My Aunt Handed Me This Family Heirloom Vintage Watch to Restore

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 well we've got something a little different than what we normally work on this is a watch that my aunt handed me and she said can you restore this for me it belonged to my grandmother so yes of course i'm gonna take a shot at it and as you can see it needs quite a bit of work um there's some damage to it for starters there's one of the indexes one of those rubies there that normally goes at the nine o'clock hour there is just floating around in the case there's a couple of the diamond insets missing and as you can see it's just in generally kind of worn shape there's a lot of dirt uh in between the jewels on the outside as well as in the bracelet it just hasn't been serviced or cleaned in forever probably you know 50 plus years so we may have a bit of a project on our hand i don't know what movement is inside of this watch and we're going to have to find that out and see if we can get it running as well but you know these are really the special projects that come across my bench every once in a while something that is meaningful to well in this case she's not technically my aunt do you have like an uncle or an aunt that you call that but they're really your parents friends that that's what this woman is to me but i mean she's been a part of my life for you know 25 years and i consider her a family member and uh at any rate uh this was her grandmother's so this thing probably dates to somewhere in the 40s i'm assuming i it's a little hard to say oh that came right out and you can see there's a lot of dirt uh underneath the uh where the bracelet meets the case as well yeah so this thing is gonna need a thorough bath for sure and i'm hoping that that'll get it looking better but also of course critical mission critical here is to get the dang thing running again but yeah these are just the really kind of special projects because you know these these watches you sure they have some value but these types of watches have a lot more value than just monetary and uh bringing it back to a state where my aunt can enjoy it again and even wear it sometimes would be awesome so here's our first problem the most obvious is that the index at nine has fallen out but it looks like i should be able to put it back in i'm gonna need some type of glue and yeah as i look closely here there's a couple of these diamonds that are missing as well at the uh what is it the two o'clock and the ten o'clock positions there i don't [Music] i'm hoping that these are somewhere in the case or something because i'm really sure where i'm gonna find them or how i'm gonna replace them otherwise i may just have to live with it i you know there's only so much i can do with these restorations first things first though we'll just take the hands off this one has a sub seconds hand there you can see it's not a central seconds like you see on a lot of watches okay but this movement did just pop out of the case and it looks like well it's at least attempting to run um this watch was wound up all the way and wouldn't unwind and as you can see it kind of comes to a stop so there's something going on with it but i will say that the fact that the balance is moving at all is pretty good right that that means that at least the parts are there the spring's in place this is a non-shock protected balance so it's not uncommon to have uh the balance staff broken on these if the watch takes a big hit the balance staff is a very thin piece of metal holding on a relatively large amount of mass and that can shift dramatically and actually break it now modern watches have shock protection systems on them that really do a great job of preventing that but this is an old watch and they didn't have that yet okay so the dial comes off and we're going to have to address that later but for now we can get cracking on this movement and see if there's any any obvious signs of damage or anything like that as usual with these type of watches we do something that you really don't see certainly not now but even normally it's it's fairly rare to see what we're about to do which is we are going to completely disassemble this movement like every screw every spring every part and down to its barest components and then we'll completely wash them and then reassemble it from scratch it's kind of weird because when you think about other things in your life like electronics or i don't know your car or gosh almost anything it is not the way that it works right if something on your car breaks you fix that one part with electronics it's usually just a situation where if it's even going to be repaired at all you just replace it and with these that's not the case and there's something really satisfying about that process i hope you find it that way too okay so i let down the main spring and there was power in the mainspring again it wouldn't unwind and that signals to me that there's an issue either with the mainspring itself or with power going through the train of wheels and so that'll be one of the places that i look first in fact i'm just going to check right now yeah so look after i take the pallet fork out there's nothing holding that back so the mainspring should unwind and as you can see it it does i put some wine in it and it is unwinding but i will say that it is not unwinding at the speed that you would expect and right here i just noticed there's also a screw missing here on this bridge for the escape wheel so that is a problem now it looks like it wasn't affecting like that's not the issue with the watch i mean unless the screw's floating around in the case somewhere which we've seen that before on the channel but assuming that that's not the case um that wasn't what was stopping it and you can see see it still wants to unwind but it can't now what this usually means it actually usually means it just needs a service because what happens is on watches is that there's oils used to lubricate them but here's the problem if those oils are left unchanged uncleaned off and replaced for years and years and years and years and years the liquid component of the oils eventually dries and it leaves a gunky dry deposit that actually works against the watch in fact it will stop it and there's a good chance that that's what we're dealing with here as the watch does seem to want to be able to go but just as for lack of a better term it's gunked up it won't fully be able to unwind i will say i hope that that's the case because that would mean no replacement parts are needed and the troubleshooting aspect kind of goes away you just clean everything lubricated put it back together and see if it runs but we shall see okay we can take the crown wheel and the ratchet wheel off and that'll reveal the rest of the train of wheels so i can take those out oh yeah there's something see that right there could have been stopping it right there and then look at the what the yeah that's not right so that's the extended fourth wheel pivot that's actually the pivot that the seconds hand goes on onto the other side it sticks right onto that and that should have come out of that hole easily and there was something it was not bent i looked it's just you know something was gunking it up and that probably means dried on oil and if that's the case that could mean that this watch is more or less just in desperate need of a of a service and and it could be the reason that the watch came to a stop this is a very basic movement from 40s 50 60s range a s is the manufacturer it's uh ah shield it's um it's german named swiss manufactured they made a ton of movements movements from the era i recommend these as ones to work on though i will say that i wouldn't recommend this one this is a 970 you can actually see it right there in the middle of the plate stamped as970 i wouldn't recommend this one the only reason i wouldn't is because it's small this is made for a women's watch and it's very small and that makes it harder to work on i usually recommend starting with something like a a big pocket watch movement but even if you want to do a regular watch movement you can get one from as from this era off of ebay for cheap and just you know with no case or dial or hands or anything like that but just to practice on but just get one that's a little bit bigger than this all right we can flip the watch over and turn our attention to the keyless works and the motion works these are on what they call the dial side of the watch for obvious reason that's where the dial used to sit okay yolk spring and yolk come out and that leaves the minute wheel and their intermediate wheel for the uh for the hand setting and the last thing that leaves us with is the main spring coming out of the barrel now i am curious to see if the main spring's broken it clearly had some left in it but one thing that can happen is it can break and still be able to wind up a little tiny bit and that doesn't look broken it's definitely old if you notice the purplish blue hue to it that means that it's a carbon steel mainspring which is before they came out with a much much better engineered versions but these work fine too as long as they don't break it's just that they're much more brittle than their modern counterparts and then they do break somewhat frequently but this one no it's all in one yeah this looks good i can reuse this spring actually too i don't think i need to reorder a new one and it looks pretty clean in the barrel too take a look on the microscope at some of the parts and the first thing you'll notice of course is that there's just a lot of dirt uh it's just caked on dirt you know from age a little bit of mist threading there here's some of the jewels for the plates and they just have well like i said you know dried on oil just sitting right there on it and that type of stuff will eventually stop it now here's that fourth wheel that i showed or that i talked about before and do you see those rings of dark along the pivot there that's dried on oil and as you can see it actually even makes it a different size because it's there and that's really all it takes to stop a watch okay it's time to put the watch in the watch cleaning machine and as i do i want to remind you that uh i have a patreon for this channel and this is really how the channel is supported i really appreciate everybody over on the patreon who supports me if you do sign up you get a thank you card and a wristwatch revival sticker in that mail you can put on your laptop or your water bottle or maybe one of your watchmaking parts something like that i particularly want to thank trevor spencer ross robert ralph n.t mitchell michael mikey kyle kim kevin jim jason james george erica dustin dominic david cory colin brenton brian brian brett brad and alex for their support over on the patreon it really does mean the world to me and uh if you're interested it's patreon.com wrist watch revival you get some early access to a little bit of the content i actually put the rough cuts of these videos up so you can see them usually a day or two before they go up in their kind of almost final form at any rate thank you for uh for considering that as of course these videos are quite labor and time intensive as we work our way through the watch cleaning machine here you can see i've already put it through the cleaning solution and there's two rinses and these are kind of ammonia based so they really do take off anything that's left over before finally working our way to the final stage which is actually just a heated dry all this is just a simple electric heater and then you slowly spin the basket in there and that drives off any of the solution that might be left over you know between plates or anything like that it is a little hot when you take it out of the basket so i'm just going to use a paper towel just to get a grip here so that i don't burn my fingers on the top there but it looks like we're good to go and while we're over here let's get this case cleaned up as well i'm going to put these in the ultrasonic cleaner ultrasonic cleaner is a really indispensable tool for a watch maker for cleaning really everything including the movement sometimes if the movement's really bad i'll do a run in the ultrasonic as well the cool part about these is that you don't actually need the harsh chemicals like we use in the watch cleaning machine this is just a it's a detergent basically and i'm going to put the case the case back the bracelet in here and then it just runs a ultrasonic wave through the water that has a detergent in it and it does an amazing job of being able to break off the tiny little bits and the little things you can't get to with uh you know any other type of cleaning as you can see the water though from this particular watch case has gotten very i can't even see the parts in there anymore yikes but we can take them out and there's the ooh that already looks better i haven't even rinsed it off yet what i have to do after i take these out of here is just walk them over to the sink and just give them a rinse under cold water that just makes sure that any of the leftover detergent is off take a look at the parts though as we have them all laid out and finished they look beautiful now including the bracelet and the case so it looks like things cleaned up really well actually and take a quick look at what these look like after the fact so the little there's the before that just popped in and you can see the after no more bumps on that pivot and that's because we got that dried oil off of there same thing here this is with the dried oil on the jewels and now and span no problem at all with that so this watch cleaned up beautifully and if that was what was holding it back we'll be good to go as far as getting the movement back together take a look at the bracelet here it looks like it's in good shape it's plated i'm not going to do any polishing or anything on it as it runs the risk of wiping off the plating and that just makes it even worse but you know what they cleaned up really nicely this is a popular type of bracelet these flex bracelets from the that era okay now we need to take a look though at the case now first things first the case cleaned up really nicely the jewels look good the diamonds are all shiny again and it looks pretty good this is also a plated case so i'm not going to be doing any um anything crazy on the case as far as polishing goes but this is an issue so this is a custom crystal for a case like this these aren't the type that you can just go online and buy and that means but it's also in really tough shape it's got big scratches in it and it's just generally fogged over and it's going to make it so that you can't really see the dial clearly and that's going to really ruin the whole presentation so i need to restore this crystal and i need to do it in a way that doesn't ruin it and doesn't risk breaking it because i don't have a replacement and i don't know where i would get one a little bit of pressure but it must be done because i can't look at that i mean this thing this crystal has seen better days let's say and it really does need to be uh polished up if it's gonna look good on the watch again for my ant so i'm going to do this kind of a hardcore way what you can use is a liquid paste polisher this one's actually a metal polish but you can use any kind of low-grade you know polish like nothing that cuts too hard and i'm going to use a microfiber cloth and i'm going to shape a piece of radical so that i have a good grip on the crystal itself and i am going to go to town on this thing i am just going to keep on working it until it's smooth and clear and looks good again because acrylic is very workable like you can get them looking good again but it takes a lot the other option i'd have here is to use my polishing wheel which is my dremel but i'm worried that i will overdo it and not be able to recover it where when you do it by hand it takes a lot longer it's a lot slower as you can see but you can do it just a little tiny bit at a time and make sure that you land right where you need it to be still not happy with it so i'm going to keep going and as you can see it takes a lot just a lot of elbow grease and at some point the um the radical got some of the paste on it and it got slippery so i took it off okay now this is uncleaned right this just has a bunch of stuff on it but this is already looking much much better and so as is often the case when it comes to polishing you want to do a multi-stage polish so i'm going to do that was my first and this is going to be my second and this is polywatch and if you know what this is you know you can use this on any of your watches that have acrylic crystals to just give them a nice buff it'll take out a little bit of the scratches as well but it's a very fine polished paste and uh would take really forever to get this thing from the condition it was into the condition i want it to be in but now that i've got it looking a significant amount better i'm going to use the polywatch as my last polish and i'm going to hope that that gives it that nice clean clear luster and oh my god that is so much better look at the improvement now it's nice and clear it looks great it actually turned out beautiful and i'm super relieved because now this means i don't have to try to track down a brand new version of that crystal which is which is going to be really really tough okay now let's turn our attention to this dial now there is a lot going on with the dial okay first it's missing the nine o'clock hour marker as well as the ten and two but the nine o'clock one was floating around in the case so i do have it so we should be able to address that also it's worn it's just dirty and worn right this watch isn't waterproof and it hasn't been cared for in a long time it's been you know sitting in a jewelry box or whatever so i'm gonna do my normal dial treatment which is a very light touch of just water i do not believe that using chemicals or paints on dials is the right thing to do i don't think that it looks better i don't think i would have the skill set to do it anyway so this is what i do instead i just let the dial i expose as much of the dial as it wants to have exposed and in this case yeah it took it took a clean up okay but as you can see that's not dirt on the dial those are wear marks or missing paint so i'm not going to be able to clean those up so let's do a quick test fit just to make sure that this thing's going to go in there and it is so we have this and all we need to do is to glue it back in so i'm going to use some jeweler's epoxy so this is a two-part epoxy as you can see equal parts of one in the other and then you mix them together to make a glue and i'm gonna use that to glue this gemstone back into place i am going to use an old oiler to do so the hard part is getting the least amount of glue that you need right like this is so easy to just flood this thing with glue and have it everywhere okay this looks alright it's not really spread in there quite right though so let's get that there we go getting there getting there there we go okay so now i've got the glue in place and i can grab the gemstone try to gently set it correctly into place it's a little shaky but this is very very small work okay that's not too bad as you can see there's a little bit of extra glue and so i'm going to use a a swab here with alcohol isopropyl alcohol and that'll take off any of the extra and there we go looks good so we've got that fixed up okay so we're taking steps here this thing's starting to come together now i ordered a movement off of ebay because i need that screw the one that was missing from the beginning that's that one right there and i got this for really cheap but look what i noticed hmm it's got a dial no case or anything but there's these little diamonds on it and they do resemble the ones in the watch that i'm fixing now what are the chances that they're from the same supplier it's a different watch brand but let's just see oh hey they just pop right out i'm just i didn't even know if i could get them off of the dial but it looks like my tweezers will take them right out and if they're the right size i can just repurpose them and then i've gotten very very lucky because i needed this movement anyway and the dial was just kind of a throw in so let's see if these happen to be the same size first thing that i'm going to do is take a piece of peg wood with some alcohol on it and that will dissolve any leftover adhesive that may still be in that hole so that i can uh put some adhesive in myself like this although oh no okay um yeah let's try that again so this one is once again has a bunch of alcohol on the tip of it which will dissolve that that the glue that i did not place correctly using my uh my oiler there and now i can just blot that out and as you can see you can actually watch it evaporate alcohol evaporates very very quickly and it's almost gone and there we go it looks kind of cool when it does it so let's try this again i want to try to get this glue into that hole rather than just a little bit on the edge which wouldn't have held it in place but it's actually very tricky to do so but that is better that should be fine so now i can grab one of these little diamonds and see if i can't fit it in place and it does actually fit wow okay so that's just super lucky i mean i think i had kind of resigned this thing to saying i'm sorry but you know these diamonds aren't there i was thinking about looking around to see if i could buy just like a subset of gemstone things because these are tiny tiny tiny gemstones i mean they look huge on your screen and by the way look at how the dirt moves around in that oil isn't that weird kind of weird anyway um but i got really lucky here and uh got kind of a two for one off of that movement that i ordered all right so now this is once again prepped and ready to go so here comes the glue for the other one oops well let's just put this in and make sure that it wants to sit correctly here because these diamonds are all a little bit different they're not super uniform like you might expect today and yes there is a bit too much glue here but i think it's fine okay fine i'm kidding i don't think it's fine i just wanted to see if it would bug you like it bugged me and uh so i'm gonna come back in here the good part about this glue is that it sets up fairly quickly and that means that i can come in and uh and and remove some of it without pulling out you know the glue that's actually holding it down but it's really finicky with how small it is where you just gonna go crazy on me if i left the glue like that i think i would have done it too don't worry okay and i think if i yeah now still a little bit there i'm gonna have to come in from the other side here this this doesn't have to be perfect perfect it's absolutely microscopic i'm literally on a microscope here but i don't want to leave like big chunks of glue sitting off the side like that that seems fine to me okay so that's done the dial restoration is complete we cleaned it we replaced the nine o'clock gem and we even got really really lucky and found replacements for the two and ten so that's done and that means it's time to start getting this movement back together and of course this is the most important part because we don't know if it's going to run or not i'm feeling pretty good about it though i'll say that you know the fact that it kind of was trying to run before was a good sign the fact that the mainspring could unwind at least a little bit is a good sign and i'm hoping that just a good cleaning and service will get this thing back in action first thing we do though is of course put the main spring back in and oh yeah there's just these little moments in watchmaking that are just so fun this is one of them i just love it so putting that we now got the mainspring back in the barrel and that means i can take the barrel arbor and put it back in as well like that and then the barrel cap and it looks like some of the plating is starting to come off of this barrel which is bizarre i've never actually seen that much of it come off but i'm just going to leave it for now and i'll i'll rub off any of the additional plating um off of the bottom of that if needed very strange though all right so here's the escape wheel going in that looks about right now the fourth wheel and let's see if it yeah see that just drops right in and before these ones were giving me pain right these are the ones that i was pulling out and it was like stuck okay get those pinions lined up third wheel time there we go okay that's in place now the center wheel it's also known as the second wheel but not the seconds wheel so don't get those screwed up and then before we want to start putting on plates here i'm going to throw the the setting lever screw in place because that actually sits under the plate and so i can kick things off here with the barrel bridge that'll hold that barrel in place okay and now we can put the train wheel bridge on trying to get it lined up with the pivots because well that's what it's going to go on this one's actually a little easier than the normal it only has the three pivots the center wheel third wheel and fourth wheel as the escape wheel has its own little bridge so that does make things just a little easier here it does make it a little tricky to make sure that i've got it all engaged because it'll run the power down to the escape wheel but the escape wheel is not held in by anything so i'm just going to take it out for a second and there we go now that is much much better than what i was dealing with before okay now we need to take a look though at this escape wheel bridge because it actually has a cap jewel setting on it that needs to be re-oiled so in order to do that we take these two parts apart we have to unscrew them with little tiny baby screwdriver and then as you can see there's the hole right there and by the way that's the screw coming out of the the hole there that holds that part on and then the other part is the cap jewel and i need to make sure that the cap jewels cleaned and then put some of the uh mobius 90 10 lubricant on it before reassembling the part this isn't something that they do now modern design for watchmaking doesn't have a capped jewel on the escape wheel anymore it's just a normal pivot hole that you just oil as normal but back in the day they went hard and so they made our lives a little harder i mean this is a much more involved process than the norm so i'm just going to use an air blower here to make sure that any of the one dip which is a solvent that i use it's a watch cleaning solvent is evaporated and now i can put this into place and there so i'm going to put that oil right on the jewel and the reason i'm using a piece of radical here is so that i can hold it steady this is this is some good stuff here and make sure that when these meet up together they're not sliding all around because then that oil will actually move out move out of place and so the radical really does a great job of kind of holding everything in place where like here where now i can grab my screwdriver and get these two parts back together all right and there we go that's exactly how that is supposed to look so sweet now we can put the escape wheel back in and then get this bridge back on top of it and let's make sure there we go that that's all in so everything's good there and now we can move on to well in this case we'll put in the click in the click spring this is the part of the watch that makes a sound when you wind it i think people have a misconception that when you wind up your watch it's all those gears turning around the bigger ones you know we call them the train of wheels or the train wheels i think people think that when they're winding your watch those are what make the sound the the winding to watch sound and they're not it's actually just the teeth off of that little part that i just screwed in going on the top of the ratchet wheel that's actually what makes the sound of a watch winding okay this is a crown wheel a little bit of hp 1300 that's also a mobius oil it's a synthetic in fact all of the oils that i use on the watch the oils that i choose to use are all synthetic that is a left hand threaded screw as well which is something that you don't see very often it also leads to a lot of sheared or broken screws because if you don't remember that it screws the opposite way that you expect well you're gonna go way too hard on it in the wrong direction and as you might imagine you're to have a broken screw pretty quickly and this one's the same you can see i'm screwing this lefty loosey yet somehow it's tightening down okay now we can flip the movement over and put the canon pinion back on like that and we can start working on the keyless works here as well this blue stuff is a synthetic grease and it's for the high friction parts on a watch i get away with using four or sometimes five different types of greases and oils in a watch but i'm also a hobbyist right and so you know i assume if you're doing this full time and and all that that you probably have a few more that you would use for more specific applications but i think for where i'm at with the hobby uh you know the the main four that i use really do serve my needs quite well sometimes five the fifth one is actually a special grease that i use on automatic watches for the for the winding barrel bridge but i won't need that here because this is a manual wind you know straight up wind em up style watch okay so now we've got the keyless works coming together here a little bit of grease here and there as i work towards putting on the uh the yolk the yolk and the oak spring so just make sure that the yolk's engaged before grabbing the spring and i'm going to use this stick to kind of stabilize everything because these are exactly the type of springs that go flying away i have definitely had that happen all of a sudden you've got your best flashlight and a magnet and you're down on the ground digging through the carpet it's no fun okay a little bit of grease here on the point at which the spring meets with it because that's a very high friction part i'm a little sloppy with the grease today so i'm just going to use this radical to clean it up if i was perfect that wouldn't happen so i guess i got bad news i'm not perfect all right setting lever goes into place and that means that we can also do a test fit here on the winding crown yeah anybody who thinks that they're you know pretty darn good try making watch repair videos you'll find out [Laughter] you'll you'll figure out the stuff you're not so good at real quick because uh people will let you know there's no doubt about it but that's part of the thing that actually attracts me to watchmaking is that i view it as an endeavor that has a very very high ceiling i think it's really hard to be really really good at this and so i'm doing my best to get as good as i can at it you know but i mean i took classes online that were you know from the watch repair channel here on youtube from mark they were invaluable to me but it's not a substitute for uh you know two years at a watchmaking school or something like that right i'm teaching myself most of this stuff so i try to keep that in mind too but still you know come on i want to be good at this cool part about it too is there's always something else to learn okay minute wheel goes into place here after the intermediate and a quick check shows that yes it looks like the parts are all engaging here and i can even get some grease and perhaps once again a little too much and i'm just going to clean that up again with the radico and now i can put the setting lever spring into place most of the time a setting lever spring access both the spring for the setting lever to engage back and forth between hand setting and winding but it also often acts as a cover plate which it does here for example for the yoke and the yoke spring but that is what you want to see right there you want to see it engaging and disengaging like that and of course this is another major point of friction as that has to slide across that spring over and over again so i'm going to put some on the inside and then some once again on the inside really important to make sure that that's done not only does it make it less likely to have metal shavings and wear it also just makes the watch a little easier to operate when it comes to pulling in and out with the setting and winding positions on the crown okay that looks like it is good to go and that means that we can kind of start working towards the moment of truth here with putting in the pallet fork that means we're just a step or two away from getting the balance in here and seeing if we can't get this thing up and running again cleaned up beautifully the movements i mean they just made really nice little movements for even these watches where the movement wasn't the star you're right that this movement is was never visible the person who bought this watch probably never saw the movement ever and look at what they did this nice greening on it just some nice beveling i mean again this isn't like super high horology stuff but it's like a nice looking little movement okay so let's get this uh pellet fork into place eventually there we go and after a little wind you can see that the pallet fork is operating correctly it wants to jump back and forth and that means we can put in this balance let's see what we got really hoping this thing just jumps to life not yet oh it wants to maybe it's just not engaged properly you can tell it's trying huh well if i use my air blower here i can make it engage and kind of go but it it just kind of keeps dragging to a stop it it doesn't want to keep going for some reason huh okay well i guess the first thing we should do then is we still haven't actually cleaned and lubricated the jewels on the top here so let's just do that and that might let us know because this thing is very very close to working but it just doesn't quite want to go so in order to do this on these non-shock protected it is a pain you actually have to take the whole balance and balance spring assembly off of the balance bridge like this and then set it aside and then you have to these two tiny little screws on the bottom and these hold together four parts the bridge thing itself the jewel the screws of course and then also the the lever for the regulation of the watch they're all kind of one unit here so there's the screws there's the bridge itself with the hole there's the lever and then this is the cap jewel so this is very finicky because what i need to do now is clean these parts up and then do a similar operation to what we did for the escape wheel where i'm going to put some oil on this capsule that's going into the one dip right here and then i have to put this all back together without mixing them up or smooshing it around so this is uh yeah this isn't the super fun part of it they made this a lot more finicky well now that we have the the shock settings it's way easier okay there's the cap jewel fresh out of the one dip as you can see it evaporates very quickly and i'm going to use some peg wood just to make sure that there's no crusted on oil because i could still see some even after sitting in the one dip for a little bit and we'll give it just another quick splash and there we go now the jewels nice and clean interestingly as well on some parts here they used clear jewels rather than the deep red ones that we have they're actually the same uh you know structurally they just you can add an element to it to make them that deep red you can even make them blue synthetic ruby synthetic sapphire they're all technically synthetic sapphire but you can change the colors on them or have no color you can do that now too there's a few watch companies that do it but it's rare so as you can see i need to really make sure that i hold this thing together while i get these little i mean these screws are so small and this is i believe my smallest screwdriver okay but it's coming back together there we go so with that done now i can put the balance assembly back into place so that means the stud the balance spring stud needs to go into that hole then i can secure it with that screw and then i also need to make sure that the regulating arm has the correct part of the spring in it before i turn it back over on an eccentric screw so this is very touchy tiny work yeah so this just screws over and then holds the last outer ring of that spring in place like so okay so we did that and now we can give this another shot and see if we can get it going no give it a good wind maybe that'll kick it up you know you do need to wind up the watch and if you give it a full wind it actually has more power than when it doesn't and i still it just it it's sitting correctly it's just hanging or not wanting to go well let's take a look at the other side of the balance jewel so you can see that this is also capped and is there something is that actually a piece of metal that's i think that that's actually a broken off pivot from a balance maybe there it is i finally got it i couldn't get it with the tweezers but that was stuck in the between the cap jewel and the whole so i'm thinking that that's what the problem was and why it still could kind of go but couldn't go go and let's see if we can get this thing running now come on baby okay hey oh there it goes oh that is what you wanted to see all right so some troubleshooting and some kind of weirdness there of having that thing broken off in in between those two jewels but that was the problem the watch needed to be cleaned and it needed that little tiny piece of metal taken out and now it kicks right up to life so let's see how it's doing on the time grapher okay so it's losing about 10 seconds a day the amplitude's about 200 which is okay now the beat air is pretty bad but that doesn't actually affect time keeping and it's very finicky to uh correct so i'm not going to that actually is totally fine for a watch of this age and this condition you know 10 seconds a day isn't great if you're looking at like modern watch time keeping but for something like this this isn't going to be a daily wear this is going to be a special occasion at best type thing for my aunt so i am going to totally be happy that we got this thing running again and we'll proceed to the final assembly now so one thing that we're going to need to do with our uh restored crystal is we need to put it back in it doesn't actually click into place or have a way to be set into place with pressure like the ones that we use now these were actually glued in and i had to scrape off a bunch of the glue here but i've got some crystal sealant and yeah we're gonna glue this bad boy in here this is how they did it back then for these uh kind of odd shaped crystals okay so just a thin thin layer of glue on the top or bottom and we can put the crystal back into place i'm just going to hold my finger on it for a couple of minutes to make sure that the crystal or that the glue is spread out and that it sets up properly and that everything goes well but frankly i'm just thrilled that this thing's running again and is going to be back in service here's the hour hand going on there we go and you can see the dial with all of its shiny jewels this watch is way different than what we normally work on on the channel but i have to say it was kind of fun working on such a kind of a fancy piece here's the minute hand going on and just a quick check to make sure that the hands aren't bumping into any of these gemstones and that they're holding up fine now the seconds hand can go on it's tiny but there we go and that of course means that we can put the case back together this actually just clicks like that and there we go we have the watch completely reassembled and running and back together and we have breathed new life into this very old watch now we can go ahead and get the the bracelet put back on and that'll kind of finish the job for this swiss geneva 17 jewels watch that is a a family heirloom of my aunt and i can't wait to give it back to her take a look at this thing out in the sunlight it's kind of pretty i even wore it around for a couple of days just to give it a good test make sure that everything stayed in place and that it was running and i don't know uh not my normal style i'll say that but it was kind of fun to wear it it's so flashy and crazy well anyway thank you so much for joining me for this restoration of this uh really cool watch with a lot of uh style and a lot of charm i appreciate you taking the time if you want to catch up with me on instagram i post some project updates and stuff some watches from my collection over there it's wristwatch underscore revival i want to thank you for taking the time to hang out with me and we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 560,678

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Id: X37F-WlbHm8

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021