Birks Challenger Vintage Pocket Watch Restoration

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wrist watch revival my name is marshall and thank you so much for joining me on the bench this time around i've got this lovely burke's challenger pocket watch now berks is a canadian luxury retailer founded in 1879 by henry burks it's kind of like the tiffany's of canada they've been around forever and they're very well known around world war ii they released their challenger line which was the name given to their watches most of which were swiss made with eterna movements and we'll see if this one has just such a movement in it this gold-plated pocket watch is from that era and it has a beautiful inscription on the back commemorating the 25th working year of one arthur cartier at the dominion silk dying and finishing company limited i looked up this company and it's in drummondville quebec canada and arthur was an early employee of the company as he started in 1924 and the company was founded in 1923 and this one had been a great gift for his 25 years of faithful service as it came from a top canadian luxury retailer the company itself was sold in 1972 but the site and the building are still historical sites in quebec uh interestingly i looked up arthur himself and found an arthur cartier who was born in pierreville in 1892 which is only about 30 minutes away from drummondville where the dominion silk dine company sat he ended up having two children the first of whom was born in 1925 so it looks like arthur got a job at the dominion silk company with the news of his upcoming child his kid henry died in 2009 and his daughter unfortunately died at just one years old uh i couldn't find any further information beyond that on the cartiers of quebec but how cool is that we get a pocket watch that has some real canadian heritage to it not only is it from berks which is a canadian company it's also issued to a canadian person by a canadian other company uh for for the work that he had done there so i just think this is so cool to get a piece of history like this and uh you know we're gonna try to restore it now it was bought as not working on ebay it does look like it'll run a little bit but it certainly doesn't run well and um it'll stop so not really sure exactly what's going on with this watch but we're going to get into it and and see what's going on with it as you can see the back and the front both come off via case knife let's take a look at this movement inside and see how it looks and good god that's just gorgeous the these pocket watch movements were so beautiful and as you can see the balance wheel actually spins somewhat freely here and the watch even wants to run a little bit although it does seem to come to a stop so that's promising but this is an eternal movement and it looks really nice first things first though let's get the hands off of this so we can take the movement out of the case and not damage the hands and it's got a separate sub seconds hand here down below not as center seconds but on pocket watches it's very common to have a separate dial for the seconds hand okay and that means that we can take the case screws out here to actually remove the movement from the case itself and of course the crown comes off at 12 o'clock and it is uh goes into the top there but there we go we've got the case apart and all told this movement actually looks quite nice aesthetically it's gorgeous um that's not in question here but it also doesn't look particularly dirty or worn looks like it's in fine shape so that's a that's a bonus but we do still have to figure out what's actually going on with it on uh on why it's not running so we'll take the dial off first and the dial has some some spotting on it but otherwise looks to be in good shape take the hour wheel off just because it'll fall off anyway and now we can get into this movement so the first thing i'll do is take the balance off and of course we do this to protect it and now we can flip the movement over and take the cannon pinion off and that way we can take the train of wheels off and they won't be stuck because that cannon pinion is actually friction fit to the center wheel which is on this side of the movement and that's that brass wheel in the in the dead center of the movement now i'm going to go ahead and just take the pallet forks out here working on these pocket watch movements is a real pleasure um they're just bigger and these were incredibly well made for their time both the american and the swiss counterparts were just gorgeous again this one's an eterna movement from switzerland but uh you know the i've mentioned it before but i'll mention it again if you are looking to get into this hobby i do recommend picking up these pocket watch movements when you can because you can get bare movements really nice ones that are even bigger than this therefore even easier to work on off of ebay for pretty cheap you'd be really surprised how cheap you can get them for i mean this whole watch was 80 bucks and it's in good shape and it's it's beautiful but you know scrap movements or just thrown away movements you can get you know ones from the 1800s for under a hundred dollars and you can get crappy ones for way less than that if you just want to practice around and don't really care what happens to it all right so we're working our way through taking off the crown wheel and the ratchet wheel now this one's the crown wheel here it actually has a reverse threaded screw so that's something that you'll want to look out for if you're just getting into the hobby as the reverse thread means exactly what you think it does you turn that screw the the opposite direction that you'd think and so what usually happens if you're a newer watchmaker is well you don't realize that and you go to unscrew it and it doesn't really want to budge so you give it a little more gusto and then boom the screw comes just breaks the head right off the screw that's a fairly common occurrence so now we can take the barrel bridge off and it looks like part of the keyless works is kind of falling out anyway so we may as well just set those aside now and the barrel will come out we'll have to take a look at the main spring inside of there in a minute and then as you can see there's these beautiful little bridges for each of the escape wheel and the fourth wheel and then the third wheel in the center will have their own arching bridge across the center there and i just i mean they don't make them like this now right these things are just flat out gorgeous didn't quite unscrew that one all the way it's also interesting to watch um watch me taking a taking this apart i i've actually owned this watch for over a year and that might give you uh some foreshadowing as to what we're facing down here uh with this repair but at the time um well there's a few things that stand out to me one of them is i'm not wearing finger cots which i think is fine for disassembling a watch you're about to put in the cleaner but i always wear them anyway because a it's considered best practice and b i will get yelled at in the comments nonstop if i don't and i don't want to have to answer that same question over and over again so i just wear them and again it's fine but at the time i didn't which kind of stands out and then also um you know this is one of the first uh videos that i filmed and it it took me a year actually to complete the repair on this watch and as you can see i haven't quite figured out how to manage the autofocus on my side camera yet so apologies for that by the way the way i do it now i don't use autofocus i just use manual alright so now we're cruising right through this disassembly we're already on the other side of the watch and taking apart the keyless works and the motion works now as we've already got the train of wheels taken off from the other side and then we can get this thing thrown into the watch cleaning machine but we'll also need to do a little diagnosis to try to figure out why it's not running correctly so there goes the setting lever spring and now we can take out the the spring here for the uh for that thing that i for whatever reason can't remember the name of the yoke thank you the yolk spring and the yolk that's the setting lever which will have to take the screw off for the other side of the movement to get it out and there's the minute wheel and there we go this thing is just about apart so i can take off the setting lever screw and that will put the setting lever on the bench like that and there's a setting lever right there and it just pops out and boy that main plate is gorgeous isn't it anyway uh moving on we've got the uh the barrel to disassemble here so we'll take that apart and see make sure that the main spring's working uh i tested the watch when i got it to see if it wound up and it did so i don't anticipate that the main spring would be broken and it looks like it's not big barrel arbor coming out there and now we can gently unwind the main spring from inside of its main spring barrel using our hands there's really no other way to get a mainspring out there's no tool for it that i'm aware of there's no whatever so you just got to be gentle and kind of let the spring work itself out under its own tension rather than yanking or pulling on it in any hard direction you're just sort of letting it get to the point where it wants to unravel itself which of course it's a spring that's exactly what it wants to do and as you can see this is quite an old spring but it looks to be in quite good shape but they don't make them like this anymore where they're just circular only they now have a kind of an s shape that helps with performance but this is you know an old spring and there you go there's the watch completely taken apart and uh ready to be put into the watch cleaning machine for its bath now this though is time for us to do a little investigation and i noticed that the balance was a little loose and when you see a little loose of a balance on a watch that usually means one thing which means that the balance wheel pivot is broken one or both of them has either worn or broken and as you can see that's too loose now there's a balanced wheel pivot on the bottom and that's what it's supposed to look like there's a nice pivot there that can go into the jewel hole and you know keep things good here's the one on the top it's gone see how that's rounded over that isn't meant to be rounded over that's supposed to have that spiky pivot sitting off of it as well so we figured out what the issue is with the watch here's the problem in order to fix this there's two main options you have you can re-balance staff it you can replace the balance staff on the balance wheel which is scary and difficult or you can source a new balance and and replace it well finding a new balance is difficult on some old watches so i'm going to start off by taking this thing apart the balance itself so there's the balance wheel with the spring and the roller attached to it coming off of the balance bridge and i'm going to take a look and see if i can't do this thing myself because replacing a balance staff is something that's going to come up sometimes and i need to know how to do it so now i can remove the spring using some levers and be very careful about it and at the time i actually have a different tool now but at the time i've got this roller remover tool which you kind of put over the edges of the roller and then gently pinch down and then it'll it'll lift it off of the the assembly there so now the roller comes free whoop it falls right off but that's okay here it is and that will leave just the balance wheel so now and by the way we're in the future again this was a couple weeks ago i can take my staking set that i didn't have at the time of the original recording and i can try my best at restaking this now i'm going to tell you this is the second time trying it the first time i did it i broke the the new balance staff it split and i couldn't get it to grab the wheel so this is me trying it again and that was months and months ago so i'm really like trying to do it the best i can i took notes i watched one of mark luvik's videos five times and and here we go so the way this works is i've got it in my staking set that's the tool right there that you see and i'm using different shapes and sizes of punches which is the main part that's pointed down to create a rivet that will secure that balance staff to the balance wheel rim and basically you're pushing the metal around on the balance staff so that it grips the inside so i'm giving it a quarter of a turn and a few light taps with a brass hammer on the top at a few different punches so there's domed punches that will spread out the rivet and there's flat punches that will flatten it down wherever it sits and so far so good um i'm gent i'm trying to be as gentle as i can with this because the rivet can break you can bang up the wheel itself it can get pretty ugly pretty quickly and this is this is me pushing myself this is i am not comfortable with this just yet i'm not super comfortable with my staking set that i got i'm not really comfortable hammering watch parts and i'm really trying to take my time and see if i can get it but if you look closely at the inner part of that pivot you can see that there has there's a rivet that's been formed and it's pressing up against the wheel and that means that we can give it a test so i've mounted it just wheel with the balance bridge and the pivots to see if they're going to hold up or if it's going to wobble or bend or break so let's find out ha ha look at that it spins very freely by the way that's on a unlubricated dirty cap jewels and it spun for way longer i actually uh cut out part of the video because it kept spinning and spinning and spinning and i am thrilled i actually did it i put a new balance staff on one of on on a watch that needed it and this is a huge step for me i am i would describe it as relief if i'm honest with you um really this is the type of thing that is is something that i don't have somebody that i can just ask and have show me so i really am figuring this out on my own based off of videos and stuff like that and it's scary territory you can break a watch really easily doing this so with that we can move forward now i can put on the roller once again now this doesn't get hammered on to the staff this just gets press fit on but i'm gonna use my staking set to do this again because it just lets you line up you know stakes right these tools that have a hole in the middle of them and so i can push this over where there's a hole so that the pivot can go in yet i can push this on now i'm just going to use my fingers to firmly press this gently but firmly press this into place no hammer needed here and boom there we go once it hits the the wheel itself it is seated correctly and you can even see the pivot sticking out of the top there okay so now what i need to do is put the spring back on but i made a mistake here i was supposed to mark where the stud on the balance spring should sit relative to the wheel so that i'm at least somewhere in the ballpark as far as the uh beat error goes and i didn't so what i'm doing is just test fitting here so i've set the wheel down where the jewel is lined up with the banking pins which is where it's supposed to be and then i'm just gonna roughly test fit the spring on top and then with the balance bridge here to see if i can get it to line up the stud with where the stud goes in to the balance bridge and still have the watch actually lined up so this is this is just going to save me some amount of time but if i had marked it properly before i could have saved this ahead of time it's just i forgot because this is my first time doing it so after getting that roughly lined up i can now push the hairspring back into place and this is uh the the hairspring collet is that little metal part in in the center that holds it on and basically i'm going to do the same thing that i did for the roller in that i'm going to gently push this on just using my fingers and my hand strength there's not going to be any hammering or anything happening here so now i just want to make sure that i get things as centered as i can because i am going to be pushing down now there's a pretty big hole in the stake so it doesn't have to be perfect but i do want to make sure that i'm not running over the the pivot itself and this looks like it's lined up closely enough and there we go now the the spring looks a little crooked so i need to make a few little tweaks with my tweezers but i get it straightened out after all and you can even see the pivot sticking out there and this looks like it's about ready to go back on the watch and we'll see how it does now one thing i need to do is reassemble the ballast bridge and to do that i need to make sure that while i have it apart i clean and lubricate the cap jewels now these are non-shock jewels so that you need to take apart the whole balance bridge here you don't get to just remove a little spring on the top and then just replace the jewel and then the spring itself so after a little bath in the one dip to clean everything and a little bit of peg wood to make sure that there's no residue i can put some mobius 9010 on this now i have to put the regulating arm over this this is this is tricky business they they had it kind of rough back in the day with the amount of stuff that they had to to work around that that we don't know so i can put the regulating arm on top here and then try to line things up by putting the balance bridge now on top of that but roughly lined up with the holes because the way that this is secured is via two absolutely minuscule screws now the and then the other thing that you're trying to not do here is spread that oil all over the place as well so this is a very delicate balance now here's one of the screws being set in place and then here's the other but as you might imagine i mean you can see how big they are in relation to the screw to the tweezers they are absolutely tiny and now i'm going to hold everything in place the best i can with my tweezers and then get a nice snug test fit in on these two little tiny screws trying to be careful and there we go there we go just want to make sure that these are good and firm because this is a very important part of the watch of course the balance and i don't want anything to be too loose so there now that is put back together and now i've given the uh the spring itself a bit of a wash and now i can take that stud and put it into where it mounts up with the balance bridge and then i'm using a special pair of um vices it's it's a special vice grip i guess is what you would call it or a pin vise that you can use to screw in these little tiny screws that are so difficult to get a regular screwdriver on just making sure that nothing's getting jammed up and that this stud is fully in place and there we go now i'm going to do a quick quick test fit on the main plate before reassembling everything just to make sure that it's spinning somewhat freely with the spring and that it's not you know that at least looks like it's trying to do something and there you go i just give it a quick flick with the tweezers or or a blower and you can see that the uh that the wheel is spinning pretty freely here and looking good i'm very very happy about this by the way okay speaking of the main plate the bottom cap jewel for the escapement is here on the bottom of the main plate and it has a similar setup to the one on the balance bridge in that i need to unscrew two little tiny screws to be able to get to it to clean and lubricate it so again no shock setting on watches of this era uh they just didn't exist yet so you know it's one of those things where this is why the balance the balance staff broke in the first place because there's no shock setting so if this watch was dropped there's really nowhere for that energy to go around that heavy balance wheel and those little tiny pivots so they would very often break okay so i'm going to use my peg wood here just to scrape off any crusted on oil as this watch hasn't been surfaced in a lot serviced in a long time and then i can use a one dip bath here with both the main plate because i also cleaned that uh the jewel hole on that side of it and then this cap as well and i can take them out of the one dip one dip is a powerful solvent and cleaner that will clean off for the most part it'll do quite a good job on jewels and bridges and things like that that you can use to just dip things in now that that is not a substitute for a trip through the wash cleaning machine or through an ultrasonic cleaner but i had done a little bit of peg wood work on this so that's why i put it back into the one dip just to make sure now i'm just going to use my blower to dry it off it dries off very quickly as it is solvent and it will evaporate on its own anyway so once again mobius 9010 i'm gonna put a relatively small dot of oil on this like so you don't need to over flood this that that that jewel does not need to have oil covering the entirety of it in fact it's better if it doesn't and now i'm going to try as carefully as i can to place this back over the hole where it belongs and then again there is oil in between these things so i don't want to be spinning this around too much if i can get it as close as possible then i can maintain that oil position so that the watch will run at you know peak efficiency where if you just sort of slop it around you'll get oil everywhere and it won't there won't be enough or as much as you'd like for for the actual lubrication of the watch so here comes the two little tiny screws and again it's important here that you don't tighten them down all the way on the first run through because these two screws do need to be aligned and given that they're so small you don't want to have them out of alignment because there's not that much thread there i mean it's just it would be very easy for it to go away okay let's take a quick look at the case uh before we start the reassembly of the movement itself um this case is gold-plated uh i love the patina on it i'm not gonna be doing any surface work on it but it is a little dingy and a little it could just use a little freshening up so i'm going to be putting it into the ultrasonic just to get it as clean as i can but i'm not going to be polishing this case plated cases are well they're not polishable i mean you technically can but it it takes almost nothing to work through the the thickness of the plating itself and then you just reveal the base metal underneath and that is not what you want i'm also going to take this crystal out which isn't in terrible shape it's not like cracked or anything but it's very yellowed it's a very old crystal which has changed its color over time and i'm going to replace that because i want to see that nice white dial under there i'm going to use some peg wood just to get kind of the bigger chunks of grime off of the inside of this bezel here before i put it into the ultrasonic you know sometimes it's nice just to get the big chunks of dirt off though the truth is ultrasonic cleaners do a very good job and they will actually take care of that as well so there we go this is looking good and while that goes into the ultrasonic cleaner the case uh and all that we can start the reassembly here of the movement itself we'll start by reassembling the barrel like we do and that means that we need to put a little bit of mobius 8200 on the main spring itself there's a few different ways to do this but i found this to be the quickest and cleanest way to do it which is just to get a little bit of it on my finger cots and then rub it along the length of the mainspring and what this does is just create a very very thin film of grease as a protectant and to protect the the mainspring from corrosion or anything like that um necessary but if you're really trying to put the smallest amount you can on you don't want like actual grease on there i've seen some people put oil over the top of the coils and i've never really understood that as it won't be evenly distributed among the the coils i don't think and you might just put too much and not know it anyway let's use a watch main spring winders here to get this mainspring wound back in i did consider replacing it decided to stick with the original for this one as the mainspring is in pretty good shape and yeah it can be nice to just reuse the the original sometimes i would view it as looking you're usually looking for an excuse to replace the main spring because they're relatively inexpensive and they're kind of a pain if they do break down the line but yeah in this case i decided to go with the the og now i just need to take off the handle from the mainspring winders which is tricky business and there we go and now we can listen to one of the best sounds in watchmaking there it is it's a really great feeling when that thing snaps firmly into place i don't know why but it is there's a lot of good feelings in watchmaking somebody put a comment on one of my videos that said that they thought the best feeling in watchmaking was when you found a spring or a screw that you dropped on the ground and you finally found it after looking for an hour i have to agree that is definitely one of the best feelings also of course when the balance starts up on a watch that you fixed it's always a fantastic feeling a lot of satisfaction in this hobby uh for bringing stuff back to life and and returning valuable things to to people who who cherish them you know a lot of these things have sentimental value as we see in this watch now it's not sentimental to me particularly because i didn't know the people but like the fact that this watch has so much history makes it important to me all right so let's get underway here with getting the train of wheels going here comes the escape wheel after we've already put in the barrel as it's been reassembled and once again this movement post cleaning machine my god it's gorgeous they really went the extra mile on these movements back in the day to make them look excellent you have to pay a lot of money to get a watch with the kind of finishing that these have now like if you want to get a regular watch that has you know all the perlage and the english and all the stuff that these watches have it it'll cost you that finishing is is hard to do but these watch these old pocket watches had a very high level of finishing for what they were okay so we can put this bridge that covers once again the center and third wheels here making sure that the pivots are in place it's a little difficult to test them because the other wheels are kind of freewheeling around but we can still get make sure that they're engaged and that they can at least spin a little bit before putting in these screws to lock it down if one of your pivots is crooked on the top or bottom and not engaged with the jewels and then you screw it down you will almost certainly bend or break it and then you're looking for a replacement i mean i that that's the bottom line is if you break you know a train wheel you are looking i mean unless you are like a some sick watchmaking master with your own lathe and the ability to measure and blah blah blah the tiny tolerances and you can make a wheel and stuff you're out of luck now i hoped one day to be that good right where i can make my own parts if i find that one's missing or broken but at this point i do not have the expertise nor the equipment to do that as i'm still a relative beginner to this and i i so that's why i'm extra careful when putting this stuff back on because i just have to i mean my version of that would be to search on ebay for two and a half months before some sketchy one shows up and i buy it and hope that it's the right part i mean that's that's my lathe all right we can put in the fourth wheel now and again it has its own little bridge which i just think is fantastic it's such a cool design for those of you that have watched a lot of my videos you'll recognize that on watches generally speaking these this bridge the one i'm about to put on for the escape wheel and then the center and third wheel are often covered by one bridge that will have all four of those covered or sometimes three of them and that's kind of the way that it's done now but back then as you can see they were more willing to break these into individual pieces rather than have them grouped as one and you know i'm sure that there's engineering reasons to do one over the other you know a bigger plate is probably more rigid but i have to say that from an aesthetic standpoint this looks so cool it's just gorgeous to have it like this so now i can put the escape wheel on and a quick test just to make sure that the power is flowing through the train of wheels down to the escape wheel and it does seem to be and that means i can tighten down the escape wheel fully okay so now i'm going to put the setting lever screw in a little bit of grease on the bottom this actually serves two purposes one of them of course is just that that is going to get turned and it's going to sit in its little hole there but it actually top secret also just keeps it in place while you're putting it together so that part matters as well now we can put the barrel bridge on and this barrel bridge really only has one bushing in it and that's for the main spring barrel otherwise it's uh just kind of holding everything else giving everything else a place to live i guess is how i'd put it so we'll get this barrel bridge secured i did want to take a minute to thank my patrons i have a patreon for this channel if you like what i'm doing here and want to support it these videos of course are quite resource intensive from a time and money perspective so any little bit helps i wanted to thank kelsey stan dustin brenton adam caleb russell james samuel tony max mitchell adrian drew kyle jake and erica for their very kind support of the channel it really does mean the world to me and if you head over to patreon.com wristwatch revival you can even get some cool little bonuses now you'll notice that uh i've got to take this this little bridge off again and that's because i didn't realize this but in order to lubricate this jewel it actually is capped as well so normally you would lubricate through the top which is what i was doing to the other jewels until i got to this one and then i was like wait a second there's no hole here and that's because this thing actually has a two-piece jewel basically so there's that part which then screws down or underneath or whatever this little bridge and i need to oil that underneath so off it comes this is just part of the deal sometimes when you're learning and i certainly don't have that much experience with pocket watches i think i've only restored three or four of them and they've all been different so you know this is the type of thing that you have to expect but it's it tests your patience a little bit when you're like hey i've already done a thing i have to undo it now yeah sometimes you do uh while you're learning that's just the the name of the game and if anything uh patience is an absolute necessity for watchmaking and you know i mean i come from the video game tv era or whatever my generation's not known for having patience i don't know that it's a particular strong suit of mine which is a lot of the reason that i like this hobby is that it really forces you to kind of be more patient and and take a deep breath you can't get angry if something doesn't work if you slam something around you're just going to break it i mean you know if you're working on a car and you throw a wrench on the ground it's probably fine here that is just not the case if you start getting pushy and you know whatever you're probably going to do damage to the part so it really does make you take a deep breath and kind of just work your way through the problems that you find and i like that i actually think that that's something that i'd like to work on anyway you know just i think it's good to be patient in life and this can help teach that and with that being said we're already back done with it see that wasn't so bad and we can just make sure that that's spinning freely and there you go so the train of wheels is back in place and we can finish putting together the top side of the watch here by moving our attention over to the crown wheel ratchet wheel we can lubricate the the barrel as well as where these are going and remember this is reverse threaded so we're going to turn this to the left to tighten it down and unfortunately it my screwdriver doesn't seem to be a perfect fit for this it works out fine but i do have to be a little extra careful there when turning those screws because you don't want to damage them but also you don't want to scratch up other parts of the movement now i can put the click spring into place and it's kind of an odd fit but uh yeah it'll go then i can put the click into place as well and unfortunately it's being a little finicky as well but there's a little notch on the bottom of that click and it needs to go on the other side of this spring so i'm going to kind of force the spring over with my plastic holder here and then kind of try to set the click in place like so and i'm just going to use both hands now so one's holding the spring on the side so it doesn't shove it up and then the other hand is going to screw down the screw to keep the click in place kind of a tricky business to be honest and then a quick test yep looks good and now we can put the ratchet wheel on of course the ratchet wheel has a square hole and the top of the barrel goes into that so we do need to make sure that it's lined up properly and seated flush with that before we screw it down it's not hard to do but if you don't do it well you're not going to be able to wind up your watch so it's worth taking the time to do so this is a traditional screw righty tighty and now we can flip the watch over and start working on the keyless works and the motion works first things first though we're going to go ahead and put the canon pinion on again this is going to friction fit itself onto the bottom of the center wheel and this is what acts as the transmission for the watch if you will if you're used to working on cars this takes the power that is incrementally given to it from the other side of the watch that's all that movement all of the oscillations all of the everything goes ultimately to this canon pinion and then there's a small geared system that runs the actual hands and that's really the basics of a watch this is the dial side of the watch because the dial fits to this side and this is where the hands actually get the the motion that turns them into the the time tracking devices that they are this is the keyless works that i'm putting in now the keyless works of course is how you wind and set your watch and even though this is a pocket watch it's the same as it is on wristwatches today it uses a very standard setup particularly for swiss watches that has a sliding clutch and a clutch wheel that allows it to be operative in two different positions in this case one of them is winding and one of them is hand setting that's just an intermediate wheel that takes that turning of your fingers on the crown and kind of works its way up here to the minute and hour wheel which uh will in turn turn the canon pinion and the hands that are attached to it and the other parts and that will turn the the wheels themselves so now we can put a little bit of grease here on the winding stem and get that fitted into the watch like so there we go and just a quick turn but nothing's really buttoned down here so i don't want to go crazy with the testing and i'm putting a little bit of grease on the post for the yolk as the yolk itself will be rotating on that post every time you pull the stem out on the watch and there's the yolk going into place and it's not uncommon to get a little bit too much grease and so i'm just going to use some rotico to clean that up making sure that the yoke is placed correctly on the sliding clutch and then i can move on to putting the setting lever in place so it's going to drop in here and then through that hole that it has in it needs to go the setting lever screw which remember we already put in place but we need to turn it on its axis there and then it will eventually grab the threads on the setting lever and pull it tight to the movement case or to the main plate excuse me and again a little tiny bit of grease oops meant to be a little tiny bit of grease there on the spring where it's actually going to be touching and again a little bit erotico just to clean up the plate you don't want to leave grease floating around you know the truth is it probably wouldn't like kill anything it's just aesthetically not not good to do that and now i can once again use this holder to kind of keep everything in place while i move the yoke spring into place which is quite a strong spring so you got to be careful that it doesn't go flying off and now i can put the setting lever spring into place and as usual with these on swiss watches they have a dual purpose it's kind of a cover that keeps the intermediate wheel and the minute wheel in place and then it also has that long arm that acts as the spring for the setting lever as well so it's kind of a cover plate spring combo and we can just engage that with the setting lever like so before we fully tighten down the plate part of it here and there we go now we can give it a quick test if we pull out it should shove the setting lever into the other mode and if we push in it should snap that spring back over where we can then wind the watch and there we go looks like it's working nicely now i'm going to do a little bit of oiling on the bottom part because there's still the any of the jewels that were oiled on the top need to be oiled on the bottom as well as the main spring barrel the bushing for that needs to be oiled so i'm going to take care of that right now while we have everything there now i can turn the watch back over though and we can put the pallet fork in and you know what happens after that put the pallet fork bridge and then we put the balance in and we're going to see if this thing will run this of course is a rather nerve-wracking operation for multiple reasons uh the first and foremost is that the pal fork and the balance are probably the most delicate parts on the watch and the easiest to break so it's a little high tension but also what has been quite a long journey for me with this particular watch lasting a year is coming to a conclusion here shortly based on whether this watch will run again or not uh after me having replaced the balance staff on it not really knowing just having done it for the first time okay so we'll get this pallet fork secured and just want to make sure that pivot is engaged properly i can even put a little bit of wind in the watch will send the power down to the escape wheel and then if i nudge there we go you'll see that the pallet fork will actually jump over on its own because it's receiving power now it's time to put in the balance let's see if this thing will work okay oh it really wants to but then it's just coming to a stop uh maybe something's just stuck underneath it here with the center wheel and i can just see if it'll free up some power also sometimes the watch won't run until you get the balance bridge screwed down because it might be a little bit tight on tolerance and if you screw the bridge down then it'll kind of put it exactly where it's going to be and then it'll run so as as long as i'm happy that that the wheel is wheel pivots are in their jewel holes i can try this and then try to give it another little kick start here it doesn't want to go now the first place i usually look is the hair spring so i'm going to just make sure that the spring is flat and lined up and there we go we have a running watch i was wrong before this is the best feeling in watchmaking no doubt about it to see that heartbeat kick up again after so much time is a thrill now we can go grab the case while the watch is ticking away and this is out of the ultrasonic cleaner and it looks beautiful it cleaned up really nicely again no restoration done on it outside of cleaning but it really did clean up nicely so i'm happy with that and i'm not going to be doing anything else i mentioned that i wanted to put a new crystal on the watch so let's do that this is what i think would be the right size of crystal but as always i buy one above and below as well they're usually only a few bucks and it's nice to have them around anyway so i i don't mind spending a couple extra bucks to make sure i get it right and don't have to send out again for them okay so i'm going to use my rubber press to put this crystal in super simple job thanks to the rover press you take one of the soft dies on the bottom that's a little smaller than the crystal you take a aluminum die on the top that's the same diameter as the crystal and you push it down the end result is that the crystal forms around that lower die bending inwards which shrinks it then you can take the watch case in this case the bezel pull it up so that it's seated and then when you undo it voila it undoes the tension right into the bezel and it creates a nice solid seal so there you go perfect brand new crystal on it and that's one of my favorite things to do to me it just transforms the watch to get a new crystal on it and i'm happy that this one fit on the first try no issues okay so now we can grab the watch movement and there's a few extra parts to put on here namely the hour wheel and the dial washer the dial washer just makes sure that the hour wheel stays flush and pushed down and can't accidentally come up and that means we can work on getting the dial and of course i put it with the crown at three at first because that's what i'm used to on wrist watches but it actually goes to 12 so we'll get that turned around now the dial doesn't really want to get seated but the way that it's actually held in place are there's two dial screws on the movement that actually are on the movement itself here again apologies for the blur but they're eccentric so basically what that means is they're not screws they just turn but they have a wider edge that nips into the dial feet to hold it into place so i've done that and now down the home stretch here we can get focused on getting these hands on this has been a really thrilling adventure for me as uh it really did push my boundaries using the staking set using a hammer on this delicate part sourcing and finding the new balance staff and getting it installed on a watch that now runs is the type of stuff that you're going to have to do if you want to restore vintage watches but it's also the scariest so the hour hand's on now i can get the minute hand on here just a little push with the hand setting tool and now i can put the seconds hand on as well which of course goes on this sub second style down below and there we go it even kicks up to life still so that's always nice and now i need to take out the winding stem and the crown because i need to get this thing back in the case i know the dial has some staining on it and i did actually take one of my cleaning swabs just to see if that would come off easily and it's not it's kind of part of the watch now and that's fine i i like some patina on a watch anyway okay so now what i'm going to do is sort of gently hold things up because the hands are on the other side and i don't want to have the watch running and set it down on my casing cushion i'm just going to grab uh the the case screws here that will allow it to kind of float in between where i can then set it down on the casing cushion and not have to worry all right there we go now i can put the case back on these are just snap on case back so just a good firm push we'll get them on there and that means the only thing left to do is to put the new the new uh the bezel with the new crystal on it i'm going to use the blower to make sure that everything's dust free i notice that the seconds hand is a little bit loose when i use the blower it kind of turned around a bit so just snug it back down again with my hand setting and look at how beautiful this thing turned out now it is a pocket watch i don't carry a pocket watch i don't know what i'm going to do with it but just the fact that i was able to restore this watch to life is it's a joy really it is part of the reason why this hobby is so satisfying and so cool and plus the watch is gorgeous it came out really really nice and i'm proud of the way it did now i'm going to put it on the time grapher and it's a bit of a mess here i got it too within about 10 seconds but as you can see the beat error is pretty significant at 5.9 milliseconds the amplitude's kind of up and down between 195 and 230. and i'm going to take a deep breath and i'm going to live with it for now um i really push my boundaries on this watch and the idea of getting into it and trying to mess around with hairspring stuff and the call it and all of that stuff just doesn't appeal to me um i need to recognize the limits of my skills and for now i'm gonna call this a win uh this watch is running it's keeping somewhat okay time even if it's not particularly consistent and i put so much effort into this thing um even beyond what's in the video that i am going to live with it and be happy that this watch is going and look how gorgeous it is it's just ticking away it's this beautiful old movement and uh really it just makes me smile and that's i hope that whoever ends up getting this watch next it makes them smile as well that's going to do it for this video i want to thank you once again for taking the time to hang out with me i really appreciate that you do so i know that there's a lot of things that you could do with your time instead of watch the the watch videos with me and come along for the journey but you choose to hang out with me and that means a lot to me so thank you very much if you want to get even more wristwatch revival you can head over to instagram and i i'll do some pictures of my projects or some of my watches from my collection every once in a while and i get a lot of messages there too so that's a good way to say hi if that's what you want to do that is going to do it for this one we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 69,496

Rating: 4.928854 out of 5

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Id: FttXLL1IVvw

Length: 55min 59sec (3359 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020