His Grandpa Wore This Rolex GMT Master To Work Every Day For YEARS (And It Shows!)

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wrist watch Revival my name is Marshall thank you so much for coming along this time on the bench we have a beautiful Rolex GMT master from the mid to late 60s and as you can see this watch was worn whoever owned this thing really wore it and uh this watch is actually a very special watch it comes to me uh from a member of my patreon named Drew uh this watch belonged to his grandfather now his grandfather sadly passed away but the watch remains and this was the type of watch that was worn and I mean really worn every day to work take a look you can see the watch on the wrist of his grandpa here way back in the day when he worked on heavy machinery here he is uh with you know grandkids in tow wearing the watch and even great grandkids as well and this grandpa just lived a crazy life this is him in his 70s doing alien I mean and he's wearing the watch too by the way this watch right here that ended up on my bench now the watch is running so that's the good news but um as you can see it's pretty beat up it needs some tender loving care Crystal's pretty scratched up um the bezel is beautifully faded uh and the watch just generally needs a service and uh hopefully to be able to run a little bit better because the owner Drew he he is actually a watch fan he's got a nice little watch collection going and uh he took this watch and put it on his own time grapher he has his own uh to see how it was running and it wasn't running very well um as you can see here he sent me a photo of how it was doing it's losing about 30 seconds a day the amplitude's a little low and the beat errors off at 0.8 milliseconds so we need to address those things so that he can take this watch and continue to wear it so that it stays in the family and uh and it can be something to remind Drew of his grandfather who is very close with uh and who like I said wore this watch every day this is really what some of the most special watches are are the ones that a loved one wore every single day and as you can see there is some evidence that this watch was worn oh my God I have never seen the level of build up here in this end link and uh yeah this is gonna be a cleaning job no doubt about it on this watch um I'm going to take a piece oh my God I'm going to take a piece of Peg wood here and get it cleaned out before we put it into the Ultrasonic Cleaner because uh the ultrasonic's better at kind of finishing the cleaning job rather than taking off a major chunks here which is what we've got all over the bench now and I'm going to assume that that's how it's going to look for the duration here so let's uh take out the Spring Bar and we can continue taking apart the bracelet here we have to take the bracelet off before we can get into the watch itself as you might imagine and I need to do a little bit of cleaning here because yikes this watch has not been serviced in years and years and years and years and you know why because he wore it that's why he woke up in the morning and he put this thing on it this isn't the oh God uh this isn't the type of watch that was held in some you know pristine safer in a box this watch is very valuable the sentimental value for the owner is is off the charts but uh you know in dollar value I mean these watches go for 20 grand easy for something like this they're highly highly collectible they're one of rolex's most popular models and this is the uh you know one of the original of it they make a GMT Master II now as well this is just the regular GMT master from before and taking a look here you can actually see oh yeah so that lug or um that end link is what it's called as bent and that will make the bracelet move around a bit more than it needs to and we'll probably need to address that at some point here during the restoration as well the owner asked to keep the watch as original as possible and that's something that I like to do in many scenarios as well you can see there's more dirt and build up here underneath the end link where the lugs are so yeah again I'm just going to use the peg wood here to kind of take the big pieces off and we'll let the ultrasonic finish it up but you know keeping things original has a collectible nature but in this case it's not that it's because this is the watch that his grandpa wore and he wants to wear the watch that his grandpa wore so we're gonna do our best to keep this one about as uh original as we possibly can and uh we'll start off by taking off the back of the watch which does actually come off with the rubber ball and yep that's a Rolex movement all right it looks actually quite nice and as you can see it is running this is what I hope to see right I mean we knew that it was running so that part was was fine but uh this thing looks clean and like it's in good shape we'll start by taking off this gasket we'll probably want to replace that and see how the rotor oh do you see that crack in the rotor there huh I wonder how his grandpa did that I you know this watch has again really seen a life this is the type of thing that you can't reproduce you know there's been a big push in the Swiss Watch and every watch industry over the past maybe five to eight years or so to make watches that that are reproductions of vintage watches or even try to look like they are actually vintage watches there's something you've probably never heard of unless you're super into into the watch thing it's called fotina which is you know two words combine it's patina and then foe as in fake and these companies will actually try to make parts that would normally look worn over the course of the life of a watch look worn even though it's brand new which is kind of funny and an interesting thing you'll see here when I take this off take a look at the the GMT hand that's one with the red stripe on it there it's dark the loom on it is what you would expect from a watch from the 60s and the rest looks very bright and white and there's a reason for that this watch has what they call a service dial and also service hands except for some reason the hour hand not I don't know if that was requested to stay on or if they didn't have an extra one but they left it and you can see the difference in what happens to what we call the loom that's the luminescent material on the dial one of them is what looks like when that dial has been exposed to air and UV sunlight all that kind of stuff over the years it turns into this sort of dark cream kind of color and that's a natural effect of Aging for this type of material but if you look the rest is very white and what that means is that this watch was taken in for service probably 30 plus years ago and it was given a new set of hands and a new dial from Rolex so they're not fake it's it's just a service style meaning that at if at any point when you send your watch to a company like Rolex they will usually replace any part that has any amount of wear on it and that even extends to visible Parts like the dial enhance and while collectors cringe at that because uh it devalues the watch and it also takes away a lot of the natural wear it was common practice for the time and in fact very often you will see service Styles and hands on Rolex watches from this era and this one has one as well the good news is it looks great I mean the Dial's in really great shape and so are the hands okay so what are we going to do here well we are going to start by completely disassembling this watch every single part we are going to take apart on this thing I know that's kind of crazy but that is how it works for watchmaking and watch repair then we are going to clean all of the parts and then we're going to reassemble this whole entire movement get it running about as well as we can see if there's any other issues to be addressed and get it reassembled and back on the wrist of the owner now the first thing we need to do here is I'm going to take off the calendar wheel as well as a calendar mechanism on this side the main reason to do this at this point is because it will give us access to the Canon pinion and the Canon pinion is a part that we need to take off if we're going to take off the mechanical part of the watch on the other side the part that actually makes it keep time and removing this gives us access to the Canon pinion this is actually a tool designed specifically to remove the Canon pinion which is that part sticking up right there and boom pops it right off now we can turn the movement over and start disassembling the running works of it so this is the part of the watch of course that actually keeps time these Rolex movements are an absolute joy to work on they are beautifully constructed they are Bulletproof and they were also made in many ways for the with the watchmaker in mind so that they're able to be serviced in an efficient reasonable manner one thing about them that's kind of interesting is that while they do um use some decoration on the movement you see those sort of small circles that are all over the flat surfaces that give it that kind of shiny look that's called perlage it's applied with a machine that looks kind of like a drill but instead of a drill bit at the end it has a polishing wheel a little tiny one and you overlap those across as you go around the movement to give it that kind of three-dimensional decorative look but it is interesting because in the world of high-end watches that's kind of basic like doing perlage on the movement is like okay that that's cool but like you're gonna need to do more than that uh to get the kind of the praise from the really high-end movements and the the truth is is that this isn't a really high-end movement this is a Workhorse this was designed to last forever and they put a little bit of effort into the decoration but that's not the focus what is going on with the bottom of the ratchet wheel here there's some oh boy that is a lot of Greece interesting wow and it's actually coming out of the barrel I wonder if that's in the barrel itself or if it was some type of lubricant around that bearing that the person who last Services used but there should not be that much coming out you don't want to see that type of Grease around um especially if it happens to be like a graphite or type of grease that isn't really used in watchmaking because it can be abrasive at any rate let's take the click and the click spring out have to be very very careful with the little click spring because it can jump away and now we can take off the crown wheel this is held on by two very small screws as you can see and we can just remove these and then remove the crown wheel itself it's made up of three parts there's kind of an outer ring and inner ring and then a kind of a washer at the bottom everything looks good here though and then there's that washer that I was talking about okay now we can take off the train wheel Bridge which goes right over the top of all the train Wheels here the train wheels are probably what you think of when you think of what's inside of a watch the little gears and wheels these are those Wheels slash gears whatever you want to call them foreign we do have to be careful with removing this because there are pivots that's the think of it being like the axle of a wheel and they uh they're long and they break sometimes okay so this comes off and everything looks good here as well for as hard as this watch was worn on the outside not too much going on on the inside as far as wear or damage or anything approaching that so that's a relief and that'll make the restoration a lot more straightforward hopefully not finding anything broken okay so with the train Wheels out we can shift our attention here to the pallet Fork it's held on by a small Bridge and as you can see this movement coming apart very nicely it doesn't really fight us much there's not really any issues to be seen thus far and this is kind of what it's why it's really nice to work on uh really well made really well thought out movements like this one okay now that leaves us with the barrel bridge and that's holding on the mainspring barrel which is that big brass Barrel that you see that wheel so let's take this off and there that's the main spring Barrel coming out now we'll have to take a look inside of that to see what's up with that grease this part here is an interesting one it's called a hack and a hack is just a way to stop the watch from running this one is actually built in so that when you pull the crown out to set the time it slides that little brass lever forward which touches one of the wheels that I just took out and stops the entire watch from running and this lets you set your watch to the exact second if you'd like for the most part that's not really necessary but you know there are some applications like flying or military or something like that where you actually would want to it also allows you to hack or sync your watch with other people's watches if you're doing some type of an operation that requires you all to have the exact same same time watches without a hack you pull that out and they just continue to run okay so the keyless Works can come apart keyless works as the part that allows you to do that pulling out the crown setting the time wanting to watch that whole thing and now we can flip the watch over to remove what is left of the calendar works and what we call the motion works the calendar works as self-explanatory the motion Works um are the little gears and wheels that control the hands themselves and this watch has a little bit extra going on because there is a minute hour and second hand but then there's an additional hour hand that you can set so that again you can set the time to an additional time zone rather than the one you're in yeah that setting lever had some Gunk on it so that'll be this is a good time to clean that up now I can take off the yolk spring being very very careful those things are that's a heavy spring for a watch and if you get it crooked it will jump but it didn't this time because I've had that happen a bunch of times and I'm a little more careful okay this is a calendar jumper spring that's the thing that actually puts some tension on that calendar ring with the numbers on it so that when it spins around it clicks over and we can take that out and below that there we go there's a very large spring that pushes up against a calendar Cam and a cam is you know it allows power to be slowly built up and then released all at once and in fact this actually has a jewel on the bottom side of it where it interacts with that cam so that there's less friction and so that it's smoother you can see that Jewel sitting there it's kind of a donut shaped Jewel and it just sits on a little metal post on the bottom of this arm and I can just take it off here and there it is but again given that that's under significant spring tension uh you know you got to be careful with it okay now to prepare for cleaning I can put the uh the balance back on and the reason to do this is that hairspring that Blue Spring that you see in the middle there it is extraordinarily fragile um and if it gets bent the watch will not run correctly so we put that back on to protect it okay let's take a look inside this Barrel now and see oh boy yeah oh that is a grease bomb in there for sure so somebody used wow that is just a lot of Grease um in that it should you shouldn't have anywhere near that much the mainspring will run almost completely dry like a thin film of grease on there to make sure that it doesn't develop any corrosion or stick together is recommended but this is like an insane amount of Grease I mean look in fact let's just see is there enough grease in here that I can yeah there is so I can actually write a note to you my viewer in the grease of it uh that's too much you don't want to see anywhere near that much and also you can see how dark it is it actually can attract dirt okay one last thing to take apart here before we get to the cleaning process and that is the automatic winding works this watch is an automatic most Rolexes are um the word that they use is Perpetual if you see that on the front of a Rolex world of say like Oyster Perpetual oyster means that they that it's water resistant to a certain amount again that's a Rolex term and then Perpetual means that it's an automatic and you can see this rotor yeah we're gonna need to address that it actually is broken and I wonder what in the heck his grandpa did to somehow snap the rotor inside of the watch and by the way it doesn't seem to have affected the right of the watch normally you'd be able to see um you can see it here by the way do you see that where it's disconnected and it's supposed to be over here so yeah we'll have to take a look at that at some point down the line but normally you'll see where where it drags up against other parts but that didn't seem to be the case here okay so now we need to put everything into these cleaning baskets the automatic winding works the motion works the keyless works all of the drivetrain stuff from the front and uh the plates everything is going to go in this basket outside of a few items like the dial on the hands and stuff because that the cleaning solution is way too tough for those who take the paint off and now we can put them into the watch cleaning machine this takes them through a three-step process of a kind of solvent that you see here and then two rinses as well as a drying cycle so I guess four steps uh in total and why the while the watch is clean and I didn't want to mention I've got a patreon for this channel patreon's a cool website where you can give back to the creators that you really like the stuff the people that make stuff that you enjoy especially independent creators like me um you know we really appreciate it if you take the time to check out our patreons and I did want to say thanks to everybody over on the patreon okay back to business here um while the movement is cleaning we need to deal with the case so what that means is first we need to take off the bezel the bezel is the outermost part here that is a steel ring with an aluminum insert in this case and then there's a spring here that holds tension on the bezel as you can see it wasn't really doing much because of the amount of debris that has uh yeah gotten under here and now there's another piece that holds down the Crystal and keeps it watertight so back to the bezel removal tool again and we can remove that this is a great little tool because it hits it from four sides where normally you would do it with like a case knife which can introduce some prying force that isn't really great when it's only on one side so yeah we can take off this retainer ring here again this gets press fit back on over the Crystal and wow there's even dirt under there have actually quite a significant amount as well this watch needs a cleaning like nobody's business and now we can remove the crystal now it's a little bit jammed on so I'm just going to use a knife with a fine blade here to just get get it just a little bit lifted up off of there and we can remove the crystal as well and huh oh no so taking a look it looks like the crystal actually has some cracks on the side now that doesn't seem to be affecting the Integrity of the crystal itself but it could affect the waterproofness now we can also oh God uh take out the this is we already took out the gasket on the back case back and this one goes inside the crown tube there is actually another gasket there's three that these Rolex watches take to retain waterproofness and while it's not usually realistic to assume that a watch of this age in this condition would be water resistant to its original spec we can try to get it as close as possible so that the owner can wear it and not have to worry about if he gets caught out in the rain or if he needs to wash his hand or you know whatever his you know whatever happens right so what we're going to do now is put all of the case Parts into the Ultrasonic Cleaner give them a nice solid bath oh man look how much darker that water got after yeah there was a lot of dirt in there no doubt about it and now we can take the parts out I can't even see where they're at let's just yeah oh boy you can see the dirt um yeah so a lot of dirt uh in this watch though that was anticipated given how long it had been since it had been serviced but it looks like it's cleaned up pretty nicely here there's the case back that of course is the bezel and the Crystal as well okay so now we've got the case all cleaned up as well as uh the movement parts and all that and we can take a look at the movement Parts by the way post cleaning and they look beautiful this is all the parts for the watch all cleaned up you can see the case the bezel there's the spring yes there's the movement all the wheels everything that goes into it so first things first I talked to the owner and I said I would be totally fine with using the mainspring again but this watch has not been serviced in a very long time and it would be appropriate to replace the mainspring he agreed and so we tracked down a genuine Rolex replacement mainspring which I'll be putting in now this does make life a little bit easier just because you can just put it in straight away like this these come lubricated from the factory they're ready to go you don't need to do anything special to them you just simply press them into place by putting them into that barrel and uh and it's a done deal the only lubrication you needed to do on watches like this when you're using a new mainspring is you have to put a little bit of what they call breaking grease around the inside of the barrel which I did here and that means that uh when the mainspring gets fully wound it will slide around the edge or slide less because of the breaking grease which is what you want okay so spring goes in now we can put the lid on and I've got a little plastic tool here that helps me secure the lid it just simply pushes down on all sides at once so that the lid can be secured back on safely foreign we can put the Barrel back into the movement here make sure that it spins freely now if you noticed when I took out the little hack mechanism I actually just replaced the screw that's kind of a unique screw and I just thought well it won't hurt it to just have it sitting in there and so I'm going to put that back in just so that I know exactly that it's the correct screw for it and then I can simply put the hack mechanism back into place here I have to do this now because this actually does get covered up by one of the bridges I think the barrel Bridge covers this one up and if you don't put it on now you won't be able to go back and do it later without some pretty serious disassembly so now we just make sure that it can slide back and forth which is what we need it to do and it does and now we can start with the real reassembly here which are the train of Wheels we'll start with the Escape wheel then move to the fourth wheel and now we can take the third wheel and as you can see this is the one that gets uh touched by that hack mechanism if you look closely you can see where there's a little lip on it and when it pulls back over it touches the third wheel and stops the whole movement it's all it takes that's why people are so crazy about you know how much lubricant to use on these things not letting any dust or debris get in while you're reassembling it doesn't take much to stop an entire watch okay the center wheel can go in it gets a little bit of uh medium viscosity oil before being put into place and you can get a good look here at how the movement works with the barrel on the left going or now on the bottom going all the way down to the Escape wheel okay now I can put on the barrel Bridge and as I mentioned this covers up both the hack and also the setting lever which I've also put into place excuse me the setting lever screw okay there we go really hoping I can get this watch running well for its owner I you know I had a chance to meet him we met up we were able to meet up in person to to hand off this watch and you could tell two things uh one he really loved his grandpa and this watch really um was like a symbol you know of his grandpa as you saw from the photos he wore it every day to all types of occasions um for for the now owners entire life so he really kind of Associates him with it and two this is the type of person that wants to wear this stuff like he you know I told him hey you know this is a quite a valuable watch he didn't care at all he's just like I am going to wear this thing and I can't wait to do so and I'm really hoping to get it running and operating well so that he can enjoy it for years to come and maybe even pass it down to his children okay so now we've got the train wheel bridge and the barrel bridge in place those are the two big bridges on the top and we can continue with now the click spring the click and the click spring are you can think of them like a ratchet right and and you know a ratchet being something that allows something to turn One Direction but not the other and that's of course important when you're winding up a watch because when you wind it One Direction if you let go you can't have it just unwind all back again right it needs to be able to wind and hold what you've wound let you reset your thumb and then do it again and that's what this mechanism does it's very simple you know there's nothing really complicated here it just rubs against the teeth of that wheel and when it Springs backwards the way that that little click is designed it stops it but it's designed such that it can allow it to spin One Direction and that of course is really important here okay so now we can get that ratchet wheel in place and as you can see it's working beautifully here as the bottom is able to spin freely because currently there's nothing holding it in place there will be in a little bit though now we can put on the crown wheel yeah it doesn't hurt working on these on this type of watch either that this is like one of my favorite watch models ever just full stop I absolutely love the GMT Master this is a 1675 that's kind of the it's not the actual original one there is an older one but it's quite rare and you don't really I've never even you know you don't see them in real life um but these ones you you can you'll see around and they are absolutely awesome cool story behind them they're beautiful they have that nice splash of color on the bezel they're just great okay so now we can tighten down the uh the crown wheel here and I'm going to use a little bit of the medium viscosity oil on the back on the bottom excuse me of the barrel where it meets with the case and as you can see I got a little bit too much on there so I'm just going to use some radical to to clean that up radico is a um it's a blue kind of a putty if you've ever played with silly putty before when you were a kid it reminds you of that it's a little it feels a little different in your hand but it's pretty close and it allows you to it you can clean up oil with it you can do light cleaning on Parts with it you can mold it to hold Parts while you're working on them you can use it to hold a part in place so that it doesn't fly away there's so many different uses for that stuff it's really invaluable especially when you're first starting out what I found is the the better I get at this the the less I need the radico but it's always really good to have it okay A little bit of uh the high viscosity grease here on the crown and stem and we can insert those and get that tied down so now things are really starting to come together here on this side of the watch this is the side of the watch by the way that has the motion Works which I mentioned are what run the hands and also the calendar works is on this side this uh this side of the watch is what we call the dial side and I think you can probably figure out why we call it that so I can put the Canon pinion back into place and now I can put the setting lever in as well I can put and I put the minute wheel in as well that brass wheel that I put in is is what turns at the correct rate for the minutes to go around and again this blue stuff you see me using is a is a kind of a heavy Grease and it's for metal on metal especially when there's friction when there's something like a spring holding something in place you want to use that grease so that you don't risk any um damage over time but also so that like you don't get little shavings of that metal in the movement that's that's a big No-No and as you can see things just go right back together with these Rolex movements there's such a pleasure to work on okay and I'm gonna put grease between the setting lever and the yoke is what we call it and a little bit between the yolk spring and the yolk as well but I've actually put on a bit too much here you don't want excess like that so once again radical to the rescue so I'm going to use that to just clean up any excess that ended up getting in getting on there you actually want to use you know about as little as you can and that's why that was a bit too much now the setting lever spring can go on and once we get that tightened down I can apply a little bit more of this grease where the spring touches the setting lever and again just to clean it up not have excess on there there we go and now we can flip the movement back over and put the pallet fork in place now we're getting close this is the uh this is the point where as a watchmaker of course you remain calm because if you get too if you get too nervous or excited uh it can affect your work but this is where you start thinking okay come on right I want this thing to run I don't want any issues I want it to run really well I hope I didn't screw anything up you know these are the things that go through your head as you get to this stage of the restoration because this is where the rubber meets the road I'm going to put a little bit of a wine into the watch and make sure that the pallet Fork works but once I confirm that it does this balance is going back on and we're going to see if this bad boy is going to run and then furthermore how well it's going to run you know after we get the rest of the restoration stuff done so gentle gentle a little bit of tweaking here to get the jewels look at that it just started up straight away no hesitation whatsoever thank you Rolex for making such a great movement I mean seriously these things are just so sweet um and I worked on so many different types of movements now you know doing this channel you and I have been through a lot of Journeys together this is the lightest viscosity oil but by the way because now we need to oil the jewels so the jewels on the top of the watch are these red rubies which by the way are absolutely gorgeous in color I love the way they look contrasted with the brass and the metal colors that we have here and what these are are bearings meaning that there's a piece of metal that spins within them and you'll see it there do you see a little tiny post of metal that spins in there and these are synthetic rubies that are actually just one below diamonds on the hardness scale they're extremely hard and that means that they don't wear now usually when you go up in hardness you also go up in brittleness which is also true here so you do have to be careful with these jewels and how you construct the movement but most watches aren't under that much force these can shatter I've seen it happen before but they do require quite a bit of force to do so and as long as they don't shatter they basically don't wear it all like it does happen sort of but it takes a really really long time and a really really bad situation to get these jewels to wear and so what I'm doing here is just putting a little tiny drop of oil on the top of this capsule and then I can replace it on the top and that will suspend the oil right above that little tiny pivot there where the metal meets the oil and allow it to run freely about as free as you can get friction wise for a very very long time these rubies are a really great bearing for a piece of metal like this now I can put a little bit of the medium viscosity oil here around the center wheel and now it's time to take apart and clean the upper shock setting and jewels so the way this works is that little brass thing is a spring you move it out of the way and you take out the part underneath it actually came off in a half here so there's the top half of it it's the same thing like before it's a cap Jewel but in this case underneath it which I need to use radical to try to fish out of there there we go now it came out is the jewel setting that is called the whole Jewel or the jewel setting it has the hole in it that the pivot goes in the cap sits on top with oil sandwiched in between and suspends that oil for as long as the oil remains viable and that'll allow the watch to run at Peak optimal speed and for as long as possible so again the trick here is I'm trying to put a yeah no not quite a tiny droplet of oil directly in the middle of that Jewel and now I can take the bottom setting I know it's going on top but when we put it in the watch it'll be on the bottom like that and they'll stick together because of that capillary action from the oil and then I can simply drop it back into place and replace this upper spring here that Spring by the way is there in case you drop your watch so that that pivot doesn't smash into the Jewel and break it instead it just bends that little spring and we can just fire it back up and everything looks good as far as oiling the jewels go okay so that part's done now let's just take a quick look as we continue the reassembly I need to try to line up this piece of metal with the under part of this rotor again and there we go I actually did it and what I'm going to do here is use just a tiny tiny bit of epoxy to just sort of smooth over that part I'm not going to actually like add any weight or epoxy to the part in any significant amount I'm basically just going to use it to fill in the the jagged part of where those things um meet up again and as you can see I'm just going to flatten it down and smooth it so that it's actually just like a tiny fraction of the actual epoxy and that's just going to give me peace of mind that that those two parts will hold together better for the long term again this was the decision of the owner he wanted to keep as many parts original as possible and to me there's very little risk in using this rotor again now we need to put back together the automatic works and what I just dip these in is a combination of cleaner and oil it's kind of an interesting thing where it sits in there it'll dissolve any of the um any of the debris or anything that's on it but when it dries it leaves like a lubricant layer on it as well and that's what's needed for these purple wheels these are called reversing wheels and that's because they allow this rotor to spin either direction yet still wind up the watch which is only spun and turned in One Direction it's a really genius little way to do this and Rolex also coats them in a kind of a Teflon or some type of um anti-uh friction material and it turns them this purple color apparently this has its own little bridge that we put together and basically this mechanism allows it so so that you don't have to wind your watch it will wind itself as you move around as you move your arm this road or this heavy weight that's on the outside will spin around and regardless of which direction it actually spins it will put every time it spins a little tiny wind into the watch as if you would turn the crown like a half of a turn and as you wave at your friend it does another half of a turn in as you write down your name on a piece of paper it does another half of a turn and as you wear the watch every day you never have to wind it it's really cool foreign ER mechanism here I'm going to put a little bit of oil here where we're going to replace that one donut Jewel that I talked about before so that it can spin and move freely again it's tiny but there we go and then I can replace this arm now this part's going to get a little bit tricky because what needs to happen is I need to have this arm in place and it gets pushed on by this spring but I need to put the wheel here in that it actually pushes up against in first while that spring and that arm are pulled back so that's what I'm going to do here yes okay I think I got it yes it so it is now holding tension on that part but it makes me really nervous that it might fly away because of how strong that spring is so I'm trying to keep something holding down this whole thing at all times in this case it's the tweezers and I'll use my other hand to both put the screw into place with another pair of tweezers and then screw it down and then now that it's screwed down I can uh feel a little bit of relief I'll now put this um this screw kind of thing that holds it down on top it actually screws on reverse and it's not a regular screw I don't know if I need a special tool for this I might have to track one of those down but two tweezers will work for now okay put it on the time grapher let's see how it does [Music] okay well that's definitely an improvement but we've still got some work to do so let's take a look at the movement and if you look at the top of the balance you can see it doesn't have that normal metal arm right there that allows you to adjust the rate Rolexes don't have that generally take a look at this screw in the front of the balance here it has that star shape and that's actually how you adjust it the good news is I have a tool for that and the tool here is called a micro Stella tool and if you look closely at the very tip it's the same shape it's that star shape that you use and what you do is you attach it to the screw and then you can turn it to adjust the time now just like this and now I'm going to turn this over to the right I'm going righty tighty that's going to bring that screw inwards where it will increase the rate of the watch and after that adjustment plus the bead error adjustment let's see how we did on the time grapher ooh ooh much better look at that thing we got it down to zero seconds a day Zero beat error and it is back in business that is fantastic that's about the best result you could hope for and now we can continue with the full to finish the reassembly of this watch but I'm thrilled and honestly not that shocked that one of these Rolex movements even dating back to the 60s is able to keep track of time at that level it these things are just made so well and I'm really happy to see that okay now we can replace the calendar wheel you know we're gonna get the dial the hands back on here do a little stuff with the case and then we'll have a finished product but first Let's uh put on the hour wheel and now we can put on the center seconds pinion so this is the the little tiny thing that you actually attach the seconds hand to and that turns from this side and the way it works is actually pretty ingenious so there's a little tiny spring here that holds that in place and holds some tension on it and then there's an additional wheel that we're going to put on that is actually attached to one of the train Wheels underneath that just has a long pivot that sticks up and it happens to turn at the exact rate that we want in conjunction with this little pinion and that is one time around the watch per minute which is a seconds hand now this is a little bit of a tricky operation as you can see because this spring is so light that when you screw down the screw it turns so you have to use another instrument to kind of line it up and to make sure that it stays in place just like that now we can put this extended wheel that I mentioned onto that extended pivot it's sitting right underneath there and I'm actually just going to use my hand press tool to uh to put this back on because it allows me to put kind of even pressure around this wheel so that it seats properly just like that and now we can put on the dial washer and that means it's time for the dial again this dial is in quite good condition especially considering that it's very likely a replacement dial I can use I can screw that into place where the dial screws are on the side of the case to secure it and now I can make sure that this watch is at midnight and how do I know that because it just turned over the calendar to five and now I can put the hands on as if it were midnight and that way when the calendar turns over when the person's wearing it it should be you know at midnight right around midnight if it turned over at three in the morning well they may look at their watch and not understand what you know what day it is if it if it's past midnight and they think oh well it's still the fifth and oh no now the hour hand can go on again this watch has two hour hands it has that auxiliary one plus the main one that we're used to this is the minute hand these hands look like they were also um service hands were placed at the time of service okay that looks like it's lined up correctly we can press it into place and give it a quick test to make sure that it clicks over the calendar and there it goes looks like maybe a couple of minutes after midnight but that is acceptable now I can put on gently the seconds hand and now this is um this is how we actually replace the gaskets on these watches because we need to do that if we're going to get this thing even close to waterproof so we put them in this little brusher thing that puts silicone grease on the outside of it and then we push this one goes into the case tube and again these Rolex watches and many dive or you know sports watches like these have a three gasket set up taking a quick look at this by the way talk to the owner and I told him that I was worried about the crack on the side of the Crystal and that it may make the watch less waterproof so he said okay let's let's get a let's get a Rolex Crystal for the replacement and so that's what I'm doing here is just replacing that Crystal outright and again I mentioned that there's this ring around the base that we have to put on and I've got a tool that does that basically it allows you to press this down without actually pressing on the crystal itself because the inside of that die is hollowed out and this is part of how watches get to be water resistant is the pressure that this ring is holding Around The Edge on the crystal creates a watertight seal so new crystal in place and I mentioned the gasket for the back that is also a brand new gasket and what I'm going to do here is something that I haven't done before on the channel because I got kind of a new thing so first things first we have one more gasket to fit to replace and that's the one on the inside of the crown and so I'm going to use a metal pick to try to get in here and hopefully it's not melted in place oh there we go oh that feels good I'm not gonna lie getting that gasket out of there is great so there it is and we can take that gasket away and after cleaning out the inside of that uh Crown again I've got a new gasket to put into place again a new Rolex gasket going in and I got a new uh tool for the workshop that I'm going to try out for the first time on this watch so after putting everything together except for not having it in the movement we're going to test the pressure on this thing and see if it is up to spec now what I need to do first is make sure that everything's screwed down properly so the crown needs to be um down all the way and then I also need to use my um case opening and closing tool here to make sure that there's a proper amount of pressure on that case and now take a look at what I got this is a pressure tester so this is a really cool tool so the way this works is there's water in there and there's this compression tube so what I do is I suspend the watch at the top part of the tube where it's in the air and then I'm gonna seal everything down so that it's watertight in that tube and then I'm going to pressurize the top part with air okay and I'm going to put it at three bar so three atmospheres and what happens is if there's any possible leaks in the watch case the air will leak into it because molecules are so small and it will equalize the pressure so there will be pressure inside of the watch case now what I can do is plunge the watch case into water and then release the pressure in the chamber and if there's leaks bubbles will come flying out of there so here we go let's see what happens hey that's not too bad you saw a couple of bubbles come out of the top so maybe it's not a hundred percent perfect with some of the wear on the case but you'll see like a stream of bubbles come out if it's not holding you know if if there's a true leak in it and you'll just see them flying out of there so you know what that's actually pretty good for this thing especially with the cons the uh the condition that it's in and look let's be realistic here you know he's not going dive in with this watch right this thing isn't going to see any pressure this is wash your hands get stuck in the rain worst case somebody shoves you in the pool or whatever and I feel confident that this watch will do just fine in those conditions which I think is fantastic okay final assembly time now we can get the case and the other movement back into the case I cannot believe that this thing passed that pressure test or even came close I was actually expecting it not to and I thought that that would be cool to show and it turns out this thing's just bulletproof and didn't care okay now we've got the movement in there I can secure it into place and replace the automatic winding works as well you can see that they color coded the screws they blewed the screws that go on the winding works the automatic Works rather so you don't get them screwed up with anything else and just a quick test here to make sure a that it's winding and B that there's no that this isn't touching or hurting anything else around it because of the damage that we'd seen on it and it looks great once again I can put this case back on nice and firm and that will help ensure the water tightness of the back of it as well okay so now the watch is looking fantastic but there is still the bracelet now you can see the wear on the bracelet this was also replaced at some point and of course the owner said I want it to look exactly like this so all I did is clean it in the ultrasonic but take a look at this spring bar that tip is completely worn down this is what it's supposed to look like and uh that one actually could have given way at some point so we're going to replace those and taking a look by the way look how much cleaner this end link looks but look at this other one do you remember back from the beginning I said there was a Bend there is that needs to be fixed as well it will create rattling and excess play so I've got a pair of flat pliers here that I'm going to use to just gently bend that back to Flat don't need to be too crazy with this it's a simple procedure of just gently giving it enough tweaks so that that bottom part is flattened out and not sticking up and yeah that looks pretty good right there let's try putting it on the watch and make sure that everything lines up and looks good this is my one of my favorite tools I have by the way is this bolt action spring bar tool I got it from a guy on Instagram called Hassler instruments and it is awesome it's handmade like you know what I mean he made it in his shop so there we go that looks really really good and uh now we can put the other side on as well and it looks like we have come to the end here of this Rolex 1675 GMT Master restoration and this watch is ready to go back on its owner's wrist and hopefully bring him joy and memories of his grandfather for years to come thank you so much for joining me on this journey with this watch this is really what it's all about for me on this channel I absolutely love you know keeping the family history going and uh getting these things back on the wrist where they're where they should be worn and it was a real pleasure to work on this watch if you want to find me on Instagram I'm there wristwatch underscore Revival I'll post pictures of uh projects updates some of my watches from my collection that kind of stuff and of course you can just say hi thank you so much once again for hanging out we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 4,215,581

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Id: la2ztR5askE

Length: 54min 5sec (3245 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022