Elgin From the 1880s Vintage Pocket Watch Restoration

hello and welcome to another video here on wrist watch revival my name is marshall thank you so much for coming along this time on the bench we've got a pocket watch this is uh an elgin pocket watch from the late 1800s built in about 1880 to 1882 this one actually belongs to a close friend of mine who uh inherited it uh it's a family watch of his and uh it hasn't been touched in a very long time so uh i've got it on my bench to kind of bring it back to life and let's take a look now first things first is we have to figure out how to open it up so this is the back and as you can see what it has is what they call a hunter case back which is the movement is actually covered by another cover as you can see here this is what the movement looks like underneath oh it's quite lovely actually take a look at that this is uh an elgin 92 movement you can see the balance wheel moving although taking a close look at the bounce wheel so the first thing that you notice is that it spins which is really nice these are not shock protected movements so the balance staff is easy to break but look at this the hair spring stud is not attached to the balance ear it that little thing is supposed to go in there and it looks like it's come out so we'll have to be extra careful with that and that's just one sign of potential wear it also shows why it's not running also i try to turn the top here and it just spins freely that almost certainly means that the main spring is broken on this watch as that's what you're winding up when you turn the top now i can't really figure out how to get the front of this thing open there doesn't seem to be one of those little fingernail grooves to actually look at the watch face oh there we go you push on the top of the crown and it's actually spring-loaded and the front pops open and reveals well a very classic american pocket watch design though it is a mess as you can see the cover on it or the cover the the crystal here is broken and it is actually glass it's a very thin glass and it is shattered that has allowed a heck of a lot into the movement as far as dirt goes it's missing the seconds hand and it's kind of a mess now i see this little lever and this is called a lever set so you pull that out and that's how you set the time when you push it in when you turn the crown it's supposed to wind and again the seconds hand missing here as well this one won't wind because the main spring's probably broken it could be something with the keyless works but it's probably the main spring so let's take off the front bezel here and yeah this is a mess that is a cracked and broken front glass on it oh there's a piece of hair here that's really bugging me so i'm going to get rid of that now it does have the hour and the minute hand there's some dirt or maybe oil on it just a quick check reveals that it does come off so maybe we can get this dial looking a little bit better these dials are they're enamel they're beautifully made enamel dials and they basically last forever but they're prone to cracking so first things first let's get into this watcher we've got to take off the hands and then we have to figure out how to take it apart this is not like the wristwatches that i'm used to working on but as i've said many times on the channel if you're looking to get into this as a hobby pocket watches are a great place to start now let's take a look here's the back of the enamel dial as you can see the back actually has enamel on it as well there's a layer of enamel on there so that when they enamel the front because they have to fire it like hot it won't bend and crack if it's supported on the back by enamel as well so now we're taking a look at the dial side of the movement and i'm just trying to get a feel for how this whole mechanism works and you can see there's a spring-loaded part in the middle that kind of can pop up when you pull out that lever and look at that dial just comes or excuse me the movement just comes right out so easy game there and here's the case we'll have to put the case aside and we'll deal with that in a little bit but let's take a look at the movement and see what's going on with it that part on the top is what you turn when you turn the crown the crown has a kind of a key thing that engages with it and as you can see when i take off the hour hand the canon pinning actually just comes off right with it which isn't necessarily normal but we'll we'll figure out if that's an issue or not it might not be here and i'll just take them apart for now another thing that stands out about this movement um it is dirty holy smokes is this thing dirty you i mean there's just like actual dirt in here right normally when we talk about a dirty movement we don't mean like chunks of you know the stuff that's on the ground we mean there's a little bit of grime or there's some oil or something this just has dirt in it so probably this watch is absolutely desperate for a cleaning and a service but it certainly needs some other work as well as it's a complete non-runner so i'm going to go ahead and take the balance off here first just to make sure that it's protected and like i was saying before you know you can find pocket watch movements on ebay for very cheap ones just like this you can find them for 30 bucks now they won't be working there's going to be something wrong with it but you will have that and look at this i test the pallet fork and there's no tension on it whatsoever which is another indication that it's likely a broken mainspring i'm becoming quite convinced at this point that the mainspring is broken on this watch i'm going to take off the barrel bridge here and as i was saying you can find these movements and they're great for practice they're also just the only reason that they're so cheap is because they were ridiculously mass-produced during this time frame otherwise i mean these things would be historical they are historical i mean this is a a watch that while this one doesn't happen to be working at the moment could be a working watch from 1880. i you know at the time of the recording it's 141 years it's incredible and you can buy it for under a hundred dollars like it just blows my mind all right so there is the top part that actually engages with the crown so that just comes right out apparently one thing about working on pocket watches when you're first learning as well is that they are a lot bigger and that really does make things easier to see manipulate and they're also a bit more forgiving they're less likely to break because the parts are more staunch so there you go all right well we can take the train wheel bridge off now and we see the train of wheels laid out beautifully and in simple fashion in fact if you look here you can see the main wheel the main spring up there in the barrel is one then there's the center wheel third wheel fourth wheel and escape wheel in order and they're just beautifully laid out okay well again there's a lot of gunk on the the wheels here but so far so good it's coming right apart these watches are also relatively simple from a watchmaking perspective because they're time only right there's no date function there's no chronograph there's nothing crazy here and that's good i think at the beginning the first thing i notice when i take the barrel off here as well is that the winding mechanism for the barrel is actually attached to it directly underneath that's basically the click spring right there the click and the click spring and uh and it's and that's attached to the ratchet wheel which is actually just attaches directly to the barrel on a modern swiss watch the ones that we normally work on on this channel it's separate it's on top of it and it engages with it but it's not below it like that also what a beautiful clickspring here you know normally it's just a little coiled wire on a modern wristwatch but on this look at this this beautiful long spring that provides tension uh to the click and yeah that's dirt this thing is very dirty okay away comes the click and now i can take the ratchet wheel which is actually just kind of stuck there isn't a proper post or anything like that on it and i'm also just continuing to be careful when i'm taking it apart but also checking out where the parts go there's not that many compared to some of the watches that i have grown more accustomed to working on but they're different this the whole setup is completely different for this and look at this the pallet fork is actually just stuck in the pivot and that is i mean that is desperately needing a cleaning to say the least i'm just hope it's not corroded okay now we can flip this watch over and look back over at this and once again this right here is how you change it into okay i'd like to set the time versus okay i'd like to wind my watch up so the first thing i'm going to do is try to see if i can remove this lever that wheel that i touch is actually spring-loaded but it does catch so i'm just going to wait and my intuition tells me that this might be a right-hand remove screw i give it a little bit of torque to the normal side and when it gives me any resistance i'm like i'm going to try this right handed and i was right it it does do that way that is common for the pieces that are attached to or are around the crown wheel which is actually what's underneath this here and uh yeah that's again you just develop this intuition as you work on more and more watches where you find yourself being right more often than you're wrong and now we can take this part i have no idea what i would actually call this part but i'm just taking it apart and there's a crown wheel as well so now i can take apart this little arm that's holding down one of the intermediate wheels and i'm still looking for a way to free up that long lever that we pull out though just give me a little bit of trouble but it's just because it's been in place for so long and there's again a significant amount of dirt one of the big problems with dirt or any type of anything that's in the movement as far as dirt or sand or shavings from parts of the metal or whatever is that they can actually work against you very quickly dirt typically will attract itself to liquid and really the only liquids inside of a watch like this are the oils so they will actually attract dirt and the oils of course live on the parts of the watch that have friction so if the oil becomes contaminated enough with dirt it can actually act as almost like a sand uh if you will and on the most on the parts that are actually moving and it can pretty quickly deteriorate the parts over time now if the watch hasn't been ran which it doesn't look like this is i mean the certain watch certainly hasn't been used in years and years and years and years like as an actual watch well then that can be mitigated so that's kind of what we're hoping for here because the dirt is definitely there okay this spring looks like it holds up what it appears to be the setting lever again i'm sure that people that work on pocket watches all the time have better names for these but i'm basing it off of working on wristwatches mostly and that's what it looks like so i can push down this little wheel and can i just pull this thing out now yes i can there we go so now that comes out and i can see that metal post on the bottom touches against that setting lever and that's what was holding it in place and let's see if i can get this out there it goes again significant amount of dirt here but otherwise not too bad i'm going to take this wheel off and then there's a set spring underneath it but i've actually learned over time that taking springs like that out isn't really worth it those are not it's going to get clean in the watch cleaning machine anyway and there's no real reason for it it's very thin and i don't want to bend it okay so let's get to the bottom of this hole it can't wind anymore thing and open up this main spring barrel that will tell us what's going on with the mainspring okay well this looks like a mainspring in here but what is the problem oh yeah that feels not quite right and we can see right there that that mainspring is in fact broken okay so our detective skills hey we're getting better at this we knew what it was we we were able to figure it out and we were correct the main spring's broken okay so that will need to be replaced in the meantime i do have to get this old spring out of here so that i can clean the barrel okay so there's the main spring removed and there's the barrel and with that we can take a look at things on the microscope and as you can see that's dirt and that is not where you want dirt to be but it doesn't look like these parts are particularly damaged though i do have to say this is the dirtiest i've ever seen a movement look at how dirty that jewel is it just has caked on oil so that's gonna need to get cleaned this one looks okay from this side but still there's obviously a ton of dirt on it and it gets worse oh my god would you look at how much gunk there is on this wheel look at that that is all dirt so this watch uh hasn't been used in a very very long time that is the pallet fork like how incredible just an obscene amount of dirt in this watch so let's get everything in the baskets so that we can do the whole watch cleaning machine thing because this thing needs a super cleaning we need to deep clean this for a long time i might even throw it in the ultrasonic cleaner as well now while that's cleaning let's take a look at the watch case and see what we're actually dealing with here now the first thing is i want to figure out how the the spring loaded part works and look at this i see james boss 14k i looked it up that means that this is a 14 karat gold filled case which is a type of plating so it's not solid gold but it has a kind of a thicker plating on it and i'm going to go ahead and take this loop off the top this is where the chain would go but i have to be very careful because it looks like this watch was used as that loop at the top is very thin and i don't want it to break so now i'm going to try to take the crown out and it looks like this screw is what's holding it in so let's see yeah there it goes comes right out and that'll need to be cleaned as well and here's the bezel and uh yeah the glass broke um it was already shattered and it's extremely thin glass so when it loses its integrity it is not going to to stick around now this is looking like a pretty normal bezel with a lip in it and i should be able to find some way to find a glass to replace it with but yeah that that glass is gone now i'm going to take a quick measurement of it so that i can order some new crystals for it um i think i'm gonna order glass and acrylic because the glass just seems so difficult to get on there and i'm a little more used to acrylic and i think it just lasts longer but i'm going to try both in the meantime into the ultrasonic we go alright friends so in goes the whole entire case with all the pieces for it i want to make sure that the water levels up above i use a detergent it's a special ultrasonic detergent and give this a good cleaning ultrasonic cleaners are really great for this type of stuff because they can get into crevices and stuff that you can't get into but they don't take off patina right there's nothing abrasive happening here it's just clean and look at this this thing actually cleaned up beautifully speaking of patina by the way i'm not going to be polishing or doing any type of augmentation to this watch i'm only going to be cleaning it that's because i want to keep its integrity because it's a family heirloom and also because it does have a type of gold plating and that doesn't leave you much wiggle room with regards to polishing if you polish a little bit too much you'll go through it get to the base metal and then it looks terrible or you have to replate the whole thing so now that the case is looking much better let's take a look at this dial now these are very resilient dials they are uh they're enamel they're not painted or anything like that so i'm just gonna see if a little bit of water might help fix because of how much dirt was in there and actually yeah this is cleaning up pretty nicely this is kind of what i hope to see actually i you know i'm not really one for dial restoration but look at all the dirt that was on it this isn't that bad i don't i'm definitely one for giving a dial a nice cleaning now you know most painted dials don't really take a cleaning like this but enamel does so i'm just gonna flip it over here and give it one another once over just to get any last little remaining dirt or scum that was left on top of it but already this dial is looking way better and i'm really happy about it and just a few more times to make sure it's clean and look at that that looks as good as new okay now we got the parts back out of the watch cleaning machine and let's see how they came out here's the main plate okay well that looks about 10 000 times better straight away i am very happy with that so i'm not this gives me a lot of hope that this thing is going to be able to uh clean up really nicely and here's the rest of the plates and bridges so let's get everything out of these baskets and while i'm taking these apart i notice there's a tooth missing yeah so we're gonna have to get the tooth fairy in here to find a new uh ratchet wheel and then on top of it i wanted to check this out because if you remember early on the stud for the hair spring wasn't in place and so this is the screw that that it goes in and there's where it goes in right there and i want to make sure that this isn't threaded or you know whether it'll still thread and then it'll actually hold it in because it could have just been loose but also it could be damaged or not working properly so i'm going to just screw this in and yeah okay yeah it looks like that still works fine and you can see it has enough clearance there so fair enough so here we go i put it back on i put the stud back in and a little bit of air blowing here on the balance shows that the springs looking nice and springy and uh the balance staff seems to be in good working order which again is very common for the balance staff to be broken on these again there's no shock setting on the top or bottom of the balance jewel so when one of these pocket watches gets dropped it's pretty likely to just break that so what i've got here is a donor movement now this one's a completely non-working uh watch in fact it just looks like it has like actual damage to the bridge here if you look at it's kind of dented but this will serve as our donor movement i got this off of ebay and so the first part we need is right here the ratchet wheel and look at that it's called its teeth it's a it's a real boy and we can compare it here with the one with the missing tooth that it's going to be replaced by so we'll just get it cleaned up in some one dip i don't need to run it through the watch cleaning machine but i don't i want to make sure it doesn't have any leftover gunk on it from the donor movement okay and now i got the main spring in now this took some searching but i did find a place online that had one for this and uh there it is there's the new mainspring so it wouldn't quite fit in the barrel by itself so i actually wound it in and that lets us do this and there we go so now the main spring is installed and we can start re-assembling the uh the barrel with the main spring and that thing right there is called the barrel arbor and i just want to make sure that the hook can come around and hook on that's how it grabs onto that inner part of the mainspring and i'm going to put a little bit of hp 1300 oil this is a oil for middle viscosity applications it's not quite a grease it's still an oil and that way i can put the lid back on okay so we got the barrel back together and uh all looks well with that so now we can move on to starting to reassemble this watch and see if it'll get running again trying to bring this thing back to life so i'm actually going to start on the dial side of this watch because this part was pretty complicated the keyless works on this was much much different than anything i've worked on before and i want to kind of get that into place before i start doing the more delicate stuff on the top so i'm going to put the setting lever in and then this spring and i don't have any type of instructions on where or how to oil this so i'm using intuition and what i've been taught you know again it's not that complicated but this is the what it's like to restore vintage watches is usually you don't have a manual so you have to kind of understand the fundamentals and then just do your best okay so let's get this thing kind of balanced over its place so that i can get this screw and remember this is that reverse threaded screw to hold it all down lefty tidy and then the spring kind of gives it some tension to hold it back down and now that that's on there i can give it the full tightening and as you can see that spring is acting correctly on it here now there's this other spring here that pushes up against the setting lever and it's held in by a screw so we'll put that in now also you can notice the beautiful bluing on the screws that is that is actually done by putting the screws after you manufacture them polishing them and then you put them through a heat treatment that actually turns the steel that color that's not paint that's not a they're not dipped in anything to make that happen they're actually put under uh really hot heat and it turns that color eventually and they're gorgeous okay so now i want to put in this lever that actually changes everything around and so i got to figure out how this thing goes in now i know where it goes in right here but how does it actually get back into the place where it needs to be is the question and it looks like it just slides on here so i'm just going to go ahead and put that on there and now i can put this little cover back on these two wheels okay now let's just check this really quickly to make sure that it looks like it's doing what it's supposed to do and it does it's actuating on this thing and that spring's there and so yeah i guess that'll probably work so i've got some hp 1300 here for the click and then i've also got some underneath the ratchet wheel because i assume that that's a fairly high friction point and then here's the click spring going into place now the weird thing about this in comparison to the watches i normally work on is that you know normally there would be like a post that a that a wheel like that would go on to but there isn't it actually goes on the bottom of the barrel but if i put it on the bottom of the barrel then it won't engage with the click so i kind of need it in place already but then if the click springs on it it's kind of pushing it around so it's a little bit tricky on how i'm supposed to actually do this but this seems to be the best way to get it set up at least okay so let's get the barrel in this thing and see what it does yeah it's a little bit tricky because it needs to line up properly and there we go and that means that we can move on to getting the train of wheels in place here comes the escape wheel and that's the fourth wheel boy this movement can you believe the difference uh how much cleaner i mean it's actually just a flat out gorgeous movement when you actually get it all cleaned up and i have to say that while there was a large ingress of dirt into this movement you could never tell it it cleaned up so beautifully okay i can put the center wheel on now and this gives you a great diagram of the first second third fourth and fifth wheels they all have different names but that's really what they are okay so now i can get the the train wheel bridge on and that's going to take care of the third wheel the fourth wheel and the escape wheel okay so i've got it roughly in place but you know you have to move around the pivots until they find their hole and then once it finally kind of clicks into place you'll see all the wheels will turn at once there we go just like that that's that's what you want where it kind of drops into place and now i can tighten down this bridge it's a really good feeling when it when it clicks into place because you have to be delicate with it but once it's in you know you're like ah there we go that's what i've been waiting for okay so now we've got this bridge tightened down a quick test again yep looks good so i want to make sure that for this winding stem thing i put some lubricant in i don't actually know how much to put in so i'm going to put in a medium amount i would say of hp 1300 this is a very high friction area but it's smooth so i decided to go with the hp 1300 rather than the grease i think it's a close call either way and now i can put on the barrel bridge as you can see it says elgin watch company it's just incredible that they all they were able to produce these type of things in the 1800s it also really does show a level of workmanship that is hard to find now and you know this this wasn't a rich person's watch you know this is something that you could buy if you had a a regular job and it's so nice all right so now we need to oil the train of wheels and i'm going to use mobius 9010 for this this is the type of oil that you use on the most lightest weight applications i guess i would you would say on the center wheel i'm going to use hp 1300 because it's a little bit heavier of a load and then we can turn it over and we remember the train of wheels the pivots have a top and a bottom so we need to make sure that we oil those as well now i'm going to use a pin vise here to wind it up because hey i want to test to make sure that mainspring is actually taking a wind and b i want to make sure that it's going through the train of wheels and there as you can see it is it goes all the way down to the escape wheel so that's looking like it's going pretty well and that is now time for the pallet fork so i'm going to put the pallet fork in and then i'll wind it up again to make sure that the enough power is getting down to the pallet fork to actually actuate on it but first we have to get pal fork in here with its bridge and of course this is as usual one of those times when you want to be very careful to make sure that that pallet fork sits in its pivot and you know it's really nice again working on these big pocket watch movements because you can see like you probably could see it on the video right there when the pivot went into the hole right you're like oh i can actually just see that on a smaller watch you definitely are going to want magnification but beyond that you may need a little a little more so that's me checking to make sure that the pallet fork is in place but this is the real test is to see if the power is going down and if the pallet fork is willing to go back and forth under the power of the main spring because that was one of the main things that was broken on this watch was the main spring okay so we've got a bit of a wind in it now and let's see if the pallet fork wants to jump back and forth with just the slightest bit of effort yes yes yes all right we did it okay so this is all good news that means that the main spring is working and it means we can put in the balance and see if this thing will actually run ah the moment of truth it's always so nerve-wracking but also exciting it's a funny thing where it's a combination of the two so let's see if this thing will fire up for us want to make sure that the pivot is right oh oh okay well it started for a second there but then i kind of adjusted the balance bridge and it it stopped so a glimmer of hope anyway let's get this balance bridge tacked down and it is running we did it so we have brought this watch back to life the main springs fixed that gear underneath is fixed and we repaired the balance because remember it wasn't right so it's running that is fantastic news so let's uh let's see about getting this um crystal in here now the first one that i got is actually just a little bit too small this is glass by the way and you could snap it with your fingers and unfortunately the other one i got is also slightly too small now what i read was if you get one that's correctly sized it won't fit but what you do is you actually heat up the bezel until it expands and then put the glass in and let it cool down but the ones that i got this one actually fit a little bit but it still felt just like a little bit too small to me where it may be able to come out under certain angles so i'm just going to stick with the acrylic one and see if that works because this one doesn't fit naturally which means i have to find a way to get it in there now this is actually an issue because the normal way i use do it is to use my rover presses you've seen on my videos that actually bends the crystal down around a post and then allows you to put the bezel on i have to be extremely careful because this crystal is a factor of 10 thinner than the crystals that i normally use i mean you could snap this crystal with your fingers with no problem a regular crystal for a wristwatch you could not do that with so i am going to just barely get the die on top of the crystal and then see if it'll fit and it doesn't quite fit so that means i need to go down another half a turn and by half a turn i mean an eighth of a turn see this is how much i turn it that's it that's the amount i'm turning the wheel each time until just until it'll fit and there's another eighth of a turn and i think it's in there and let's take a look hey it's in and we didn't break it so perfect that it looks beautiful again uh a brand new crystal does wonders for watches like this particularly these ones are these beautiful white enamel dials it's uh it just shows them off so as you can see the watch is quite happily ticking away here and that means that we can continue with our assembly now one thing that we need to do though before we call this job done is we need to clean the jewels on the balance now this is some tricky business because uh you know normally there's a shock spring that you can remove and then you can remove the jewels to clean them but here there's no shock spring so that means that we actually need to disassemble the balance itself so i take it off of the movement to start with and of course on the bottom there's also a cleanable jewel setting and i need to be able to take that out here so i'm going to take the screws off of that before we get to the balance and then we can actually get to cleaning on these now if remember if anything tells us this watch was very very very very dirty so these could be as well and that can affect the performance and the rate of the watch quite a bit so in order for me though to get at it i actually have to take off the pallet fork once again which is a little bit annoying but it is something that we just kind of have to do here because i need to clean that so what i've got is a piece of peg wood and you actually push these through the bottom and as you can see it looks like on a wristwatch where there's two there's a flat jewel that they call a cap jewel and then there's the whole jewel which has a hole that the pivot goes in so there those are out and we can we can address those but we still need to take them off of the balance itself so first i have to actually take the hair spring off so once again remove it from the stud that's the part that we fixed earlier and we'll carefully set this aside and then i need to take these screws out of the balance here so that i can then remove the two jewels and get to cleaning those so this is finicky work to say the least and these are quite small okay so those go away and now i'm going to tip it over and use my peg wood once again to remove those two jewels the cap jewel and the hole jewel and there we go they just kind of pop out okay so now we've got all these jewels removed and what that means is well let's take a look at them on the microscope and see how they look oh no well as you can see this watch was dropped at some point now the good news is that the balance staff didn't break or if it did it was replaced but it took out the jewel that's actually the cap jewel and it has a big chunk missing out at the top of it as you can see here and that means that that could drastically affect performance and if it doesn't today it certainly will down the line this one as you can see the whole jewel is just app is just cracked all the way through so while it's still structurally there enough to hold the pivot and allow the watch to run this watch will not run correctly with jewels that are broken so we're going to need to replace these outright before we can uh go on with our restoration so these are the other jewels so we're going to have to combine the bottom jewels and then the jewels from our other donor watch to get a good set of them to go and as you can see this one looks much better it's intact but it is very very dirty that is just caked on oil and dirt so it's in dire need of a cleaning as well so this now we've cleaned them in the one dip but they still are going to need some manual labor here to make sure that these are actually clean enough and as you can see the one dip is is evaporating here pretty quickly which is because it's a solvent but it still left a layer that you can really see right there as it evaporates of oil that still hasn't been removed so i'm going to take some peg wood and kind of go over this and give it a really good once over so that we can make sure that these actually get cleaned sometimes when the dirt builds up enough it actually takes this type of action you know physically scraping it off of there as you can see it already looks a little bit better and then what we'll do is we'll go through and put these through the one dip again and again which is just a solvent and then we'll see if they've actually gotten cleaned up properly yeah that's the cap jewel right there and as you can see that that film that you see on the top is just old oil and that that should be flat you shouldn't have it shouldn't be textured and as you can see there's still a lot of that oil and dirt caked on here so out of the one dip again and again we need to clean up the the other side of it as well but once we get it out of the one dip and and and having been cleaned with the peg wood and the one dip a few times this is what we get that's how it's supposed to look much much better you can see how clear these are now and flat so there we go that's what we were looking for and now we can put them back into the watch so first we need to put them back into the balance here and this is a little bit of tricky business because uh they the fit on them is quite tight okay this is the whole jewel so this is the the hole that the uh pivot for the balance will go into and now i'm going to oil the cap joule so i'm going to put a little bit of 90 10 directly on top of that cap jewel and then well as carefully as i can i'm going to reinstall that cap jewel on top of the whole jewel and then the cap jewel will kind of hold the oil in place right where it needs to be on the most important part of the watch okay and i'm just going to use the flat end of the peg wood here to kind of put this into place and there we go now i can get the screws and tighten this back down and the job is done there for those those cap jewels as you can see it's a little finicky i'm using a piece of peg wood just to support the bottom because i do have to put a little bit of pressure down to make sure that the screws are tightened so that both of those surfaces are flat and perpendicular now i have to put the balance back together but no big deal there and now that i've got everything back together well we can do this whole part again so i'm going to put the pallet fork back in and just give it a quick check to make sure that the pivot's still in there before i fully tighten this down and once again i'm going to use my pin vice to wind up the watch put a little bit of wind in the main spring and that way the pallet fork will be under some amount of tension and that means that once again we can put this balance in now we know that this watch runs so uh that that bit of drama is behind us but it really should run a lot better without the broken jewels um those can really affect performance it they're the type of thing that can give you a really erratic rating on the time grapher as well where it's just like it looks like a snowstorm and yeah it even seems to run a little easier now as it sort of picked up before i've even got this balance in place all the way and it's running i'm just making sure that it's in the right slot there but yeah it wants to run i'll let it run it's actually picking up quite nicely these old watches and many and quite a few modern watches but mainly older ones run at 18 000 vph that's vibrations per hour so it basically ticks that many times in an hour that's considered slow there are watches that run it like 36 000 you can see those from companies like zenith or grand seiko they call those high beat movements so let's take a look at this thing on the time grapher and see how it ends up looking okay well the amplitude's pretty good the beat error is not great and the rate well it's gaining about three to four minutes a day now on a normal wristwatch this would be unacceptable for me in fact way outside the range of what i would expect but there's two things that that are at play here one i've adjusted this watch to the slowest that it can go now after doing some research i found that one of the ways you can slow it down further is to do a whole different hairspring on it i'm not doing that that's outside of my skill set for starters but more importantly your expectations for an old 1880s watch should not be as high as they are for your modern swiss watch and this of course is not going to be used as a time keeper and even if it were it's off three or four minutes a day it's not a disaster because you end up setting these quite often anyway so i am going to recognize my limits and recognize that this isn't the type of watch that needs to be within two seconds a day or whatever and i'm gonna be happy that i have it running again at an even remotely good pace and that's something that i think every beginning watchmaker needs to make sure that they're keeping in check this is a family heirloom from a close friend of mine this is not my playground this isn't the place where i try all this new stuff that i've never done before um on on a watch that's really important to somebody so i'm gonna be happy with his performance even though i'm kind of not happy with his performance right because i'm so used to getting that much better well anyway onward let's get the hands on this thing this is a little bit awkward because i need to be able to change where the hands are so i have to use this uh pin vice but then i kind of have to have it hanging off the edge so it's a little bit tricky but i do get to use my new hand setting tool that i got for christmas so that's sweet and just a quick check to make sure that it that the hands are correct and that they're not hitting each other or anything like that and then i also ordered an extra seconds hand so we'll go ahead and install that now and there we go the seconds hand is on and now it's time to recase this watch which is kind of tricky business but not really right it's just a little bit different than what i'm used to but you know i've worked on a few pocket watches and so i'm starting to get the hang of it about how they go in the front and then you put these screws on on the back these screws are kind of interesting because they are case screws in the sense that they're they're they're meant to hold the watch into the case but they actually do screw down into the barrel excuse me into the main plate as well okay let's get this bezel cleaned up and this dial cleaned up so i'm going to use my air blower here so that i can reinstall the bezel the bezel has some cutout markings for the spring that uh releases the front and as well as where the uh setting lever is there so i just need to make sure that that's right but look at how beautiful this thing looks it's got this beautiful decoration on the case it's held up really well over the time and it is a vast improvement to say the least and as you can see the lid goes on okay as well now i can replace the crown and after a little bit of grease goes on and i can just uh yeah screw it back in and yeah it just holds right in place so easy there and i can put the chain holder loop on the top and again i'm trying to be very careful because this is much thinner at the top it's been used and i don't want it to break and wow look at how gorgeous this thing came out what an improvement this was a dirty mess of a non-working watch and now it's gorgeous it makes it ticks beautifully like you can hear it if you put it on your desk you can hear it going and it keeps okay time like i said it loses it gains about three to four minutes a day depending on kind of what when you test it um but uh yeah that to me that's within acceptable range and we've got this beautiful functioning pocket watch again for my friend to enjoy hopefully for the rest of his life i mean you know that's kind of what it is about with these old family heirlooms you know they're meant to be passed down and to be enjoyed and to you know think about who owned this and and and if you know a member of your family did and all that kind of stuff an absolutely beautiful watch and i'm really glad that i had a chance to work on it because it came out gorgeous uh just a cool piece of american history too and that is going to do it for this one thank you so much for joining me i really do appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me on my journey through watchmaking and hopefully it inspires you to try it out yourself it's a great hobby and i definitely recommend it if you want to keep up with me in between videos you know these videos are pretty difficult to make they take a while if you want some updates on what's going on you can follow me on instagram that's wristwatch underscore revival over there and i post uh in between project updates also if you'd like to support the channel again these videos are labor and money and time intensive i love making them if you love them too you can support me over on patreon i want to say thank you to kelsey stan dustin brenton adam caleb russell james samuel tony max mitchell adrian kyle erica trevor robert squirrel derga lewis rudy dominic brad mikey sorin grant and patrick those are all the kind people who are supporting me over on patreon and if you want to there's a link in the description it's patreon.com wristwatch revival you get a thank you card in the mail no matter what level you're at and you even get access to some pretty cool stuff feel free to check it out again i want to thank you for watching it and we'll see on the next one

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 256,033

Rating: 4.9034152 out of 5

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Id: Yxk5zQNsANg

Length: 51min 43sec (3103 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021