Elgin A-11 World War II Military Vintage Watch Restoration

hello and welcome back to another video here on wrist watch revival i'm marshall i'm going to be guiding you through what is today a very special watch on the bench here this is an a11 military spec watch from world war ii manufactured by elgin and these are really special watches uh what they were are during world war ii the us government came out with a specification for watches for soldiers and this had certain requirements and then they opened that up to companies as you can see well it's a little hard to see it was called the a11 spec and there you can see in the upper right hand corner right yeah right there a11 type a11 and a11 spec watches were a specification of military watches in world war ii that was issued by the u.s government for military use three different companies manufactured these watches waltham bulova and elgin as you can see here you can actually see some of the specifications on there the a11 was a higher specific specification than the normal military issue watches and the watches were often used by european military during the war as well the spec called for a hand-wound hacking movement with center seconds an outer minute track with 10 minute demarcations and minute and hour hands as well there was some leniency with the rest of the production standard as some of the watches were produced with flat bezels some had coin edge bezels some had waterproof or dust proof cases you could find loomed and unloomed versions as well but the key the one interesting feature that really stands out to me uh was hacking and we'll talk about that when we get into the guts of the watch here and kind of see what that was and why it was important but i got this one off of ebay and it's in actually pretty decent shape all told um could definitely use a new crystal and it's not running so it does have uh some issues for sure but you know i bought it broken and we're gonna see what's going on with it and if we can fix this little piece of history on the bench this time i'm really glad that you've taken the time to come hang out with me and uh explore this hobby and uh see what's going on with us watching if we can get this dang thing running again so first things first we got to open it up i like using this one of these rubber balls to try to open up the back first because sometimes i have to use my watch case back opener but a lot of times watches that have been worked on or that are just have been sitting around for a while can actually be open with that rubber ball and it's much more gentle and quite effective so let's see what we've got inside here and take a look at the movement and well it's actually got another cover some type of protective cover inside the case probably just to protect from more outside stuff like dust or water from getting in and i can only do so much with another metal cover sometimes you see these made out of iron and those will often be used to to make magnetization issues less of a thing you can you can kind of cover up the movement and shield it from from that but i don't think that's what this is i believe that this is just a steel cover on the inside just to help to protect the watch all right now we finally get to actually take a look at what this movement looks like i don't know what to expect from a watch this old this was produced probably around 1944 43 somewhere in that range again this was made by elgin which was once a very prominent us-based watch company they made pocket watches in the 18 and early 1900s they produced millions literally millions of them all right the cover is off and wow this movement's actually kind of really good looking and it even seems to have kicked up a bit here and might be a runner but it's beautiful um i'll be honest i didn't expect the movement to look this good not only uh from the fact that it's old but also just aesthetically it's just a really nice looking movement with that beautiful kind of copper color and it does seem to be running as well so i'm a little confused now because the the ebay ad said that this wasn't a running watch and i don't know maybe if something with the the cover was holding it up or or something but it looks like it's ticking along and now i can wind it up too so something was jammed up in there maybe the case or the cover was put on improperly or something but now it seems to be running which is very good news let's put it on the time grapher and see how it does watches of this era um generally ran at 18 000 beats an hour and that's what this one runs at and well okay so it's gaining a minute and a half a day it's got quite low amplitude and the beat error is not fantastic but it's running and i you know i feel like just giving this thing a good service we might be able to get it to actually run pretty well which is really exciting probably just hasn't been serviced in a really long time so as you can see when i pull out the the crown the movement stops and that's what hacking is and we'll get a look at how it actually works this is one of the first watches i worked on that had a hacking movement and it's actually really important for a military spec watch mainly because the soldiers when they would get up in the morning they would meet up with their sergeant or whoever their their uh you know officer was and they would all sink their watches the same but you can't do that if the watch won't stop when you pull the crown out so they would get exactly to the right seconds and of course when you think about being in a you know a battle situation well that's really important if we have two different groups of people and we want to run over a hill at the same time we can't have it be to the nearest minute that's we're going to have people that are going to get killed so they needed to have a hacking feature and that's why it was part of this a11 spec all right hands need to come off these are non-luminescent hands uh the the time frame would have if they did use loom on the hands it would have been radium which is a potentially dangerous substance and one that you need to be very careful with on watches though these this is just a painted dial but you know what the dial is actually in pretty darn good shape and it's a handsome dial as well so these are the screws that hold the dial feet in place and when we loosen these then it'll allow us to take off the dial just like that easy easy and again the dial looks properly aged but in relatively good shape none of the major pieces of paint are missing and all the numerals are readable and all that so we'll take the hour hand off just because that can just simply fall off and now we need to take the canon pinion off and i've got my trusty canon pinion remover that i bought off of ebay and restored myself and it's a beautiful tool that works really really well for this and there's the canon pinion now i take this off of this side so that when i take the train of wheels apart i can remove them because you have to remember that the canon pinion is stuck on the center wheel and it won't come up if the canon pinion's still on so i do that first and by the way once again you can see the hacking feature here as i'm putting the crown the winding not the crown the winding stem back in and when i pull it out it stops and when i push it back in it starts up again stop and start and again that allows you to synchronize watches with each other and we'll take a look at how that works uh internally in just a bit first things first though we need to let the power off of the main spring no big deal just move the click out of the way and let it wind down in your fingers you don't want to let that undo it once if possible because the mainspring is quite powerful and it will snap undone and there is at least a potential for it to break or bend in that process so you'd prefer to let it wind down gently here we're going to take off the balance i always try to take this off first so that it doesn't get damaged one thing to note here as well if you look at the top balance jewel that's the big red jewel at the top of the bounce that i'm taking off there it is not shock protected that technology was either not invented or not widely used at the time of manufacture for this watch in the 40s so if you dropped your watch you stood a pretty good chance of breaking the pivot on that balance wheel and your watch wouldn't work anymore but this one's managed to survive all these years with the pivots intact at least until now okay so now we can continue with the disassembly of this watch and the first thing i'm going to do is is take off this this top piece it's a little tiny bridge and what it's doing is actually that's the center seconds and that was a part of the a11 military spec as well that it had to have a center second so that they could sync them up and what that is is it's on top of a very long shaft that goes all the way to the other side of the watch right there you can see it i have to actually pull it apart because they're kind of stuck together here but that shaft right there is what you actually put the seconds hand on it's what spins and it spins off of that large wheel on the left which i'm going to take off right now so when that turns it turns the uh it rubs up against the pinion on the top of that and that actually turns the center seconds hand so i've got a special tool here here to remove that wheel and there it is so now we're going to start on the barrel side and this is going to mean taking off the ratchet wheel and the crown wheel this is a crown wheel here and if you noticed for those of you with very sharp eyes that this has a reverse threaded screw you actually turn it the opposite way that you think you would to take it off you you turn it to the to the right to take it off and this one here on the ratchet wheel is is normal threaded though righty tighty lefty loosey that kind of thing and there's a crown wheel looks fine too you know i like to inspect it for wear there's maybe a little bit of etching on the bottom but nothing terrible and now we can take off the click this is what allows that ratchet wheel to turn one direction but not the other and that ratchet wheel is actually attached to the barrel arbor which is that little piece of metal in the center of that big circle with the kind of the spring around it and that is attached to the main spring which is what powers the entire watch and there's the click going away and then that kind of beautiful spring actually is a is it clicks is called a click spring it's kind of delicate so i'm just using a a stick here to make sure that it doesn't go flying off on me because those things are you know prone to do that and i've had that happen multiple times no doubt about it and now we can take off the barrel bridge and uh really kind of get into the guts here barrel bridge is held on by these three screws i always just double check them when i take them out to make sure that they're identical and they are occasionally one will be shorter longer than the other but not in this case okay and now we can take the barrel bridge off and it looks good nice and clean this watch was definitely serviced at some point during its life it's dry meaning it's been a long time since it has but this watch was well taken care of now we can take the center wheel fourth wheel off and then i can take the barrel which contains the main spring completely out and while we're here i can get up this side of the keyless work so they don't just fall out that's a sliding clutch and that right there that is the hack so that part of the middle with that little stick coming off of it is what actually activates the hack and it's actually it's just a super simple device it's a little i'll you'll get a look at it later but it's a just a small piece of metal and all it does is when you pull the crown out it pushes on that kind of shiny part in the middle and that little stick that's coming off of it touches the balance and it stops it that's it that's all it does there's nothing real fancy going on there all right here's the bridge that holds the uh the the fourth wheel here and the escape wheel so now we can get those out of there now i do have to be a little careful here because again that that part right there that's the hack that's it right there and it's kind of made up of two long springs one coming from the side of the case and then there's some debris in here as well which makes me a little bit nervous it could be another reason why the watch wasn't running some debris could have got caught in there and then when i opened up the case it knocked it loose but i'm going to take the hack mechanism out now and that's it like i said i was kind of curious to see how it worked and i'm like oh that's really smart and really simple way to do it so there's the screw that holds the hack in place and then this little part right here is the hack now the the tension spring that's below it there that's actually just pressed into the plate here so i don't need to take that out that part right there i can just leave that in but this one's going to come out and go on the cleaning machine with everything else but that right there just provides tension for it and now i can take out the pallet fork and the little bridge that holds the pallet fork in place next to the balance the pallet fork's probably the most delicate part on the watch it has very very very fine pinions and you can pretty easily break one of them so you do want to be careful i mean they're not it's not a disaster if you drop the thing or something but you just don't want to be slamming it around you can easily break off the pivot and there is the pallet fork coming out now we can flip the watch over back to the dial side as we call it and we can take out the rest of the keyless works so we've already got the sliding clutch and and the other part off of that side but we still have this these are usually kind of a combo of like a cover plate and also a spring for the setting lever which is that piece kind of down on the lower right that you can see sticking out so we'll take this out kind of a cool looking part it looks it reminds me of an animal or a hieroglyph or something i don't know the setting lever and that's the yoke spring there the yoke's already on the bench and then we can take out these intermediate wheels these are what they call the motion worker part of the motion work whoop jumpy motion work and then that's the setting lever screw which i'm just going to kind of push down and take out the bottom and we've basically got this little a11 world war ii watch apart the last thing we need to do is take the main spring apart oh this has got a very old mainspring in it these blue ones you can see by their color are quite fragile compared with the ones that we use these days which are called unbreakable main springs they're they really are breakable but these ones were really breakable so i got to be very careful with it because i would like to reuse it if it's in decent shape but the only real way to get these out of here is by hand like this so you kind of kind of just gently rock it out and there it comes now as i can start to see though just by taking it out this far this is one of those really old school style springs where they didn't even have them in the shape they kind of look like an s now and these ones were just wound up like a circle and here's the watch completely disassembled as you can see yeah it's complicated it's a watch but also not that many parts you can see how these would be used for for military uses where you know you could take a watch and take parts off and swap them with other ones uh you know when you needed to all right everything's been through the watch cleaning machine and now it's time to begin reassembly now as it turned out i decided just to order a new mainspring because that one looked completely worn out to me i had to measure it and order one online they i couldn't find i found a couple but they were the same type as that and i wanted to use a modern mainspring in it these are much stronger and they last much longer the way they come here is in this little and that metal disc just holds the mainspring in place and on one side of the disc there's a color it doesn't matter what the color is sometimes they're blue sometimes they're red and the other side of the disc is just bare metal the colored part is the top and all you do is just do what i did there which is set it over the spring and then just push it in gently now i can put on the barrel arbor and i'm going to put a little bit of hp 1300 lubricant there just because that's the part where it turns and i can put the lid on so now we've got a nice new modern mainspring in here this is going to need a little bit more of that oil and the barrel is all ready to go which means we got the green light to start reassembly of this watch and let's get this thing running again and running real well i love working on these these type of watches because they really are a piece of history i mean we don't know the history of each of these watches of course but this could have been worn in world war ii uh this this watch could have been over in europe for a number of years and and brought back it could have been in the pacific we just don't know but it's exciting to think about the history that these little you know what what what part of the world and and what have these little watches seen it's incredible we're going to start by putting this hack back in place and now we can get going on the train of wheels that's going to be the escape wheel going in first remember these two wheels over on the side the fourth wheel and the scape wheel they have their own little bridge so i'll start with those and sometimes it can be difficult to get the pivot in the jewel hole here because it's so small but then eventually you'll find it you just have to have patience with it definitely one of the things that watchmaking is a hobby uh test you on as your patients for sure more on that in a little bit uh but yeah uh i think that that's a good thing you know i i would prefer to be a more patient person and i think that this kind of forces you to if you just start jamming stuff it does not end well that is not where you want to be as a watchmaker when you just start you know oh i'll just screw it down and see what happens that that is a good way to break a watch so if you want to be good at this you got to kind of test your patience let's get this bridge on here and as you can see i've put the other wheels in place as well just so that everything's kind of lined up and now you know this is a tricky part i have to get both of the holes lined up on the pivots for there and finally it falls into place and i can screw down this bridge i also just can't get over how beautiful this movement is given that it's a military i mean this is a form follows function 100 but boy the form on this thing is nice it is a beautiful little movement they made a ton of these watches by the way the three companies i mentioned before waltham elgin and bulova again this one's an elgin all three us-based watch manufacturers and they got a government contract and they went nuts it also means though that you can find these on ebay for just a shocking price i mean these are a couple hundred dollars like these are legitimate pieces of history if if there were fewer of these around they would be worth so much but since there's so many you can have one okay so now we can put the barrel bridge in place here and start to get towards screwing it down it's a little easier to place it only has the two holes to line up there and that makes it a little easier and of course we want to give it a quick test to make sure that the train of wheels are rolling along freely and now we'll do some oiling so this is for the barrel and i'm using 1300 once again this is the same 1300 there's usually three basic types of oils for a watch there's a really fine one for really tiny you know high friction or i shouldn't say high friction low friction parts then there's like a medium that's what i'm using here the the red that you see is is hp 1300 made by mobius and it's a medium synthetic oil i use 90 10 as my lightweight one and then you'll usually find uh that you'll want a thicker like a grease and i have that too for the parts that are really higher friction and then you know if you're a professional watchmaker you probably have a few more that you might use here or there but for a hobbyist like me those three really do cover most your bases the only others that you need that are kind of specialty are oils or greases for the mainspring for the pallet forks that's a really important one that's a i think it's 9415 i have that one too and then also a breaking grease for the inside of the barrel the main spring barrel is is another one those are all the ones that i use i think it's five or six total all right so now we're getting the click in place here and i've already got as you can see uh the crown wheel and then i can get the ratchet wheel going and uh now this thing's coming back together really nicely also it cleaned up nicely realize i didn't screw down the the click there first i don't know why but i'm glad i remembered and now i can get the uh the ratchet wheel screwed into place and that means that we can flip this thing over back to again the dial side and we can do some oiling here so check this out i put it on the microscope so that you could see about how much oil we actually use again this is mobius 90 10 going on the train wheel pivots and you just don't need that much the the hard part when you first start doing this is actually to put on enough like not too much and even then sometimes you do but it really is just a very small amount and i found that putting the watch on the microscope helps helps me see how much i'm actually putting on because otherwise you need like your highest powered loop and you have to get really close to the piece to do that and that can be hard all right so there's some oiling done now we can put the canon pinion back in place and get the motion works going again i'm using hp 1300 for most of the motion works parts here but that blue grease you see there is is the actual grease that i would use and for some of the higher friction parts like the yoke i will use that the clutch wheel also gets the grease because that is a part that has a lot of friction between it and the other part i mean they they literally just rub metal on each other when you turn your watch one one direction and then occasionally if you find yourself you know getting a little bit too much on uh or you miss or whatever you can use some radical to kind of clean it up and again this is the grease going on the winding stem now so that we can put together the rest of the keyless works and now this watch is actually kind of interesting because the yoke spring or the yoke itself which is that piece right there normally has a post on the actual watch that it goes on but here the post is actually on that funny looking spring slash cover that i talked about before that's why i put the oil on it and so i like well i don't know how to really put this thing together so i'm going to put the rest of the parts in place and then try to kind of place that part in from above and see if the parts line up it's a little tricky though and and one that i i haven't seen one built quite this way before again assembling the rest of the motion work these are intermediate wheels that transfer that uh turning motion from the crown when you want to set the time up to the canon pinion which you can see there which then drags the the the hour wheel on the minute wheel around in circles so that you can set it get the watch set how you want so i remembered though that i do need to make sure that i get this setting lever in place and apologies for the out of focus but you have to pick it up and screw in the setting lever from the bottom which is what i was doing there and now i can get to trying to set this whole thing in in motion again i've got the uh the yoke on the bottom of this kind of held on by grease and friction or something and we'll see how it comes together okay that seemed to work and what i'm doing here is is putting this cover on but not tightening it down all the way because i still need to make sure that everything's lined up properly before i i put it together put it together and now i'm winding the watch here and now this is the hand setting position and there you go so it worked very strange to put it together like that but it worked out fine now i'm going to put some grease here on again the high friction points of the setting lever spring and the setting lever and again i got a little too much on there so i'm going to use some radico to clean it up i'm sure if you worked it you know patek philippe or somewhere they would frown on you for that but for having to clean up a little bit of extra oil but uh for those of us who work in our home offices it's fine so now you can see i can wind up the watch and now it unwinds smoothly which is exactly where we want to be so things looking beautiful here and now once again this is that top little bridge that holds that extended pivot that goes all the way to the other side of the watch and that is the uh the seconds hand that goes around that's what you attach the second hands to seconds hand too there's an extended pivot on the third wheel okay so now we get to put on the the last touches here which are the balance and the pallet fork but even though i did run these through the cleaner i like to put them in one dip which is a solvent basically like it's it's made to take away anything that's left on there any possible residue of oil or dirt or anything it's actually quite a powerful solvent in fact it kind of evaporates quickly even so you have to keep it in a sealed jar because it'll just go away because it you know it's like super alcohol or whatever um but the good news with that as well is that you can put it on a piece of paper like this and just use a blower and it'll dry off very quickly so you don't have to have any special equipment or wait very long to get it going so after the parts are dry that means that we can now install them in the watch and we are getting close to being almost finished here with a potential runner and that's always really exciting for those of you that have worked on cars in your life it's very similar feeling i worked on cars for most of my life and you um you know that feeling when you worked and worked and worked on a on a car and then you finally get to fire up the engine and see if it's going to work and if it goes it's the same moment it's it's exactly the same when you uh when you finish working on a watch and you get to see all right is the engine going to fire up and how and how does it run and all that so the first thing we do though after we get the pallet fork in is put some wine in the mainspring and then just gently touch it back and forth like this and that shows us that the power is reaching all the way down to that pallet fork and that means that it's it's good to go to put the balance in so here we go balance going on of course have to be very careful with this you don't want to put that screw in there and just start jamming you got to make sure that the balance pivots are in their jewels because if they're not you will snap the balance uh the balance pivot in like half a second okay so let's see if it's gonna fire up for us uh no okay well sometimes the the the balance bridge isn't quite all the way put down so now let's see if it'll go usually just kind of fires up but hmm it seems to be in line with the pallet forks correctly but it doesn't want to actually go what is going on here so we need to do a little bit of investigation because that should just fire up like i've got a wind in it it's the the power's getting down to the pallet fork it was running before you know so it really should fire up here i don't know what's going on i'm just gonna double check the pallet fork again yeah see it's it's getting clicked over on its own that's not me pushing that so that's fine so the first thing i'm going to do here is i'm going to take the balance wheel off because i haven't cleaned the jewels on this yet this is something that i normally would do after the fact but this is a these watches are weird because they don't have those springs on the top for the shock protector on the jewel so you actually have to take the balance wheel off turn it over use like my smallest screwdriver that's like half a millimeter or something and then take off this little plate on the bottom and then after i've done that i can actually get access and there it is you can see the two sides of the jewel so now i can properly clean and lubricate these and then and then see if maybe that there was just something in there that was preventing the balance from from actually spinning but these are i mean look at these screws like these are absolutely minuscule skews screws like the smallest ones i've ever worked on those are screws right they look like dirt so now once again we get the one dip out and we'll put both halves of the jewel in there's a cap jewel and then the the main part of the jewel and we'll put those in the one dip to uh to make sure that they're looking good and all cleaned up and then we'll also lubricate these using some 90 10. very very small work here and hey while we're doing it i might as well get that that hairspring back in there once again the blower just to dry all of the one dip off and i'm actually going to get in there with a little peg wood and clean it as well because i could see that there was a little bit of dirt so i put it back in the one dip and now i'm going to lubricate it and what you want to do is get a drop of oil it was a little too small for me to get in with the camera but you want to put just a drop of oil on there and then you put these two parts back together but they're held on by those absolutely tiny screws so this is some hardcore stuff this is not a large watch the movement's quite small on it which which also contributes to these little tiny things but i think i need to work on a pocket watch soon which just feel like you're working on a truck after working on these little tiny movements you might need a little refresher again just getting these two parts put back together the cap jewel and the lower part now i need to put the regulator back on this is what you turn to make the watch run faster or slower it's just held on by friction though and now we need to put the balance back together as you can see there's a lot to do with these older watches that you don't have to do on on newer watches this whole process is just unclip the little spring on the top take out the jewel throw it in the one dip make sure it's clean put the lubrication on put the jewel back in and throw the little spring back on and i know that this quality is not what you're used to there but i was just screwing back that balance and now we get to try it out again and it still doesn't want to go what is going on with this thing so my first idea was maybe it's the hack and that's the hack right there when you pull it forward it just pushes itself up and touches the balance wheel and stops it and i thought maybe it was bent and touching the wheels but as you can see it's not then i did find something look closely at the outer rings of this spring and look at what you see liquid a lot of it this should be impossible but it's not uh because it turns out that the one dip had kind of ran out of its solvent property so i needed to replace it with a new one and after i did i put it back on and i guess we have a running watch as you can see it's extremely low amplitude meaning it's barely running so i put it back on the microscope i took the watch apart and this is what i found look at that jewel now that was not that way when i first started but the process of me troubleshooting this watch taking it apart putting it together put you know 10 times which i did by the way um eventually that that jewel broke and i think it was cracked at the beginning and i checked the upper jewel for that same pivot and look at this it moves around that means that this watch probably took a huge hit at some point and that fourth wheel i believe it was pivot jewels where one was cracked and one was loose and i believe that that's what was going on here so my decision then was do i replace the jewels which is hard time consuming and expensive or do i use a donor movement that i have which i do of another elgin 539 and use the plates from that for this project i decided to use the plates for it so the upper plate and then the lower but i also want to learn how to do the jewel part a little bit better so what you're seeing now by the way is the fact that i had to take this thing apart so many times that it really just needed to be cleaned and done all over again to do this properly after i found out the issue so back in the cleaning machine back in the one dip and we finally got it all back together and now we get the moment of truth once again to see if this thing will run properly and as you can see before i even get the screw in the balance it's starting to kick up although it does look low amplitude like before low amplitude means low power it just had nothing going i put it on the time grapher before this and it wouldn't even read because it was barely running but we're gonna see if we can get it kicked up now after having discovered the problem okay this looks much much much better and i haven't even put a full wind into the watch yet and look at that it's working yes this is seriously the best feeling after hours and hours and hours and hours i mean this was i put this on instagram i asked watchmaker friend i this was such a tough one for me because it just wouldn't run and to see this thing finally going after having figured out what happened i'm stoked now we'll put it on the time grapher and see what it's doing and as you can see i was able to get the amplitude up above 300 which is fantastic the thing that really stood out though was the beat error it was nine milliseconds off that is unacceptable so what you're looking at now here is we're looking down the the site of those two posts and what you want to see when when you look at those is the jewel the red jewel in the middle there to rest naturally between the two posts and unfortunately as you can see that is not the case so i had to once again take the balance off of the watch and then do a manual adjustment on it where there's no number it doesn't tell you whether you're doing it right or not you just have to guess and then put it all back together and as you can see from the time grapher reading here it worked i got it to within 0.5 milliseconds and normally you'd want to get it to 0 or 0.1 but i was going to be content with 0.5 in this case and also i can show you here that it's really close to perfect this is how it's supposed to look where that jewel lines up perfectly so with all of those issues finally solved and the thing running well again we can focus on the outside of the watch so we're going to actually replace the crystal on this unfortunately the case itself is uh plated meaning that you can't polish it or really refinish it without replating the whole thing which i definitely a don't know how to do and b don't want to do on a watch like this so let's get the watch crystal replaced so you can see we've got the new crystal and this is our crystal press the bottom has a soft felt piece that pushes up against the crystal on the bottom and the top pushes is a aluminum part which pushes on the edges of the crystal from the outside so here's the case it goes on here and this is the brand new crystal i measured the crystal and ordered a new one so this one's well looks nice so you put this on the smaller diameter soft part on the bottom and then i like to use a plastic bag just to make sure that nothing gets nicked or scratched from the top that is metal on plastic and then what it does is it just pushes the edges down and bends that crystal and then i can just bring that case up where it'll fit on the inner lip of the case and then just unscrew it and then thing just expands into the slot that's it it's a very simple tool but it's a pleasure to use i love this thing it's called a rubber press there's other ways you can get crystals on but i really love this one and it wasn't quite big enough so there now i can feel it click in and then just unscrew it gently as the crystal on his tension gets released it goes into the slot on the inside of the case and boom just like that we've got a brand new crystal on this watch i can push on the back and it doesn't come out and that means that it is good to go job done so now we can start assembling the dial side again we'll start with the hour wheel this is the this is actually what the hour hand gets attached to and that's a little washer to make sure that it stays down so that it stays in sync and now we can put the dial on again i really like the dial on this watch it's obviously very uh utilitarian but it's a military watch that's what it's supposed to be in fact it was part of the spec that it was black with white numerals and then the numerals themselves were also part of the spec that it had to have the uh 10 minute demarcations and then the second sand as well okay so the dials on now we can get the hands on this thing and again these are non-luminous hands if the technology was cheaper or more widely available at the time i'm sure they would have had luminous hands that would have been something very handy for a soldier in the field but alas this one didn't have it so our hands on now the minute hand now there's no date on this but you do have to line these up at some hour where you know the minute hand is up at 12 when the hour hand is on an exact hour marker it doesn't matter which one you use i just chose 12 here and then i use this hand tool that pushes around the edges of where the hand is so that it goes onto the little post that it goes on to and then we can just give it a quick check to make sure that the hands aren't touching each other or scraping up against the dial and that they turning freely and all that they look good by the way i love that color that that aged kind of look beautiful hands real simple but again legibility was really the the name of the game for a watch like this these are also interesting just because before world war one watches wristwatches for men weren't really a fashionable thing at all they were considered an item that that were that were for women and uh but by world war ii they were manufacturing millions or hundreds of thousands of these or whatever and issued them to the soldiers so things changed pretty quickly it was only you know 20 years later okay there's a movement ring that helps the the movement stay firm in the case and not get knocked around in there and now we can put the case on crystal looks beautiful here too because it really shows off that aged but lovely dial and now we can put the winding stem back in and again given that this is a hacking movement it kicks right up once we put the the winding stem in and that's exactly what should happen and again it stops when i pull it out so i'm checking that and then also just to put a little extra screw down here on the setting lever and it's working beautifully now the last step is just to put this little cover plate thing back on and then the the back of the watch and then we'll call this a finished if lengthy project i'm telling you this thing would not run it was so i finally figured out the jewel situation there after one of them more or less broke out um but again my theory is that that jewel was already cracked which is why things wouldn't run and then me assembling and disassembling the watch all those times just you know brought out that crack and that's why you see that damage on the jewel because i inspected it early and it didn't have that kind of damage that would have been obvious all right and we've got this watch back together our elgin a11 world war ii military spec watch is restored and ready to go on the wrist of somebody and i'm really proud of this one because this one really challenged me as a watchmaker as many of you know who watch i'm an amateur at this this is not my profession or my job i'm learning as i go and i do get stuck there's a lot that i know and there's a lot more that i do not know and this one really kind of put me to the test for that but what a cool little piece of history right these things were issued soldiers in world war ii this one could have seen combat action or something crazy like that and uh the fact that you can pick these up still for a few hundred bucks and own a little piece of history's awesome and i'm really proud and happy that i was able to get this one running really well and hopefully back on somebody's wrist so that is going to do it for this video i want to say thank you very much for hanging out with me and watching and supporting the channel i really appreciate it i do have an instagram if you want to see some updates to the projects in between when i actually upload videos because as you might imagine these videos take a really long time to make because i have to order parts and wait for stuff to show up and i'm slow and then i have to edit the video etc if you want to get a little more uh see what's going on on the bench in between i'll usually post some stuff over on instagram it's the same handle as here it's wristwatch underscore revival over there again what a cool watch what a piece of history and i wanted to say thanks we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 114,314

Rating: 4.8914728 out of 5

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Id: kJFNcfT-7HQ

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020