Omega Vintage Pocket Watch Restoration

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 i've got this sweet omega pocket watch this watch dates to the late 30s and i got it off of ebay on a four parts only auction and i got this watch for 68 dollars but as you can see straight away it's got well a missing crown there's no there's no winding crown on the top and it looks like the stem may have just broken right off of there so that's one problem also it doesn't run at all so we've got a bit of a project on our hands and we're gonna do what we always do on this channel we're gonna do our best to bring this little mechanical wonder back to life if this is your first time watching one of my videos i want to welcome you along i'm really glad you're here and don't worry even if you're not that into watches i hope you'll find something fascinating as we dive into the case back here you know we what we do here is take a look inside oh that's pretty really pretty movement here and then we're going to figure out what's wrong with it and we're going to fix it and try to bring a little piece of history back uh oh that's not good news at all so that part right there is the balance wheel it's probably the most important part of the watch and it should not wiggle around like that when you see it able to wiggle around that much it almost for sure means that the balance staff is broken and the balance staff is think of it like the axle for the balance wheel and if the axle is broken well the wheel won't have anything to spin on and the watch won't run at all so that's something that we're going to have to look into boy we've been been here for about a minute we've already found two problems with this watch now there's always a risk you know i buy these watches off of ebay and they're advertised as non-running and the dial looks like it's actually in pretty rough shape too it has some patina let's call it on it but it also has some just outright wear with a little bit of the track missing and kind of a yellowy dingy hue to it well well we'll take a look at that in a little bit as well for now let's just take off the hands so that we can continue to disassemble the watch pocket watches or wrist watches we handle them the same and we do something to them that you don't see very often these days uh you know we're not really about repairing stuff now you know most of the time if you have a an item like a watch or any electronics think about anything like that you just get a new one right even if you take it to the place to get it repaired they often just throw the one you have away and give you a new one we're not doing that here um this is a little piece of history right i mean omega is a very prominent brand to this day in the watch space and uh i want somebody to be able to enjoy this you know you can set up a pocket watch like this on your desk sure people don't really carry him around anymore that's fine but you know you can set this up on your desk and you can hear it ticking away you get to wind it up every day and it has like kind of a soothing ritual around it with winding it up and then watching it kick up and take and keep time for you also given how big these movements are there's a couple of things to note one well going back to the kind of nostalgia history factor they're they're loud like you can actually hear them ticking so if you like that sound you can you can really get that out of it oh yeah that parts of the dial look pretty rough um but the other thing is being so big if you're interested in getting into this hobby that i've fallen in love with you know they call it horology right the study of time but you know watchmaking is the is the term for the professional watch repair watch servicing whatever you want to call it if you want to get into it a big pocket watch movement like this is a very good place to start these movements are way bigger than their wristwatch counterparts and that actually when you're learning really does make it easier to work on them and as you can see i have this really cool kind of dial holder thing that keeps it nice and suspended and of course means that it won't get damaged while i'm working on the other parts of the watch okay we can take the hour wheel off and of course i like to just inspect the parts as i take them off to see if there's any obvious signs of wear you know anything broken or whatever there's the canon pinion i use a special tool a vintage tool actually that i got off of ebay and refurbished that's kind of part of the fun of the hobby as well as if you're the type of person that likes tools like me then this hobby certainly will not let you down there are a lot of tools well the first off there's a lot of tools that you need just to get started but then even after you have kind of the basics down there's infinite tools for you to get going forward let's start by taking the balance out and normally i would say we'll take this out that's right so that it doesn't get damaged but this one as far as i can tell is already toast we'll take a close look at that in a in a minute too just to make sure that uh that it's actually what i thought it was a quick check of the pallet fork reveals that it does snap back and forth that is what we want to see so that's promising and i can even use a pin vise here to to wind up the watch what that lets me do is what we call let down the main spring the main springs wound up and it's where all the power for the watch comes from and as you're taking apart a watch you want to make sure that all that power's been let out that way when you take one little piece off it doesn't unwind the whole thing in one swift motion which can cause snapping or breaking especially on vintage watches like this where maybe the metal is a little bit fatigued all right we'll start off by removing uh the screws that hold down the ratchet wheel and the crown wheel if you look closely you'll also notice that the one on the crown wheel this one right here is actually a reverse threaded screw which means it screws backwards from where you would expect this is very common on swiss movements that's how i knew it was already before even having to try it and now we can take out the ratchet wheel all told pretty dirty in here but nothing terrible i can work with this also isn't that a gorgeous movement really just pops this is called the click and the click spring that i'm going to take off now this is actually the part of the watch that makes a sound when you wind it and with that out of the way we can take off the screws for the bridge that holds this all down this is called the barrel bridge and as you can see it's the biggest bridge on the watch and we can take off the bridge all at once and that'll give us our first view into the train of wheels at least part of them not all of them ah yeah not too bad that comes off nicely and we can remove the barrel that has the main spring in it and here's that broken stem it doesn't want to come out just yet fine we'll just leave it in for now no big deal we can remove the other bridge now though this is what they call the train wheel bridge this houses three jewels on top that act as the bearings for the train of wheels which are the the gears inside the watch if you've ever wondered what's up with those jewels by the way they're made of synthetic sapphires they're they're colored to look like rubies but rubies and sapphires are basically the same thing fundamentally and they have a hardness scale of nine that's one below diamonds which is the hardest they're very very hard and the steel uh wheels inside the pivots they call them that's like the axle that i just grabbed right there those have a hardness of about seven so the bearing surface is harder than the axle and what that means is that they don't rub off on each other and basically if they're lubricated properly they can go for nearly forever okay we've got most of the movement disassembled here as the train of wheels has already come out this is called the pallet fork bridge and you can see why that little part underneath is the pallet fork and it comes out nicely yeah things coming apart pretty well we can flip the watch over now and take apart the keyless works this is called the keyless works because pocket watches that are you know quite a bit older than this used to have an actual key like you'd have to have a little separate key that would dangle and you would put that into a hole and then that would let you wind up the watch but at some point it was invented that you could use the crown that you set the watch to also wind it but you didn't need the key anymore therefore they were keyless and that's what i'm taking apart here this is the the parts of the watch that let you wind and set the watch through that crown now the problem is one of the many issues with this watch is that it doesn't have a crown it seems to have broken off so we'll just take off the setting lever the center lever screw is actually on the other side of the movement it's that kind of tall one that's sticking out there the top and we'll just unscrew it until the setting lever falls down to the bench which there it is and now we can take out the rest so there's what's left of the stem again that was broken off when the crown got snapped off however that happened however long ago and there we go one last thing to take apart here before the movement is completely disassembled and ready for a very thorough cleaning of which it needs pretty badly is the main spring barrel so we'll take that apart and see how it looks inside oof okay that's a mess not only is there a bunch of grease and dirt but that spring does not look uniform yeah oop there we go that's called the barrel arbor as you can see it's a dirty mess so definitely going to go in the cleaning machine as well and let's take out this spring and see what's going on with it because just on a visual sense that should be a nice flat concentric circles within that spring and it it looks like there's a bunch of space and dirt and stuff and it just doesn't look right yeah and i can already tell just removing it that it doesn't feel right coming out either this is weird oh okay well there's part of it it looks like it's actually broken but it broke kind of upstream so that it would still work or maybe there's just an extra piece yeah i don't really know what's going on but do you see how that spring is sticking up like that that's not right it's supposed to be flat yeah no that's that's definitely not supposed to do that we'll we'll address that in just a little bit for now let's get everything put into the watch cleaning machine these little baskets keep all the small parts together and then the bigger parts can go in the bigger basket like this all right so there we have it everything's ready for the watch cleaning machine before we throw that in though let's take a quick look on the microscope and yep it's just as i thought the balance staff is toast that's supposed to be like a spike there and it is gone we're going to have to address that but as we put things into the watch cleaning machine here i did want to mention that i've got a patreon for this channel if you like what i'm doing here that's a great way to support me over there it's patreon.com wristwatchrevival and i particularly wanted to thank zack trevor stephen spencer ross robert ralph nico nt mitchell michael mikey mark marcus kyle kim kevin kevin jim jason jason james jack hammond jerry george franklin evan ericka dustin drew dr unks david cosmo corey colin chris chris chiseled brenton brian bryan brett brad andrew alex and adrian for their support thank you very much and i really do appreciate it take a look at the parts all laid out on the bench and uh you can see that's everything that's what makes up the movement of a watch when you look at it as a sort of destructed view and uh all we have to do is put it back together what could be so hard about that right okay well we've got other things to address besides just the reassembly and the first and most important one is going to be fixing this balance staff situation so as we looked at on the microscope the balance staff is broken this was actually very common on watches of this era because they were not shock protected they did not have a system that would allow a drop of the watch or a bang on the side of it to prevent that force from driving all the way through to the movement and then breaking off the very very delicate balance pivot which is exactly what happened on this watch and we need to replace it so first things first we'll take the balance wheel away from the balance assembly and now we need to take off the balance spring i have some special pry bars for this it's very delicate if you slip with this and bend up that blue spring you're done you got to find a new one of those and they're they're very very delicate they don't call it the hair spring for nothing so we'll set that aside for safe keeping and now i've got a special tool here that allows me to disassemble the rest of the balance so first thing that we need to take off is what they call the roller right here and just like that that's the roller that is just friction fit meaning it's just pressed on so we've got that removed but now the last part's kind of tricky so there's the roller right there it's got the jewel on it as well that we'll look at a little later when we're actually going to be uh installing the new parts but now we have to take the old balance staff off and how is it put onto the wheel it's riveted meaning it's bang the metal is banged into place and we need to undo that so i've got this tool that's really great for undoing this this outer shaft kind of holds everything in place and then i can use a hammer to just push out the old balance staff as gently as possible and with the old balance staff out that means of course that we can rivet in a new one does that sound scary to you because it sure does to me i've done this a couple of times but it is it involves hammers and as you can see the old balance staff is there with no pivots on the tips but take a look that's what it's supposed to look like with those metal pivots sticking out the tips so we need to use my staking set for this and we're going to take the new balance staff and we're going to figure out which one of these holes it fits in just fits in nope there we go that one and then i can take what's called a centering punch which is just a one of these punches that has a very sharp tip on it and that lets me rearrange this plate on the bottom and then lock it in with the wheel and that way everything is aligned perfectly then i can take our brand new balance staff and put it in the the hole that we chose before and then i can take the wheel and place it over it now that piece of metal in the middle needs to get hammered down around the edges of it and yes this is as scary as it sounds but here's how we do it i'm going to take a punch that has a rounded bottom on it and make sure that it fits correctly and i've got a wider rounded one i've got a flat one and i've got a narrower rounded one here here's the wider rounded one and i am going to take my hammer and very gently tap on it and then give it a twist until the middle part of that new balance staff starts to rivet itself into place on the new balance wheel now if you hammer this too hard the balance staff will simply split apart i mean it's a small piece of metal and you're sending quite a bit of power down through it as you can see it still hasn't really grabbed on but there is a little bit of riveting happening the thing that you have to keep in mind here as well is this rivet needs to be formed in a perfectly flat environment because if it gets riveted on crooked well then the wheel won't spin true and the watch won't run at all so this is a stressful and still relatively new territory for me like i said i've only done this a few times on watches so hold your breath with me and let's see if we get through it as you can see that rivet is starting to form now and as i pick up the wheel you can see that i've actually got a bit it's grabbed onto the edges now so now i'm going to switch over to the flat punch which i'm hoping will then flatten out that rivet pushing it towards the sides and kind of sealing it into place hey there we go the balance staff is installed and as you can see it's flat up against the wheel which is exactly what we want now first thing we'll do is just a quick test on the movement itself or on the plate and this is going to just be to make sure that it spins correctly and that everything lines up and that the staff that i got is the right one you know i ordered it online it said it was for this movement but who knows that's a good start so let's just grab an air blower and just see if this thing will spin freely that looks good wow look at it go yes that is what we wanted to see so already we've made a nice step towards getting this watch back in action but now we need to put on the parts of the watch that we had taken off so here's the the impulse jewel so we'll press that back onto place like that very gentle and now we can put the uh the spring back on as well the balance spring and again you have to be very careful because with the new pivots there you have to make sure that everything's lined up because if you push down on one of the little pivots on the top you're done it'll just break right off so this isn't quite aligned correctly there we go that's better and then once again i can simply press this onto place with my fingers i don't need to use a hammer for this now this does present a bit of an issue though because i have just pushed this spring back on kind of randomly and what we need to have happen is we need certain parts of this balance to be aligned with certain other parts and then we also need to be able to put the top part of the balance on and have that all work out together so if you take a look here do you see this triangle and you see this triangle that triangle post goes into that hole on the top part and as you can see we need to move this over to here or else it won't sit properly so what we're going to do is mark it this is where i want that stud to be aligned with right now you can see it's almost on the opposite side now how do we do this more tricky business so we take a screwdriver and put it into what we call the collet that's what actually holds the spring into place and then we very very gently turn until the stud gets lined up with the mark that i made on the rim of the balance you can see the mark it's at about 11 o'clock and i went a little too far there we go so that's much better that's much closer to how we want it and that means that we can take a look at the top part here of the balance bridge and look there's a jewel setting under here that needs to be cleaned and lubricated and we might as well do it now while we have everything apart right so we'll take off this little bottom plate i've never seen one quite like this but it's pretty self-explanatory how it works and now the balance bridge should separate into a few different parts as you can see there's the kind of pointer stick that is for regulation here and then there's the cap jewel here and then there's a whole jewel underneath it and as you can see it really needs to be cleaned there is dried on oil this is very typical for watches like this they get you know serviced and lubricated but then they sit in a drawer for 50 years and that oil dries up and when it does it becomes a very tacky dust attracting surface that is really not good for the watch and usually makes it run off so i'm going to put it in some solvent it's called one dip and let's take a look i think let's see oh see that should be clean and even after being in the one dip it needs to be manually cleaned so i'm going to take some peg wood and just scrape off that extra oil i mean that's how caked on that can get where you can put it in as you can see it's already looking better you can put it in literally in a solvent and it won't dissolve that at least not in in a shorter period of time i'm also going to take the peg wood and just go ahead and give the the pivot itself a little bit of cleaning and then put them back into the one dip solvent and after a short soak we can take them out and the solvent evaporates fairly quickly and let's take a look at this jewel now there we go see a perfectly clean flat surface way better than before now i can actually oil it i'm going to put some light viscosity oil right in the center of it and it'll kind of just suspend itself there and then i can reassemble the balance and this is a little bit tricky because you can't be sloppy with this if you miss you will displace that oil which needs to sit right above the hole and if it no longer does well then you have to redo the whole thing again anyway but i'm getting good at it and that was a pretty good shot for a first attempt now i'm going to kind of hold everything down with peg wood and then grab my screwdriver to refit this bottom plate to kind of hold everything in place there we go and the regulator arm's a little little out of whack here but i can just move it back over like that okay so now we've got the balance bridge ready for the balance wheel this is a lot of work i know like the replacing the balance staff is really no joke it's uh it requires quite a bit of very small finicky things including screwing down this little tiny screw like that and now we can put it on the watch so we're going to test a couple of things here the first one is just to make sure that it still works like that with the spring in place and with the jewel and everything that there's nothing hitting or moving so we'll just give it a quick uh test with some air beautiful that is exactly what we wanted to see out of this you can see the the wheel is spinning wonderfully but we've got a job to do here so if you look carefully between those two brass posts right there do you see that white jewel sticking down that's the impulse jewel and that needs to line up right in between those two posts when the watch is at rest meaning when there's no forces on it at all it needs to land exactly there and that's what we were lining up earlier with that post on the top and the pen and the whole rigmarole there so i'm gonna give this a couple uh blows from the the air blower and we're gonna see where it lands naturally and we're hoping that it'll land as close to input right in between those posts as we can get okay looking pretty good you can see the jewel certainly in that neighborhood letting it come to a stop naturally good hey that's pretty good we're at a little bit of an angle but check that out it's right in between and that means that we got a pretty good shot on it and that is what will create the beat error which we'll look at in a little bit when we test the watch after we get it running again now take a look at this main spring it is a total mess so i've gotten a new one for it that spring is bent it's crooked and it stands up too high and there's another problem with it i noticed when i took out the spring take a look at how low the other spring i was using was sitting in the barrel do you see how low that sits right there there's all this space up to the barrel wall the it should actually fit in there so let's see if the new spring oh i love that sound is a better fit yeah see that's how it's supposed to look where the cap can still come on but the new spring it's actually a very old spring this is a vintage spring for this watch but it has never been used before looks like it fits in there properly so with that in place we can put in the barrel arbor this grabs onto that inside hook of the spring and lets you wind it up and then we can put the cap on the barrel and i can just push down on the sides of this little tool to secure the cap into place and maybe even get a little bit of help with my fingers here and there we go we have a ready-to-go assembled barrel so we'll set that aside and i just wanted to show you this is a watch movement from a from a watch that i've worked on a few times this is an elgin a11 did you see how much smaller it is than this huge pocket watch movement this is why i recommend working on these pocket watches at first because you just have so much more space to work and to see you know with your eyes what's going on and all that kind of stuff because that other thing was a movement that's like not that much bigger than just the barrel bridge on this watch okay so now it's time to start reassembly of this watch and we'll see if we can get it running and if so how well and we're going to start off with the train of wheels this is the escape wheel first and now we're gonna put in the uh the third wheel this is the fourth wheel make sure everything's lined up and has the pivots in their jewel holes like that and now we can take the center wheel i'm going to put a little tiny bit of oil on it just so that it gets lubricated properly and we'll set it into place right there in the middle and i'm going to take just a little bit of grease to put around the edge of where the setting lever screw goes this oftentimes needs to be put into place before you put on any of the bridges on the top in this case it actually doesn't need to but i just decided to anyway i guess so first things first we'll put the barrel bridge into place and i'm just going to take a piece of peg wood to apply a little bit of light pressure to the top so that i can get everything seated correctly like that and then we can screw it down into place now we can put the train wheel bridge on which is a tricky operation all three of those pivots on the top have to go through those jewel holes on the top while staying engaged with the jewel holes on the bottom if any one of them is out you won't be able to to screw down the bridge and if you try to and when a in any one of them is out you will break the one that's out but as you can see you can even see the pivot sticking through the top of the jewels there as i finally got this plate nicely into place a quick test also shows that sure enough all the wheels are spinning freely which is exactly what you want to see nice so now we can screw this down like that and then one more quick check just to make sure that everything looks good and perfect looks beautiful now i'm going to take a little bit of medium viscosity oil here and oil the barrel arbor where it meets up with the plate and what i'm going to do is actually apply some pressure with my oiler so that the oil has a chance to flow in between the two surfaces there and i can even just give it a quick turn to make sure that the oil is distributed same thing here just a little bit of hp 1300 is the name of the oil if you're looking to get into the hobby that's the one i'm using here and then i can put on the crown wheel and again this is a screw that reverse threads and you can see also that it has three stripes on the top that's an indicator that is a reverse threaded screw not all reverse threaded screws have that but anything that does have that is a reverse threaded screw okay so we'll tighten that down and now i can put the click spring and the click in place and then the ratchet wheel will go in really curious to see if i can get this watch running again needed some fairly major surgery and a good cleaning okay so we'll get the click spring into place as well as the click there we go and just make sure that the click's working correctly before i grab the ratchet wheel the ratchet wheel is kind of interesting if you look in the center it's actually a square and that's to fit over the barrel arbor top which is also a square and then i can just screw this down to make sure that it's in place properly and with that we're getting actually fairly close to seeing if this thing will run we'll flip the movement over and concentrate on the keyless works and the motion works i told you what the keyless works were earlier but if you've never heard of the motion works that's actually the part of the watch that guides the hands themselves so that they display time properly and also it's the part of the watch that's job is to let you set the hands so now we can put the clutch wheel and the sliding clutch into place after some lubrication it's a grease that blue stuff that you see me using is a grease it's actually the highest viscosity stuff that i use this is like the heavy duty stuff if you will and now i can take the yolk and put it into place and it actually engages with the sliding clutch but i'm going to move it out of the way because i would like to put a little bit of grease on there first so that that yoke isn't just doing metal on metal whenever we use that part of the watch and here's a little bit of hp 1300 before we put on the canon pinion this is friction fit so we just have to press it down with a sturdy pair of tweezers like that and now we can put just a little bit of 1300 where the intermediate wheel and the hour wheel and the minute wheel go this is the intermediate wheel here and then the minute wheel will go next to it right there again this is how we set the watch now the yoke spring can go into place this is a spring that has a tendency to fly so i'm going to use this black stick to make sure that it does not do so okay and that looks good now the setting lever can go into place and we'll make sure to lubricate the high friction parts where the setting lever and the yoke spring and the yoke actually touch after doing that we can put on the setting lever spring which is kind of a funny looking spring it actually serves multiple purposes on a watch primarily though it's a spring for the setting lever to be able to go from the winding to the hand setting position back and forth like if you've got a watch you know when you pull out the crown and it kind of goes click and now you can set the hands and you push it back in and it goes click and now you can wind it that spring is what makes that click happen and i just need to make sure that it's engaged with the setting lever like that there we go and then i can once again put a little bit of grease in where that setting lever is going to engage with it right there okay so that looks good do a quick test put it into winding to setting lever or setting position hand setting to winding and just make sure that everything's lining up and it looks good okay so that means that we can put in the pallet fork and once we've got the pallet fork in take a deep deep breath that's when we can put in the balance and see if this thing will actually run so let's put in the pellet fork bra wait what the why is that rocking back and forth like that that should that should be flat what is going on with this thing oh it's bent i didn't even notice that when i took it out and oh no if i look at it on the microscope the jewel is cracked too it's shattered oh that sucks that means i'm gonna have to order a new one of those well that happens sometimes in watchmaking i'm gonna have to set it aside on the bench but hey why have it on while i have it on the microscope let's oil up the jewels might as well this is an exercise in restraint you're basically using such a tiny amount of oil you want it to suspend itself on the jewel between the metal pivot and the jewel itself but it's very easy to use too much oil in a situation like this and in fact ends up being kind of the default there we go that's on the center wheel this is the escape wheel you can see some of the jewels that they used back then were clear that was actually common you actually you have to change the chemical component of the jewel when you make the synthetic rubies to make them red you can also make them blue or keep them clear okay and again while we're here we might as well get the bottom capsule setting this was remember the part that we took apart on the top and we had to put it in the solvent and do all that this is the same thing it's just the bottom of it where'd that screw go uh there it is okay close call we're fine we're fine everything's okay here nothing to see so this is the bottom cap jewel setting and it needs the same treatment as the top we need to clean it lubricate it and put it back into place but as you can see it's a lot simpler because it's easier to access on the bottom of the movement than it is on the balance so a quick dip in the solvent and we'll put a little bit of lubricant on it like we did before just a dot and then we'll take it carefully flip it over very carefully oh careful if you bump the walls it'll screw up the placement of the oil and if i can gently there we go that's more like it and we can put this cap joule into place and that way we'll have cleaned and lubricated jewels on both the top and bottom of the balance which will give it the best chance to spin nice and freely and run very strong so put this back into place and now ta-da we have our new part in the mail yes it took like a month to arrive from europe but uh here it is it's here so this is the new old used but still new to us with joule intact pallet fork bridge so we can once again put the pallet back into place and here's where the nerves kick up again because really curious to see if we get this thing running or not after having replaced the balance staff and have to do all the stuff to make sure that the jewels align properly and everything like that okay that looks about right so we can go ahead and put the pellet fork bridge into place okay you can see the movement cleaned up beautifully it really is a nice looking movement okay so let's wind up the watch and what that will do is put power from the mainspring barrel all the way through those trainer wheels in the middle that we put in and down to that and that's what we want to see remember this is how it was at the beginning where when we just lightly touch the sides of the pallet it jumps over on its own and that's exactly what we want so now we have reached the moment of truth we've got the balance and we're going to put it into place and see if this watch will run oh look at that it kicked right up oh if that isn't the most beautiful thing you've ever seen oh look at it go oh you love to see it and it's even picking up some steam here as it gathers momentum we can even put a full wine in the watch you know when you wind up your watch all the way it actually produces more power than not and look at it so beautiful and you can hear it too listen oh that makes me so happy we have a running watch again now let's see how well it runs first off though we'll stop at our demagnetizer just to make sure click that's all you have to do to demagnetize it i got this vintage demagnetizer at a local watch shop pretty cool and now we can put it on the time grapher this measures how well the watch is running so the rate is the most important thing on the left and it is at hey not too bad plus 13 seconds a day decent amplitude at 276 and the beat error is half a millisecond which is not too bad at all we'll need to make some adjustments though to see how good we can get this so i'm just going to kind of let it go here and make some adjustments to regulate it ooh the amplitude's getting up a little further and look where we got it over 300 degrees of amplitude and only three seconds a day including two of those were only one second off per day and that's awesome so the movement is done it's good to go but of course we are not done with this watch because we have more work to do first thing i'm going to do is take a look at this dial now i like to have a light touch when i work on dials uh the most i'll usually do is just do like a light cleaning and that's what i'm gonna do here this dial is pretty dingy but it has kind of a cool color to it so i'm just gonna use some water and some light soft synthetic swabs here to just sort of take away maybe some of the bigger pieces of dirt or grime that have collected on it so just giving it the good once over but also i'm noticing that some parts of it are actually cleaning up nicer than others and that isn't really what i wanted and you can see there's some parts that have cleaned up and now i feel kind of compelled to clean up the whole dial and i never really want to find myself in that position this is why i try to have such a light touch as i don't want to have to do it this way but after cleaning it for quite a while this is what i came up with and it's okay um i think it looks kind of cool like it has like kind of that champagne color back to it again but i'll be honest i think if i just would have left it alone i would have been happier and that's often the case which is why i try to do so little but you can't really predict what a dial is going to do and this one just kind of needed the full cleaning i really didn't feel good about leaving it halfway so now we'll put the case components and the ultrasonic cleaning machine this is a you know a non-abrasive way to clean watch parts watch components that type of stuff and after it sat in there for a good long while we'll pull that out and have all the parts done and cleaned up and ready to go for that quite a project we've got on our hands here but i really want to get this thing looking and running awesome again because i just think it would be such a cool little piece of history now we can replace the crystal and i'm going to use my robo press and as you can see on the bottom you actually want to take a soft topped base and then on the top you want to take one of these aluminum dies and you want that to be just about the same size as the crystal that you're going to replace now this is the old crystal but same difference they're the same size and then i can move this die into place and then as you can see the ring the bezel that they're going to go into is below here's the watch crystals that i bought i always buy the size that i think it is and then one one step bigger as well just in case i'm wrong because if it's too small it won't work but if it's too big you can make it fit so we're going to start off with one of them i guess the the size that i thought it was and what's going to happen here is it goes on the post on the bottom the soft post and then i'm going to use the wheel to gently press down on it and what it's going to do is it's going to bend the sides of this crystal inwards it's a acrylic crystal so it actually is flexible a little bit and then i'm going to bring the bezel up so that it's seated within the edges of it like that and then i can just simply unwind the top and the crystal will expand into the bezel and that's it i just wanted to show you this because this is one of the things that's actually pretty easy once you get used to it and look at that a brand new crystal so that's looking good take a quick look at the rest of the case yep looks nice and shiny good to go i'm happy with that and now we can start the actual casing process so first we'll put the movement in to the main part of the case and i got a new stem and a new crown for this watch but as you can see quite easily as i put the stem in it's way too long and so in order to fix that well we're gonna have to trim the stem down so first we'll measure how much of the stem we'd like to trim looks like it's 4.4 millimeters then we'll put the stem and the crown into a pin vise so that we can remove the crown and then of course we need to mark it out and uh how many of you know what i'm going to say here measure twice cut once right if you've ever done anything like this you know that you really don't want to over cut this because then you've basically ruined it so look at where i cut it see how i've left myself some space there of the black that i marked on there that's on purpose that way i can slowly file or maybe trim it cut it down one more time or maybe even another time after that to make sure that i get it to the correct length because if you do too much then it's useless it actually won't function anymore because the crown will bump up against the case and it won't let it fully engage with the keyless works so let's put it back on and take a quick uh test just to see how it does and i'm anticipating that this one will be a little bit too long and it is just put it into place but yeah so you got a little gap there and that's what i expected so we'll take it back out again and we'll go ahead and keep trimming it down but this time we're going to trim just little tiny bits at a time because like i said we we really don't want to overdo this so a little tiny bit then get the burrs off with a file test fit it again not quite there do it one more time and then we'll test fit it yet again and see if we've got it correct hey we do that looks much much better and we can secure it into place and now we have replaced the stem and the crown so that's good to go and the only thing left to do is the final touches on getting this thing cased up we'll put the hour wheel in we've got a dial washer that just keeps the hour wheel pushed down then we can put the dial on screw it into place and this is exciting we're almost finished with this project bringing another watch back to life and hopefully somebody can enjoy this like i said it's just a cool thing to have you know you can you can throw it on your desk you can throw it on your bedside table and hear it ticking sometimes that helps people sleep we'll use some case screws here to make sure that the movement's in place and now we can put the hands back on as well these are beautiful hands by the way you can see how they're blued and you know that's actually done by taking steel like these are made out of and you put them in a bed of brass like shavings basically and then heat it up and uh when it gets to the right temperature it will actually naturally turn that blue color it's a very difficult to reproduce color it has a almost purplish tone and um yeah they they did these the good old-fashioned way when they made these watches they they heat blued them as it's called and i love it i i think it just adds such a cool contrast you can even see that it kind of changes color it turns like a purple near the uh where the hand connects really cool minute hand goes on now of course we have to make sure that these are aligned properly and also that they don't hit in anything if they touch each other if they bump up against one of the numbers or whatever that can actually just stop the whole watch so got to make sure now the seconds hand can go on just like that and the last thing to do is to uh put the bezel on the front and the case back on the back and then we are finished with this project what a fun one to work on a really cool pocket watch from a really prominent company um then and now omega's still going very very strong they sell a ton of watches they're really popular james bond wears them i mean they are just a huge brand still and it was really cool to get to restore this pocket watch from them i want to thank you once again for hanging out with me and going on this journey i hope you learned something and had some fun along the way if you want to find me on instagram i'm wristwatch underscore revival over there and i post pictures of in between project updates and some watches for my collection that kind of stuff and you can pop over and say hi thanks again for hanging out we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 979,605

Keywords:

Id: X7asVJfXgKE

Length: 52min 0sec (3120 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Matty_M99]

I love this guys videos!

[u/Splice]

That was top notch. It kind of felt like the Chef John (Food Wishes) of watches. When riveting the balance staff - "just give it the ol' tappa tappa."

[u/Dergeist_]

I often skip through a lot of artisan videos to get an idea for the overall process and see the finished product. This is 52 mins and I watched the whole thing start to finish. Great video.

[u/Chesh]

Fun fact, in addition to watches this guy is (was?) also a professional Magic: The Gathering play by play commentator. Great voice for both.

[u/tibbodeaux]

Captivated. Both the micro-photography and his presentation are amazing.

[u/ducklingugly1]

lovely work and presentation!