scale they're like one down from diamonds they're very very hard they are brittle as well but they are very very hard so when you combine them with a lubricant up against Steel they are amazing they will last a very very long time they create a very low friction environment for those two things to exist and they're harder than the steel so that you don't have the problem where you know you're grinding up against metal on metal and little shavings are coming off or anything like that it works extremely well a lot of times when people see a watch and it'll say on the front how many jewels it has like 17 or 23 and they'll they think that that's like a like Precious Metals count but but it's not okay so now we can just do a quick test of the uh motion works oh that doesn't feel right actually that is too loose that that should actually be turning the uh the hands when I have it in that position and there's no tension and which makes me think that I might have forgotten something so let's take off this plate once again oh I see it right now yeah so right there where I'm putting that there is a intermediate wheel and there it is it was in the parts tray I forgot it turns out that does happen sometimes and uh that transfers that turning motion from the crown over to the hour wheel and minute wheel which are the ones that turn the hands and so when I turned it there was no tension at all and you should be able to feel it let's try it now that's winding and there we go so now that's the feel that I expect to see and that means that we can now set the hands and thankfully it wasn't a huge setback this is the uh the calendar jumper spring so this is a long spring that applies a little bit of pressure to keep things moving along with the date disc here and again you can see again I just mentioned the jewels well there's one very large one there in the in the center portion there again to reduce friction and wear and this clip right there simply holds things in place and there we go that's the quick set and that's looking pretty good and then make sure it yes jumps over at midnight as the hands would turn naturally as well so that's great so now we need to turn our attention to the dial and as you can see the surface of the dial has the discoloration on it but unfortunately it isn't just dirt sitting on the top it is actually corroded away at the surface of the dial itself now the the crown here that you see that sort of famous Rolex Crown you can see I've cleaned it up here and it cleans up pretty nicely that's made out of gold as well but the dial there unfortunately we're not going to be able to do any like cleaning on it and it's just going to have to keep the patina that it has it's not all bad right it kind of shows the life of the watch and it actually adds kind of a cool Starry effect to it but if I could clean it I would have asked Denise and done so but again most of the time with the clear coats and stuff on the dial set isn't an option and that's the case here as well and if you are looking to get into this hobby by the way you got to be really careful I know it looks you get all excited and get out the Q-tips and things that you can clean a dial like that but you can do you can take off the ink you can take off the clear coat you can make it look really bad really really quickly so it's almost always better to just leave it unless you know for sure that it's just like a light dirt surface on the top okay so let's get the hands put back onto place here as well we're down the stretch now on this watch it is just about ready to be fully reassembled here we'll put the hour hand and then the minute hand on make sure that the calendar ticks over yeah there we go and now we can put the seconds hand on as well beautiful watch like I said uh very elegant yet everyday wearable timepiece here that's pretty cool not a lot of watches can pull that off now we'll put the case back on as well I mentioned before but when I took off the crystal I made sure to straighten it up when I put it back on so that the they call that the Cyclops the little uh magnifier that magnifies the date for you on a Rolex it's called the Cyclops part of the crystal it was crooked when we got it but looks good now and as I mentioned before we can now put on the automatic winding works I can do that last okay now we can put the rotor back on as well it gets secured via that little clip and then it'll just spin around like that and it'll wind the watch as it does so even while you're wearing it case back goes on as well and look at that it's already looking beautiful we still have to put the bracelet back on as well but that's easy enough job and once we're done with that well this little beauty will be all finished up and boy did it come out nice a lovely watch and a really cool restoration to have done I hope that Denise can wear this watch and think of her mom and uh hopefully not think too much about the Fiasco that it took to get this watch into my hands uh maybe it'll just be another memory for her one last thing we need to do is check to see how it does on the time grapher and after a bunch of tweaking and fiddling and adjusting does quite well 250 degrees of amplitude and take a look at how pretty this watch turned out absolutely gorgeous a beautiful timepiece and something that I think that Denise can enjoy for a very very long time thank you so much for joining me on this journey I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out if you want to find me on Instagram I am over there at wristwatch underscore Revival and uh yeah hope to see you over there and hope to see you on the next video we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 1,870,152

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Id: zSEwmB_tQwc

Length: 49min 39sec (2979 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023