Abercrombie & Fitch Super Shipmate Vintage Watch Restoration

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wristwatch revival I'm Marshall and this time around we have a super exciting watch this is an Abercrombie & Fitch super shipmate this is dates to around the 1950s it's very old and I got it on eBay as you can see really bad shape - this thing is tore up the seconds hand is just completely floating around in the case it looks fairly beat-up as well though maybe the dials actually in okay shape it's kind of hard to tell it's an on runner it won't work at all in fact nothing works on it currently so that's a little bit concerning and I don't really know what to expect from this watch just yet but it looks to be actually completely original I it even said that the strap was original it says pigskin eye which I don't even I don't even do that anymore and it looks pretty original it's all shrunk down there's the buckle it's got some rust on it and there's a little bit of rust here and there on the watch as well so I'm not really sure what to make of it but today on the channel we're gonna take this thing apart and see if we can get it running it's a beautiful watch with a lot of cool history if you don't know Abercrombie & Fitch they used to actually be a full-on Outdoor Retailer like the you know outfitter in New York City and they would actually you can see if this one was made in Switzerland they would actually contract companies from Switzerland watch companies to make watch specific for their needs now this is one of their more basic watches just time only but a lot of them had some cool complications and stuff at any rate the first things first is we need to get the case back off so I've got my case back opener out here and this is basically just a device that lets you lock down the case and then use any number of different fittings which you can see on the lower right there and what they do is they fit into the different fittings on the case back of a watch in this case we're gonna use the kind of basic one and then that allows you to use the big wheel that was on the top there to apply some leverage to the to the case back and open it and on watches like this you know I usually just try to open them up with like a rubber ball there's like a special type of rubber ball that you can use it really grips the back and it wouldn't open up this one was actually on pretty good but when you use a machine like this it usually lets go pretty easy and there we go you can see we've got some movement right away these machines work really well it's just it's easy to scratch up the back so you have to be really careful about getting it set up properly before you do so all right case back removed and this is a big moment we get to see what the heck's going on inside this case back first so let's get this strap taken off here so that we can have good access to the case so not have it flopping around and maybe getting dirt in there or whatever and by the way check out those lugs those look like original lugs they are really nasty all right here we go let's see what's inside oh this looks actually really good so Abercrombie and Fitch signed movement there and as you can see the case back is also signed Abercrombie and Fitch and all in all there's some rust around the inside of the ring so it looks like this has been weathered pretty well but the movement itself actually looks very good quite clean in fact and you know it what I'm hoping here of course is that it just needs a good service and then it'll be good to go but you never really know with these with these especially with these super old watches so first let's try to get the movement out of the case and that of course means that we need to take out the winding stem and you can see that there's two case clamps holding it down so we need to remove those in order to take the movement out of the case and actually get a good look at what's going on with it again it's not working as you can see and there's a movement ring in here as well that needs to come out and then it looks like this is actually bent so I'm gonna have to figure out what's going on with that but the movement and and the dial and everything do pop out although it looks like the that seconds hand is just kind of hanging around in the case that's concerning for sure and you can see the case is pretty rusted on the inside and crystals pretty banged up too very well could be the original I like to try to just take a quick poke at the balance it does look like it's spinning freely but it certainly isn't receiving any power nothing's nothing's actually going to it so first things for let's take the hands off I try to you know move the hands to be perfectly lined up but they won't move at all they're just completely jammed up so maybe something going on with the keyless works it's hard to say on a watch this old kind of interesting I point out the I'm pointing out that there's rust marks where both the our and hand and minute hands were it kind of shows exactly what time it was when this watch stopped working and probably hasn't been working for years and years and years all right dial feet need to be unsecured here with the these screws and as you can see fairly typical on old watches two different size screws you know people have been working on these or whatever but the dial comes off and looks fine it looks like it's actually held up really well all told which is which is nice because yeah there's no way I'm getting another dial for this thing so so let's flip / and start working on the movement like I said the good news is the case really does look like it did its job it's uh the movements fairly clean at least on a big picture level I mean it wouldn't be shocking to me if I found a bunch of rust and debris in here and I didn't so that's really promising for getting this thing running again first things first let's take off the balance the reason I do this is just to make sure that it's safe the balance spring otherwise known as the hair spring is probably the most delicate part on a watch it's just an absolutely miniscule spring and if it gets jammed or bent it completely screws up the whole watch so that's a good one to just take take off the watch and get it out of the way so that you can start working on the rest of it without having to worry about damaging that so next up is the what we call the motion works and the motion works is what moves the hands on a watch you and this just comes right off normally there's a Canyon Canton pinion there that's friction mounted but yeah it just comes right off here so I'm not sure what's up with that so that's a majority of the motion works coming out you and that means that we can go back over to the other side of the watch and start taking apart the the beefy mechanical stuff over here and I'll start by getting at the pallets you and of course you want to be extra careful with the pallets as they are very thin and delicate and those of you who are really into watches and movements and stuff will notice at the bottom of the movement right by where my tweezers are here it's it says 2390 and then there's a logo there and that logo next to it says ETA or Etta and that is traditionally the largest manufacturer of movements out of Switzerland in fact they design movements for almost all major watch brands at some time or another now interestingly here when I do take the pallets off all of a sudden the watch starts unwinding now I tried to unwind it but it wouldn't let me and so there's something that was bound up in between or that was being held up there and as you can see it's actually unwinding well all of the mainspring now so it was wound up before it just was stuck something was was preventing it from running that whole time and I don't really see any other way than to just sort of let it finish so I'm just gonna wait and it even speeds up faster now that looks like it's just about out of gas finally so I'm just gonna use a little bit of pegwood just to help it along that last little stretch to make sure that mainspring is just completely done but it's not quite done yet it still has a portico but as you can see this watch is not running well the the power is not being delivered in a smooth fashion through the train of wheels its stopping and starting and there was something holding up the whole thing so definitely it's going to need at least a service to get running again so yeah this is an edit when t3 90 movement which is a fairly common time only movement out of Switzerland it's a nice one Abercrombie and Fitch was very expensive high-end outfitter in its day they had a massive store in New York City that was their flagship this was in the you know late 1800s Early 1900s like that range and it did actually go for quite a long time but I've seen some some pictures of it some drawings of it and stuff from back in the day and it was absurd they had like stuffed elephants in the lobby apparently like you know all types of stuff like that you could get anything that you wanted to go adventuring or hiking or camping or on a safari apparently and this of course I make like a classic mistake that that spring didn't look like it actually had tension on it but apparently it did and so it pinged off but only just on the Pi bench thankfully that's actually the click that I'm taking out there that's the thing that stops the mainspring from unwinding it's testing the side shake here on that barrel sometimes on old watches that part can get really worn out and it'll just shake all over the place and you know that that could be part of the reason why the watch isn't running properly so I just gave it a quick check and now we can remove the barrel bridge you and I have to say so far so good with this thing again it's not working so that's concerning but as far as visual inspections go at my experience level which I'll remind you is not super high I'm very much an amateur at watchmaking but again just with my limited experience and what I know from this stuff okay you there we go aerobridge free at last you and I'm gonna try to take the barrel out but it's being a little bit fussy and I decide you know what I can just take out the train of wheels those are the ones that are covering it and it'll probably just come out easier so I'll just leave it in there for a minute so this is what we call the train wheel bridge this is the part that kind of connects all the train wheels together and make sure that they run that they stay in the exact place that they're supposed to be so that they can run you so there's the fourth wheel and I'll just take the barrel out now looks fine and the escape wheel and then the third wheel last again I'm just giving them like a cursory inspection just seeing if there's anything obviously broken or rusted on them and there's not so all in all seeing looks okay that means we can flip it over and start getting working back on the keyless work so this is the part that was jammed up that wouldn't let me set the the hours I couldn't turn the crown to have the hours actually get set you all right so once again I'm gonna use a piece of PEG wood here to keep this spring lock down so that when I take it out it doesn't go flying off and it does anyway but again it only one on the ground I'm trying to get better at that but it's actually really tricky and this is what we call the yoke or the return bar and then of course the other two parts that were being held in place by that just fell down to the bench and again all in all this movement actually looks pretty good I'm kind of excited because for a non-working movement there's all types of disasters that you can find and we didn't find him I still need to get the mainspring out of the barrel and to do this I have to release the barrel cap so I just push down on the edges with my fingers and loop there it goes and then that reveals the barrel Arbor which is the metal part in the middle and then the mainspring which is wound around it when you wind your watch that's the spring that you're winding that's the spring that powers everything in a mechanical wrist watch every single thing comes off of that and now it's just a matter of gently removing the spring from the barrel even though it seems like the watch industry has come up with a crazy tool for basically every possible thing apparently getting the mainspring out of the barrel is still something you just have to do by hand there's just no other reasonable way to do so I have read that some watchmakers will just leave it in but that doesn't really make any sense to me because it gets dirty for starters and probably needs a little bit of help along that line but also you can't really inspect it if it's in there alright so mainspring out and now we can start putting everything into the watch cleaning machine so what we need to do now is put everything into the baskets that go into the watch cleaning machine and basically the way this works is the big stuff goes on the bottom basket and the little delicate stuff goes on the top and that's the top of the basket there and you see it has these grooves in it where you can set little delicate parts inside you you you you every single part basically goes in this thing with a couple of exceptions but for the most part everything goes in you you and one little thing that I forgot but I wanted to make sure I got on there was the balance again so you can just put the balance in but then it's just sort of flying around and that's really not where you want to be because again it can get damaged so easily so one method is to put it back on the main plate here before you put it in the watch cleaning machine and that holds it in place and also gives it some kind of metal protection around the edges of it just to make sure that it doesn't go flying off or get hit by anything and and it's it's a safe way potentially to to wash this thing in the cleaning machine now the thing that you'll note though is the jewel on the top that ruby jewel they call it that does need to be cleaned and if you put it in the watch cleaning machine this way it won't get cleaned it needs actually to be removed and then cleaned separately so we'll have to do that after but the spring and everything else will get clean this way all right back in it goes and we are all ready for the watch cleaning machine so this is with all the parts having been thorough clean thoroughly cleaning the machine and the watch completely disassembled that's what it looks like if you take the whole thing apart and that means it's time to get going on getting this thing back together so the first thing that we need to do is get the barrel with the mainspring in it back together that means of course getting the mainspring back in the barrel and before we do that though I'm gonna take a little bit of grease here this is called Moebius 8200 it's four main springs and I'm just gonna get a little bit on my finger cots there and pull that along the line that just puts the tiniest thinnest film of that grease on there but that can help against corrosion sticking that kind of thing you really don't it's not meant to be fully lubricated it's just a little tiny bit on there just a thin film and now I'm gonna use a special tool a very special tool especially if you base it on the price of the thing that is called a mainspring winder so this lets you wind the mainspring back into a little cap so that it's all wound back up and then it has a plunger at the back that you can push down and then they'll push the mainspring out into ideally whatever it is that you want to push it into so in this case its back into the into the the mainspring barrel that I have sitting there so I just wind it back in then remove the winder part that's the end with the red dot on it there and then the the whole mainspring will be wound up inside this tool and you can see it just wound up in there and then all I do is put it over the barrel and click it into place and it just shoves the mainspring down into it and now it's been transferred over and I can put the barrel Arbor back in so pretty cool it's nice to have the right tools for the job you can do this manually but you are run a very high risk of bending or breaking the mainspring and especially on old watches where it can be hard to find the right mainspring or just tricky to source them and get them fit and everything this is a great way to do it okay so with that job done it's time to get cracking on the actual movement itself and that means we'll start with a training wheel so we'll get out all of the wheels that we need for that plus the bridge and this is a really important part of the procedure this is also the part that wasn't working before so what we want to see here by the time we finish putting all of these in is that the train of wheels can move freely that it spins freely and that it was not doing before so if we can fix that then that's a big step potentially towards getting this thing running again yeah I'm trying to give it just a little preliminary test but the real the reality is is that we won't know if this thing spins freely until we get the the bridge on top of it because that's what holds each wheel in its exact position and allows it to spend now I did notice while I was putting these in that I still had the the balance on the watch and I bumped it a little bit and I'm just like you know what let's just get that thing out of the way I don't need it to be on here for this part of the build and for the same reasons that I took it off at the beginning of the job I'm gonna take it off here as well just to get it out of the way for safekeeping because again it doesn't need to be on the watch for this part so I realized there you know I should just take that off and I do so now it's time to put the bridge back on and basically this is really tricky because there's four holes that you can see and they all have to line up with those those colored jewels on the top perfectly and on the ones on the bottom and if any one of them is off that bridge will not go on so it's a real kind of test of patience and very subtle movements of each of those to get them each to line up and then once that finally all does the bridge will fall right into place and then you can secure it with the screws but until that moment happens you are applying some amount of pressure depending on how you do it to the pivots to the very tiny metal points at the top and bottom of those wheels and any one of them can bend or break quite easily so it really is a tricky job that you have to be very careful on now one of the things that I'll do is grab a piece of PEG wood here and hold it down and that will help me line it up and as you can see we now have free movement of the train wheel so this is a big step for us because it means that we might actually be able to get away with getting this thing running again without having to do any major work or go scouring for replacement parts or whatever and there you go you can see it spinning quite freely especially if I start at the back most wheel and the escape wheels just zip and right along which is what it should be doing and now we can put in the the mainspring barrel gotta be just a little delicate because it does need to slide in under those wheels but there's room to do it and now if I turn the wheel the mainspring barrel you can see all the other wheels along the line are spinning and they're spinning quite freely so this is good news now this is what we call the setting lever screw this is the screw that I actually unscrewed very early in this build to take out the the winder and that needs to go on first in many of these watches because that plate that I'm about to put on actually covers it up mostly it leaves a hole so that you can put a screwdriver in there and adjust it but it doesn't make it like that now what I'm doing is an important part here and this is I am lubricating I'm oiling the watch so right now I'm lubricating the mainspring barrel so that's the barrel Arbor at the top to make sure that it can spin freely within itself and as you can see I also have my little loop on at this point to to try to get in close to make sure that it gets properly oils and will actually take a closer look at that a little bit further down the line in the video when I do it on the on the plates themselves and you can get a chance to see what that looks like and how little is tiny amount of oil you actually end up using but for now the barrel bridge goes back on and once again I'm applying lubricant here this is HP 1300 for those of you who are fellow watchmakers and want to know what kind of lubricant I'm using and now we can start putting on the ratchet wheel and the crown wheel you and once again I'm applying just a little tiny bit of lubricant to the side so that these can spin without any friction it's amazing the the tiny tiny amount of lubricant that is actually correct for watches like this it's it's a really small amount the difference between zero and too much or I should say zero and the amount that you need is huge you know if you do oil these they perform better for longer and it protects the parts if you don't at all they won't run very well for very long but if you end up putting too much on that's almost as bad as putting nothing on because it ends up seeping into other parts of the watching and getting cut up so here this is a microscope shot now of me oiling the top there of that bridge that we had put on it first so it's just a little tiny bit of oil it needs to fall into that cup and sort of suspend itself in there if you put too much it won't suspend it'll actually just drain through and if you don't put enough while you're just running them dry and that's not where you want to be either so there you go just that much to get the job done it's really a tiny amount and but it is cool because using the microscope we can get up really close and get a chance to see exactly how much that is and there we go and what I'm doing there is using a little bit of that's that kind of silly putty like substance it's like a neutral silly putty stuff that you can use to clean up any oil that I did in excess or that I just sort of splashed around maybe that's not the right word but like that like I'm just gonna use a little bit to clean that up because I accidentally touch the side of the jewel and I just want to be proper with it the truth is is that if you're a really great watchmaker you you don't often need to do that if you've been doing this for years you just sort of have it down and you know cleaning up stuff with with Roddick oh is kind of frowned upon at some point because it means that you you slipped up but yeah for where I'm at I always keep some Roddick around because I'm still good still practicing all right so this is what we call a cap jewel this will need to be removed oiled and cleaned separately there it is you can see the bottom of it it doesn't look bad though this watch clearly has been serviced in its lifetime you can tell from a lot of different parts on it to be honest but it certainly doesn't seem like it has been recently as the watch had come to a complete halt okay so now we put the cap jewel then screw that back down this is one of the many ways that they do that okay now it's time to start with the keyless work or excuse me that click so this was actually a mistake that I made so I realized after that I never reinstalled the click normally the click goes on at the same time as these wheels but this one was different and what that means is I need to actually start over again with that take off those wheels and then put the click in this is kind of actually a really cool design for a click I've never seen one like this it's a really simple thing with a spring and then two posts so one of them holds the wheel and the other one means that the wheel can't go a certain direction and that's all a click is really trying to do this is also my first time working on a click like this and what that means is hey I screwed up and I forgot to put it put it in so get a little bit of grease on it and then I'm gonna put this we all back on again no big deal right this is something that happens sometimes especially when you're working on a watch movement for the first time that's it that's a big step is there's only so many watch movements in the world there's a lot of them but even though they all work in a similar way think about working on an engine on a car right if you know how to work on one specific type of engine all the time on a car then you know all the little tricks to it and all that all engines and all cars work roughly the same way so you theoretically could work on any engine if you knew how to work on them but it really does help to work on the same one a few times over and over you'll see consistencies within the same company even within the same country or region they will have different practices for how they build these movements and how they solve the little problems that the a little engineering problems that are faced when you're building a watch it's really interesting once you understand how they work and you start opening them up to see how things change both regionally but also over time and then within country to country too it's it's really fascinating once you get inside and start noticing these things but the good news is is that this is an ETA or a Teta you know 2390 from Switzerland this is a very straightforward and mass-produced movement or at least it's similar to a lot of mass-produced movements so this one doesn't have any particular curveballs except for that click was the only thing that was a little bit different okay now I'm applying some grease here cuz I'm gonna put the pinion the Canon pinion back on now this one is not actually held on by friction though every other watch I've worked on has been so here's another small difference with these ETA movements it's actually held on a different way but it works just fine and again I'm just applying a little tiny bit of grease to the post here so that when these wheels spin you know they they have a little bit of lubricant there and those two wheels are what they call the minute and our wheels they actually the hands will spin at the rate that those spin this is just an intermediary wheel this just takes when you pull out the watch crown and turn it to set the time that gets engaged and then turns the other two as you can see so not a not a super critical part but of course it does you know all everything matters you know clear off a little space here and this is what we call the setting lever that's the thing that allows you to change from winding the watch to setting the watch to winding the watch as you click and pull out the side of the crown on the side of your watch again just a little bit of grease here to make sure that these parts engage and disengage smoothly and the trick really is to put on the least amount like less than less than you would think which is which is kind of funny you and now with the yoke so this is this is the part that I was thinking of before but this is the actual one not two not the click spring you you and the yoke does have a spring this is it right here yeah that's a spring it's just a little u-shaped spring and all it does is apply pressure but as always these things are very tricky because they have to go in a very specific spot in a very specific way and it can be hard because they they do kind of want to jump away from you when you're working on them and it just did and it's brutal because you have no idea where there's weather where they go and in this case this thing was gone for a while like I had the flashlight out and you know the classic down on the ground looking at my clothes seeing what it cuz it's so small and so light and ended up flying just on a different part of my desk but this time I'm getting a little better at it and I was able to really kind of pin it down with the pegwood and then and then the rest is easy and now I've got that spring tension on that arm exactly where it's supposed to be and disaster has been averted but clearly something I need to work on a little bit of grease here again just for any moving parts that are gonna be grinding up against each other just a little touch of grease really goes a long way to help them stay good and that's really important on watches especially ones that you want to keep in your family for a long time because these parts can be harder and harder to find over time so you might think well it's fine it'll still run and it probably will but that part will fail at some point and then you're gonna need to replace it and that could be a real pain you could have to wait months on eBay to replace it now on a watch like this that's actually not the case the ETA 2390 you can find parts for it still because it was a commonly produced watch but as you work on watches you know you of course want to employ your best practices right the best way to do it time and time again so now I've got the keyless works almost all together there's this little bridge thing that goes over the top of the motion works and then we can actually give it a test you ok so now we're going to put the whining stem in and again we need to apply tactfully a little bit of grease here to make sure that it can operate smoothly for the long term and then and then we can give this a test to see if it properly winds the watch so that will tell us if the click is working correctly and if the mainspring barrel and the mainspring and everything's in there correctly and then we can also pull it out to have it test the motion work so to see if it can set the hands and it looks like it's working fine here it's it's winding up the watch just fine and the click seems to be working so now I'll pull it out to the hand setting position and give it a whine and it is working you can see that it's it's moving the parts that it's supposed to move there in the middle part of the watch but I can actually feel this should operate very very smoothly and I can feel what feels like a slight tension or grind and I don't know why but that really shouldn't happen like it should be completely smooth so we need to investigate this because it's just it's not right so I'm gonna take off that bridge and see if I can just see if all of the leaves of the wheels are engaging properly it's a very simple thing happening it's just those three wheels the intermediate wheel and then the the minute an hour wheel so I don't know what's going on with it and I need to really kind of fiddle around to figure it out and I'm gonna start off with the cannon pinion and make sure that it moves smoothly the way you know in its seat and it seems to so I'm happy with that then the hour wheel and I'm gonna try it again here after just having looked I did lubricate each part already so that isn't the issue and see how it feels because it's just it should feel right and I'll tell you it still is just fighting a little bit and I'm not happy with it I just I know that I know how it's supposed to feel and it doesn't feel the way that it is so we're gonna have to investigate further and this is a real pain because I don't really know what the deal is and it's gonna be hard to figure out but I'm just gonna have to start looking at every part and seeing if I can find some type of thing now this is what I found this is insane but that intermediate pinion look at this on the top it veers in a little bit do you see how it's just bent down on the top it here on the bottom it's completely flat that little tiny thing only goes in one way and by the way just to show you this is what it looks like in my hand just to like zoom out for a second and show you the how small these parts are that we're dealing with that's what that looks like in in my hand so it turns out that it actually does have a top and a bottom even though at glance it looks like it's just a you know rounded off thing and if you put it in with that rounded off part on the top facing down that is the difference that is the difference between it working but feeling not right and between it working and feeling just right so okay so we figured out that little bump in the road and put everything back in accordingly to get it to run as smoothly as possible and that means that continue the rebuild and go back on the other side of the watch now this is going to be the pallet forks going back in now these needed a good cleaning as well and I'm not surprised remember the watch was stuck and that could have been the point at which it was stuck if the pallet forks weren't allowing the power to go through that's absolutely possible that that was the case so once again very gently we're gonna put those in and here's the pallet fork bridge and this is the same procedure as putting in those wheels above but the difference is there's only one pivot on the top and one jewel it needs to go in too which makes it way easier than trying to line up three or four and now I can do we'll check to see that it's winding and then put a little wind in it and then the power should be going through the Train of wheels to the escape wheel and it should be going back and forth there on the pallet force and it looks like it is so that's a good step now I'm gonna get what we call one dip out here and this is a solvent that is used for cleaning and I'm just gonna make sure that this balance is cleaned perfectly and as much any extra residue of any potential lubricant that was used before dirt grime anything is done I'm gonna use a blower just to sort of agitate the air around it and then what we need to do after it's been in the one dip for a little while is to dry it off now this is a solvent so it evaporates quite quickly but I can use this blower just to make sure that any potential remaining cleaner on it is gone and I'll flip it over and do the same this is actually how I used to clean all my parts before I got the watch cleaning machine it's very tedious but it is effective and then we get to try to put it in the watch and this is of course the big moment because if we can put it in the watch and the watch runs we have a running timepiece here and we have revived this thing if we put it in the watch and it doesn't work it's back to square one on troubleshooting so let's put this thing in and see if it'll go this is always the best part of building a watches the anticipation this is the exciting part and look at that it the palette for picked it up almost right away and started to make it run now it does look like it's stopping here but that's fairly typical we'll get this screw in and we'll see if it'll actually run give a little kickstart and it's going yes so this is a great feeling this is why you do this hobby honestly is to see that balance will kick up again on a watch that was previously dead and we have ourselves a running watch now how well it's running who knows right that that part will figure out in a little while but the fact that it went from being a complete non runner to watch that's actually working is incredible and it's a great feeling so now we need to lubricate the jewels on the top and bottom of the balance and these are of course very critical jewels and as you can see though they actually have a shock system that's a spring that I just pulled out of the way that lets it let's if the watch were to say hit the ground that spring would flex and allow the balance inside to move around a little bit and that means that it wouldn't snap which it often does so now I'm gonna take out the jewel and I'm actually I know I'm sorry it's off camera or my hand cover the camera but I'm gonna use Roddick oh to do this that's that sticky silly putty stuff because it can just grab that whole setting and then off camera I'm gonna I'm gonna lubricate it and then put this jewel setting back in and lubricating it is extremely tricky business but I guess I did it so now I just need to simply push this Springs back on and while this can be extremely finicky I found that for me I'm generally pretty good at it and I know some some watchmakers on YouTube have a really hard time with these but I've actually been pretty lucky and I don't know I haven't had one fly off on me or anything so there we go and just need to clean this up just a little bit and there we go now this one's on the bottom and so I'm gonna do the same procedure that I did on the top remove the bottom and you can see that's the pivot moving around in the hole right there I like to put these down even after I've taken it off just because they are so extremely small and delicate bending them is trivially easy you breathed on them wrong and they Bend and so even just for the minute that I'm gonna take to clean the jewel and put the lubricant on I like to just put them back down this is easily one of the most finicky I mean I'm doing this on a microscope like it's about as finicky as it gets so back in with the jewel setting that's actually two parts it's called a cap and then the jewel itself and like I said I'm getting pretty good at that part so now it's time to test this thing and see how it does on the time Grapher so the answer is not very good in fact terrible so I'm gonna attempt to adjust the rate of this and see if I can get it to work right but the bottom line is is that it's all over the map look at that reading + 102 + 36 + 61 it's really really terrible and I mean now it's minus 110 minus 150 this thing is just a complete mess and I'm really disappointed because it looked like it was running okay and I was like pretty excited that we had gotten it back and now it's just a disaster I mean - 52 minus 50 and then all of a sudden that's running fast somehow and this is exactly what you don't want to see now it's plus 6 seconds so I need to do some investigating and I actually do this off-camera and I realize that the balance spring is not seated correctly and that's why we're getting this up and down and all around thing that it's extremely erratic readings so I'm gonna seated correctly and then attempt to adjust it on the regulator again that's what I was doing there before and see how that comes out and look what happened this is awesome like 277 degrees of amplitude is pretty strong for an old watch like this beat air point 1 milliseconds 0 is perfect point 1 is totally great and the rate is between 0 and minus 3 seconds a day for a vintage watch this is incredible and I'm really happy that was the only thing I needed to do was just make a slight adjustment to the air spring and then regulate it and boom unbelievable results really from a watch that was completely stopped and a non-runner altogether - this is incredible also you know it means that depending on how long it was not running might actually worked for us because maybe somebody said it's broken and threw it in a drawer and that means that this watch was effectively not used as much as it would have been and now it cleaned up beautifully and is running awesome so I'm super stoked on that so now we can continue with the build and that starts by putting this beautiful dial on I love this dial super simple super legible but really nicely patina'd as well you can see it's got that kind of cream color love that and so first things first we're gonna put the dial screws in but they're weird like I said there was two different sizes but you just run what you brung as they say in the business so now it's time to get the hands out and this is a problem too because that second hand was literally just floating around in the case and that's something that we're gonna have to figure out as well but first things first the our hand goes on and I'm gonna use a tool here from version that pushes it on it's a really simple tool it's just a nylon tip so it's soft so it won't scratch anything that has a hole in the middle so that you can kind of push around the edges that's it it's not a complicated tool but it is a very handy one now the minute hand goes on you can still see those two rust spots I'm not gonna clean those off by the way I don't ever really clean dials or mess with dials I think that the it's a lot of the story of the watch is contained in the dial and look if it's if it's got some weird stuff going on then it does this one has a cool it almost looks like reverse star night behind it like with the dots so this looks okay I can set it and the the hands are going in the appropriate times and resetting back you know they're running the appropriate relative to each other and now we can try to put on this the seconds hand that was again kind of floating around in the case now the seconds hand doesn't have to line up with the other hands perfectly because it runs on its own and okay this works so the seconds hand attaches and I'm gonna be very delicate with it but it does seem to be on the pinion and working so let's see if it go oh okay well now the minutes hand just ran right into the seconds hand and knocked it off so it looks like I might need to put it on a little bit harder a little a little further down on the pinion to make it work and so let's see if that works and the answer is absolutely not so this seconds hand is interfering with the movement of the minutes hand so I'm gonna try to adjust that you can kind of rock these hands back and forth a little bit to get them so that they're parallel to each other so we'll try that now and okay oh no no it's getting hung up again and it's again colliding with it so let's take a look at this hand onto the microscope and as you can see it doesn't have the normal makeup of a hand it simply just has a hole in the top which means either a parts missing or it was never there or it's worn out it's hard to say really but this isn't how a hand is supposed to look so we're gonna have to set that aside for the moment and I'll deal with it in just a little bit now I do want to try out getting this thing cased up because I noticed it when I got it the dial was sitting too far forward on the case and actually was touching the case and you can see that barely there as I do it that there's the dials not fit correctly for the case but what I realized is two things and this is the first one there was some pretty serious rust on the inside of the case here and it came off a little bit but we needed to actually deal with this as well because this case rust is really not what you want to see a little bit of staining is one thing I can just take the crystal out by pushing with my thumb's by the way which is normal but this case needs a little bit of attention so I'm gonna go back to my trusty ultrasonic machine which means we need some water and this is some ultrasonic cleaning detergent and in goes the case and we'll run it for a little while not in a big hurry and as you can hear it kind of messes with the camera speakers but yeah and it is also very loud so we let it run for a while and let's see what we came away with here all right much much better there's still a few spots on there that I can try to deal with individually to knock off you know some of the edges and make sure that it's okay but a much much improved case from where we were before as you can still see there's still a little bit of rust deposits here and there but again much much better than we had before so I'll clean those up with the pegwood and yeah there's quite a bit on there and then we'll get back to getting this this movement back in the case and what I discovered from this was that the movement ring was actually what was meant to hold the dial back from touching the front of the case and those little arms on the side were the one that was bent at the very beginning of the video that is why the the dial was actually hitting so I replaced it with a new one just from a kit that I have and that worked just fine so now you can see the hands can go freely and the dial isn't touching the case so we've solved that problem and got this thing just about ready to run again and I'm pretty happy with this at least so far with how its come along but that said there's still some stuff to do here so let's get a strap put on this watch the lug width that's the distance between those two lugs at the bottom you can measure it with one of these little tools or anything really they come in fairly standard sizes this one's an 18 millimeter lug width so I'll need to find a watch strap for my collection that is 18 millimeters and I found one that doesn't really this is like a handmade black watch or I should say Racing strap but I just like this strap a lot I just think it's beautiful and I didn't currently have it on a watch so I decided to throw it on this one but of course you know you can put any type of watch it suits or any type of strap that suits you on this and we'll get an idea of how it looks in it's nearly final form but looking at it well it looks nice I mean seriously like this watch has come such a long way but it has a couple of things that need to get addressed before we're done with it and the first one is gonna be the crystal of the watch it is really beat-up and you can see it here I mean you can see how dirty it is I can just pop it out but it's also just extremely scratched up these are made from acrylic they're soft very durable but as you can see they're durable what I mean is they don't shatter or anything very rarely but they are very scratch prone so what we need to do is get a new crystal so I've done that I measured it out and twenty-nine point four millimeters which is what that 294 means is what I measured it out at but I was taught to always order a size up from what you've measured because sometimes things aren't exactly what they seem it's worn or it's in there or whatever so let's do a test fit on the 294 and unfortunately there's actually some wiggle room and it doesn't sit in there at all so thank you actually in this case the person I took the class from which is mark Lovick over at the watch repair channel you should definitely be checking that out if you're into this stuff he's kind of taught me everything I know for the most part I've took all his classes online and watched all of his videos so this one does look like it's the right size at 296 but in order to make it fit we need to take out the rubber press so this is a crystal press and we'll take these two dyes one goes on the bottom one goes on the top and I'll show you how it works so the one on the bottom is just a soft dye and the one on the top is meant to go around the edge of the crystal okay so what's gonna happen is we're gonna put the watch over the soft I just hanging there then the crystal then we'll put the dye the rounded dye on top the aluminum one and what it's gonna do is we're gonna press it down and it's just gonna press it around the soft die gently it's gonna bend it and what's that what that's going to do is temporarily at least while it's bent it will be smaller in diameter and then we can bring up the the watch case to it hold it there and then undo the press and it will expand into the slot that is designed for so first things first is to get it pressed down I use a piece of bag just to prevent any potential scratching so you don't need to overdo this but just get it firmly in there and then give it a few extra turns so that you know that it's kind of pressed it down a little bit and has bent it now I know it's hard to see and I do apologize but what I'm doing is I'm bringing the watch case up to the crystal making sure that it's seated holding it down and then just simply undoing the rubber press rubber is the brand name of the press by the way there's other ways to do this too and then it expands into the slot and now we can just check it out and see how we did and there we go I can push on it with my thumbs and it doesn't come out which is about the amount of pressure that you need this is not a dive or watch or anything like that and it looks great so we've got the crystal in there and what I did in between is I actually took the seconds hand and I put it on my I was not able to film this because it was far too intricate to actually film but I put it on my staking set and I sort of pushed down and manipulated the top of it so that it would flatten out the top of that second sand and give it something to grab on to and it worked hey the seconds hand is basically dead anyway there's no reviving it but as you can see I actually got it to work and this watch is done I could not be happier with it either this thing is absolutely gorgeous it's got a really cool story behind it not just in the sense that it's a own old watch dating back to the 50s but it has a couple of really neat things about it that are good conversation starters are ways to get to help people understand why these little things that we all love are so interesting and one of them is the fact that is from Abercrombie & Fitch which has a completely different brand now you know it's it's you know upscale clothes marketed towards young people I mean we're talking about completely off-brand from what it was before before it was a hardcore outfitter really the place you would go if you were gonna go on a long trip um you know for those of you that have in the states that have an REI you next to you right this is it was something along that lines but like think upscale really expensive exotic stuff I mean they sold guns and tents and you know stuff like that completely different so it's really cool to say is that the same I have our Crombie & fitch that I'm thinking of and you can say yeah it is it's the same one it's just from a different time and like I said they ended up you know take using the Swiss watch company sometimes Hoyer which is one of my favorite watch company as I own a bunch of watches from old Hoyer before they were Tag Heuer to make the movements even this one it was based off of an at - movement as we talked about before but these are nice Swiss watches that they did to their specification so in this case again this was a fairly simple time only watch but there's ones with tied indicators with all title arm you know things that you would need when you are out camping or hiking or on an adventure of some sort and it's just a totally different look from Abercrombie and Fitch then the other thing that I really like about this watch is that we are able to kind of figure out its story right somebody wore this a lot and used it and then I think it stopped working and I think that they put it in a drawer and forgot about it because one of the cool little things about this watch are those two discolorations that you can see so that you can see exactly what time it was when this watch actually died and I'm leaving those on there I'm not gonna try to clean them up and what that means is we get a little bit of an extra story because the hands were at that position for so long that it actually discolored the dial underneath them disproportionately and again these are just the neat little things that you can find to love about vintage watches and restoring them all in all I'm really happy with how this watch came out and I'm thrilled that it keeps such good time as well because there are certainly some problems that are above my paygrade as they'd say when it comes to fixing these things and the fact that we were able to sort out all the issues with the watch from the crystal to the hands to the movement and even some rust on the case and get it back into service is a real thrill thank you so much for coming along for this adventure with me if you want to you can follow on Instagram I post pictures of the projects as they're going and even some videos some tool highlights and some pictures of the watches in my personal collection and of course you can like and subscribe as you see fit I'll leave that up to you thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 613,769

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Id: Wfr9rFeM1uU

Length: 62min 15sec (3735 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020