My Friend's Gorgeous WWII Military Watch Won't Run, I Try to Restore It!

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wristwatch revival my name is marshall thank you so much for coming along this time on the bench boy we have a gorgeous watch this is uh an elgin a11 military watch from world war ii and i have to say it's one of the most gorgeous examples of said watch i have ever seen it is pristine absolutely gorgeous i don't know how you keep a watch in this good condition for as old as it is it was produced in the 1940s and this thing is mint this belongs to a friend of mine a local uh from the seattle watch club shout out to my guys over at the seattle watch club who said look i i got this watch a while back because it was in such great condition but i can't get it to run he said it was originally running but not well and he took it to a local watchmaker and they handed it back and said it's not running at all and that they didn't want to bother with it and so now it's completely stopped and he said is there any way you could look at it and see if we can figure it out take it out check it out on the back here type a11 this was a military standard that was put out by the u.s military and then the watch companies could produce watches that met the standard and then they would be purchased and there was numerous companies that actually met this standard and produced watches for it elgin bean one of them from the us let's take a look at first things first and see what this thing looks like on the inside because the outside is just gorgeous wow yeah this thing is just unbelievably good condition wait a minute is that a screw just it there it there is a screw down by the balance and you can see it goes here that's called a case screw that just actually holds the movement in place and it's just sort of floating around now i'd be so well let's just take a look and see what happens when we take out the screw it's crazy that this was left in here that should not have happened and it looks like the watch actually does want to run i would be amazed if this is all it takes to fix it let's yeah okay so the watch has stopped again and as you can see it just doesn't want to go any further shoot i thought we might have one of those those real lucky stories but this makes more sense as the watchmaker would have certainly seen that frankly if they're not the ones that left that watch in there i yeah i'm not sure how far they got into this but as you can see this is like one of the very first steps so a little bit sketchy here and i'm not sure what to expect from this movement but i'd really like to get this watch running well for my friend look this isn't the type of watch that you wear like on a daily basis it's more of a kind of a showpiece but boy it is a lot better to have it run right and there's no reason it shouldn't given its condition and relative lack of use you can see it's got a coin edge bezel on the front that is one of the ways that they made these watches and now i can remove the the winding stem and the crown in order to try to get the movement out of the case and it has fully stopped again it's also fully wound right now so it should be going so we'll gently take the back off here and that means that we can now take the hands off but in order for us to do this uh the the best way would be to put the crown back on again and then that way we can put the watch into the hand setting position and align the hands so that they're not at a bunch of different angles and that makes them a little bit easier to take off with the hand levers which is my preferred method of taking off hands you can see you can just get a lot of control and get right under them and as long as you use a plastic bag like this you don't risk damaging much these are extremely old of course the watch and the hands so you do have to be extra careful and as you can see the watch is actually wound up all the way and it's just so close it wants to go but it just won't quite turn over and this is going to take some investigation so the first thing that we want to do is what we call let down the main spring and since this watch is fully wound up all the power is ready to unspring at any moment and when we take off certain parts of the watch it will actually allow that to undo all at once that's not good we don't want that much power flying through this watch at once so if i simply move the click out of the way and then let the power kind of go through my fingertips with the crown we can let it down nice and gently now that the entire entirety of the power is out of the mainspring we can continue with disassembly i'm going to be doing a lot of inspection as we go because there is something holding this watch up and i don't know what it is now there's an obvious explanation it just needs a service right you know watches of this age uh they need to be serviced and this one probably hasn't had one in a while so that you know is your first stop sometimes the oils actually dry up and can gunk things up take a quick look here under the microscope at the hair spring or the balance spring as it's called as well looks great nice concentric circles no issue so that is you know one of the places that things can get really screwed up and that doesn't seem to be the case here so i'm going to continue actually taking apart the escapement end of things so this is going to be the pallet fork and the pallet fork bridge because if i take out the pallet fork any power that is remaining should just go right through the train of wheels right when i take this out like that and nothing happens and i can wind up the watch and that should be unwinding consistently so let's just poke around whoa so all i did is touch that extended fourth wheel and boom all of the power that i just put in unwound as you would normally expect i'm actually a little shocked that the watchmaker that tried i mean remember i'm a hobbyist at this this was a professional and they didn't even bother with this it's a little strange and now it's got my curious is that really all it took to undo this movement because now i want to find out so let's just put the pallet fork and the balance back in and see if the watch will actually run i'll tell you i thought i got away with an easy one with the screw the case screw floating around in the case that's just sloppy work by the person who was working on this prior that didn't end up being the case but all i did was just undo the train of wheels a little bit and it just completely came free that that would count too and i'm kind of crossing my fingers for it at this point okay pallet fork back in and now we can put the balance back in and see if the watch will actually run on its own after we wind it up a little bit okay wind it up and see if it'll kick up oh my god it totally did this is incredible that was all it took now that doesn't really tell us why that happened so we're gonna have to take a look at that as we go through but this watch is now running again let's heck with it let's put it on the time grapher and see what it does maybe it runs great and we don't really have to do much at all whoa okay it doesn't run great it's got low amplitude it's all over the map as you can see the time graph we're reading so fair enough we have the watch running again that was really the primary directive here but we can we can get it running better than that so let's go right back into where we were before and start taking this watch apart now i'm going to let down the main spring again yeah you get to see it twice here and we can take out the balance as well and what we're going to need to do now is take off the dial and the hour wheel and we'll do a complete disassembly if this is one of your first times watching the channel and you're kind of wondering what's going on here what's happening is is something that is actually quite rare these days which is that we are going to disassemble this movement every single part every screw every bridge every wheel will all come completely disassembled and then we will give it a thorough cleaning and then when we reassemble it we'll make sure to lubricate in the necessary spots and then hopefully that'll clear up some of the bad running that we saw there from this oof that was on there really good this watch hasn't been taken apart in a very long time if ever it's unlikely that this watch was never serviced it was quite routine to have that happen but i have to say it either has never been serviced which is possible given the condition or whoever did it before a didn't leave any marks um in the inside of the case back which was kind of common practice at the time was to uh to mark on the inside of the case back to engrave with some numbers or some code or whatever that would say what you did and maybe even who you are and that's not the case here and they also did an excellent job in the actual movement as it's not all scratched up and stuff it actually looks pretty good yeah just a beautiful watch really a great part of a collection the owner of this watch has a a fairly wide-ranging collection as well he has really good taste and uh and it's not just in military watches it's all across the board but this is one that you know has a special meaning just because of its significance historically speaking okay so now we can take out the click the click spring and start taking off these bridges broadly speaking watches have the biggest components on a watch are the plates and the bridges the plates kind of the under part that everything's attached to and then these bridges go on top kind of like a sandwich and for this delicious sandwich the the meat are the gears and the springs and everything in between who's hungry fairly large barrel bridge here as it comes off it also has a few jewels in it that will work on the second and third wheel and we call this the train wheel bridge this one goes in this case on the fourth wheel and the escape wheel just a gorgeous movement too i yeah i my friend got very fortunate to pick up a watch in this condition i've worked on a decent number of a11s and even have done a couple for the channel that you may have seen and while they they were in pretty good condition too except for one of them that i did that was in horrendous condition which is kind of why i chose it for a video but uh this one is leagues better okay once again we can get into the pallet fork bridge in the pallet fork and take that out and that leaves the barrel as well that other part that you can see next to it is the hack that's actually what stops the movement when you pull out the winding crown very important for military applications so that you can sync up your watches with other people so that when you say i'm gonna whatever run up on this hill at this time that you can coordinate that with other people and from what i've read the soldiers would gather every day with their officer and they would all sync their watches or hack their watches together at the same time so that they had that in common every day all right the keyless works comes apart now this is the part of the watch that lets you wind it and set it and it's a got a lot going on but it's ultimately fairly straightforward operation to disassemble it and as you can see we're kind of almost there that leaves the mainspring barrel every single bit of power that powers the watch is on the spring that's inside of this barrel that's right everything that moves on the watch is a result of that metal spring wound up inside of that barrel this is an old spring almost for sure the original to the watch it's made of carbon steel which is fairly strong but it can get brittle with age so you do have to be careful with it now if we needed to replace this it wouldn't be a huge deal to do so but i am definitely keen to try to keep every part original on this watch i think you know as a collector uh the owner would appreciate that look if the mainspring was broken i think you'd rather have a working watch with the new mainspring rather than that but if in any way you can keep the original parts i think that's better especially on a rare find like this this just has everything all original okay and now we can put the balance back on the main plate and this is just to secure it because it's about to go into the watch cleaning machine i have to just make sure that it's moving freely and so i move the uh the hack out of the side just temporarily but you can see when i let go it goes in now as i mentioned before all the parts are taken apart and now they're going to get put into these little fine mesh baskets and this is of course just so that well they do serve two purposes one of course so you don't lose the parts but also so that they don't fly around too much right they can move around a little bit in there but they're going to get spun back and forth in the watch cleaning machine and that means that you know you want to make sure that they're kind of all held together in a reasonable way so that they're not slamming into each other too much at least okay so let's put these into the watch cleaning machine they go through uh four total cycles cleaning rinsing rinsing and then drying and while we do that i did want to mention the patreon i have a patreon for this channel if you sign up for it you get access to some cool extra bonus stuff and i wanted to particularly thank trevor spencer ross robert ralph r play it nt mitchell michael mikey kyle kim kevin jim jason jason james jack george franklin evan erica dustin dr unks dominic david cosmo cory colin chris brynton brian brian brett brad andrew and alex for their support thank you really does mean a lot to me and if you're interested you can head over to patreon.com wristwatch revival and you'll get a thank you card and a sticker in the mail okay with that out of the way let's do some inspecting and look at what we have here this is one of the wheels from the train of wheels and if you can see right in the middle there is a tooth that is bent up that is almost for sure what was stopping this watch from turning it also makes sense that when i just pushed it a little bit that clicked it past that tooth and let the watch actually run so that is a part that we are going to have to just straight up replace you can bend back pieces like that but in my experience it's probably not worth it as they do lose some integrity potentially and it can be uh the type of thing that could be a problem down the line so first let's get this main spring back in the barrel the first thing i'm going to do is take some grease it's just a very simple grease that i just will put a very thin layer of around the mainspring or on the main spring and then you need a very special tool you need a mainspring winder now you can technically just wind them back in by hand but it is almost impossible to do so certainly if you're wearing finger cots which are what you know the the little protective layers that i have on my fingers here and that protects actually the watch from any type of uh you know oils and stuff on your hand that could be corrosive down the line and if you try to wind a mainspring back in by hand it will eat little tiny pieces of the finger cots and they'll get caught in there and that is not what you want so you use this tool this main spring winder and you basically wind it into the end of this tool and this mimics what it's like in the barrel the only difference is and i'll show you what this looks like it sits in the barrel it looks just like it does when it's in the barrel but the difference is this has a plunger on the back that allows you to push it out of there and into the barrel safely while maintaining the integrity of the spring so take a look here that's exactly what it looks like when it's in the barrel it just it's in this mainstream but i've got this little thing and oh yeah i love that that's a really nice feeling by the way and uh yeah so there you go now i've got this in now i did notice though and this happens sometimes that the main spring looks a little bit bent out of shape especially on old mainsprings this happens so you have to get kind of good at gently reshaping it so that it'll grab back on to the barrel arbor which is the piece that i'm putting in right now because it has to kind of wrap around the inside of that so once again i'm going to take my tweezers and just give that mainspring a little bit of a tweak you have to learn how to do this because if the main spring does get a little bit out of whack it just won't grab it won't work at all there you see how it's wrapped a little bit more towards the center and that'll give it a chance to actually grab there's actually a metal hook on that barrel that will grab onto that main spring so that when you wind up the watch it actually pulls it in so that is much better now i can take a little bit of oil here just on the part that is met with the cap here it there's actually a little bit of friction there so you just want to make sure you put a little dot of oil and these caps just get pressed fit in they're held by friction there's no you know glue or screwing it in or anything like that and as you can see we can put the mainspring and its barrel right back into position and start the reassembly of this watch i would love to get this watch running again i mean i think my friend is going to be thrilled that it's running at all because again he took it to a watchmaker and you know they handed it back to him and said sorry and so you know he was probably like well this is still a great find but it sure would be nice if it ran but i'll tell you what i'd like it to run like at least pretty good you know the again these aren't really daily wear watches they they're small by modern standards and um they don't have shock protection on the balance itself so if you drop it hard you you do run the risk of breaking the uh the balance pivot so i mean look they went to war right like these type of watches are built very very well so they're it's not like terrible but you know these are a little bit more of like a relic of the past rather than like a daily wear type piece for most people but still it's nice if it runs right you can wind it up you can see it go around plus i'm just interested because this is just a little piece of history that's been so well kept i would just love to be part of you know prolonging that so that it can be enjoyed by generations down the line as well so we can put on the train wheel bridge now and we just have to make sure that both the fourth wheel and the escape wheel are engaged with this before we tighten it down you really have to be careful the pivots on the end of these wheels the pivot's like the axle right the part that goes through the wheel and they are tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny you know tenth of a millimeter type stuff and if you go screwing down one of those bridges and the axle isn't aligned properly well you can figure out what's going to happen from there okay so now we can start getting these barrels put on or excuse me these bridges put on this is a barrel bridge and once again i like to use one of these little sticks just to help me apply pressure evenly and then keep the bridge in place once i know that the pivots have lined up properly this is a very good design by the way where they some of the bridges that go on the top will actually have the pivots for three or even four of the different wheels and that can make life very very difficult to get all of those lined up at once but this one quite cleverly breaks it up into three and two which i think is right where you want to be okay and with that on we can now continue the reassembly we've got the click spring if you've ever wound up a mechanical watch before and wondered what it was that makes that very satisfying noise it's the click spring this is a crown wheel we can put this on before putting on the click and a little bit of oil on there so i'm just going to use some radico to clean that up that's mainly just for looks and you know standard practice type stuff okay this is the wheel that actually attaches to that barrel arbor that we put in put in earlier and there's the click so that's the part that makes the noise this is a very classic american and swiss click design and i can even wind the watch here just by turning it with screwdriver here on the ratchet wheel now turning the watch over we can start to uh put the keyless works in place putting these in place will allow us eventually to put the uh the winding stem and winding crown in and then we can wind up the movement and give it a test to make sure the power's going to the right places and that everything's working and these are just posts for the motion works the motionworks is the part of the watch that allows you to have either set well it allows you to both set the hands so that you can set the time but also so that the hands go around at the proper ratios those are actually the wheels that that make that happen and that's the setting lever going into place and now we can put in the yolk and there's also the yolk spring right there so that'll need to be in place and these get a little bit tricky because the pose for this is actually on the other side so getting these all lined up can be a bit of a chore and there's the yoke and it needs to be up against the yoke spring but it also needs to be engaged with the sliding clutch this is a kind of a two-part deal i guess you could say yeah and so for now i'm just going to leave that because i have to put a couple of other parts on anyway this is the the canon pinion that's the intermediary that takes the power and the turning from the whole other side of the movement and turns it into into the hands turning which is kind of cool going to oil one of these pivots before it gets covered up here by the minute wheel it's called the minute wheel because yeah you guessed it it is what determines how often the minute hand goes around so now this is tricky business because i have to get everything lined up underneath the setting lever spring here like that and then tighten it down and now i can introduce a little bit of grease here on the high friction points and i can go for the winding stem and winding crown now again these were get some grease and then i have to make sure that everything's lined up properly here and it looks like it is so that's hand setting there and winding on the other man it looks good to me okay this is the extended pivot for the center seconds they put these on because it was just easier to read having the seconds hand in the center is sort of standard issue these days but watches from this time frame actually routinely had the seconds hand down at about six o'clock was the most common it was its own hand it was separate from the central but this little bridge that i'm putting on plus that extended pivot allows you to have that big seconds hand right in the middle and that is much more legible and when timing is really really important like when you're in the field in war you want to have you don't want to have anything ambiguous there at all this is the extended wheel here and it just sticks back on top it's actually what runs that seconds hand and it looks like it's running pretty freely here after that wind undoes and now i can put in the pallet fork and we're getting really close now to see how this thing is gonna do i was lucky and had uh another project going that i had bought one of these movements for and that's how i found that replacement wheel for the one with the bent tooth otherwise i'd have to do what i always do which is start off by going on ebay and searching a lot of times you have to just buy the whole movement and hope that the part that you need is there and then you call that a donor movement and put it in a box and see if you need parts for later and that actually is what happened here i bought that movement to fix a different watch and uh and i checked and i said hey i have that wheel so it worked out beautifully okay so now i can put some power in but as you can see it won't unwind this time and that's expected behavior that's because the pallet fork is doing its job of keeping that power at bay and what it does is it allows the power in conjunction with the escape wheel to be released in very small very specific times and that's actually what keeps this balance wheel spinning as well okay so here we go let's see if we can get this thing running again we had it running before i assume it will run again but with old watches like this you never quite do no oh it definitely wants to run and yes there we go all right and just eyeballing it looks like it's running pretty well also we had very low amplitude before it was down in the 130s 140s we're really hoping to improve that these type of watches often don't run with a super high amplitude especially because we decided to keep the original mainspring in it but still we should do better than than what we had before so now i can give it a nice wind and see what it looks like oh yeah that's coming right along now yeah that's just a beautiful sight to see let's put this thing on the time grapher and see how it's doing i'm hoping for some improved numbers and hey this is a lot better just kind of cruising through here look it's not perfect but it's well above 200 and it's within five to eight seconds a day now that is a massive improvement over what we had before and i am happy to call that job done now we just need to finish recasing the the movement and uh getting it all back together so that i can hand it back off to my friend and uh wow i'm really you know this is a interesting journey right when you do this as a hobby but you take it seriously right you've seen my videos like i'm not messing around but at the same time you know i don't have 20 years of experience and a bunch of schooling going for me either and uh you know being able to to take on a project that a working watchmaker couldn't figure out and figuring it out is pretty great and it's a really good feeling to be able to bring something like this back to life and get it into decent running order as well for for a friend so feeling really good about how this whole thing went now we can put the hands on and of course want to make sure that those get all set up right can be difficult i did have some people on a prior video a worry about radium on hands like this but these are actually just painted they're not radium hands in fact they're not luminescent at all that was not part of the spec for watches like this so the and it would have cost quite a bit more for the companies to do that so since it wasn't inspect they just didn't do it so nothing to fear as far as that goes but you know if you are looking at getting into the hobby and you do come across a watch that has radium paint luminescent paint on the hands or on the dial you do have to be very very careful it's a highly toxic substance if you've ever watched any of the videos on youtube about it you you will know what i'm talking about and there we go i can just push in the hack and the movement kicks right up so that's great and that means that we can re-case the watch and call this project all finished up and yes we're going to make sure that these case screws both get back in there since there was one just floating around somehow i'm still surprised at that uh to be honest but now we can get the the winding stem and winding crown put back into place as well and we may as well put the cover on after making sure that there's no dust or anything in there make sure that the watch goes into setting position i usually like to give it one extra little tighten down after that as well and as you can see it's still happily running right away and look how gorgeous this watch is what a great job they did with this very strict utilitarian design but it is gorgeous i also noticed that there was some light scratching on the acrylic crystal so i'm going to use some polywatch just to clean this up a little bit this is a very light abrasive it just takes off you know kind of any fine scratching or anything like that and lets you see the beautiful dial underneath a little bit better i just use it with some microfiber cloth you can use this for any of your acrylic crystals that you have on your watches and it just gives it a little bit of a luster and and lets you see inside a little bit better while really not taking off any significant material or anything like that what a gorgeous little military watch though and i am super happy that we were able to get it running and i can hand it back to my friend and i can be very proud of it thanks so much for hanging out with me for for this video i really do appreciate that you take the time to go down this watch making journey with me it's i know it's kind of a weird hobby but i've really fallen in love with it and i don't know it's kind of part of my mission when i find something that i think is really interesting has a lot of meat on the bone i like to share it with people and that's what this channel is all about so thank you so much for joining me if you want to catch up with me as well off off of youtube i have a instagram account wristwatch underscore revival for this channel and i'd love it if you'd uh follow me over there and you can say hi i post uh in between project updates sometimes and i'll post some stuff from my collection and that kind of thing as well and uh yeah we'll see you over there thanks again for hanging out we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 883,026

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Id: G5ziU2-9yOo

Length: 35min 22sec (2122 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 28 2021