PART 1: IS IT EVEN WORTH SAVING? DESTROYED citizen watch restoration tutorial repair polishing ASMR

greetings my fellow earthlings all over the world welcome to the channel and thank you for joining me on this episode where we try and save another watch from going in the bin and here's what's coming up in this episode now i have been working on a couple of projects for you guys which i've been filming however i've hit a brick wall on both of them due to parts both of these projects that i have been working on require parts which are obsolete and not something that i can just buy off the shelf so now it's just the case of me hunting the globe to see if i can find these parts to complete these projects and so i thought to myself my viewers must be craving another video so what else can i do in the meantime now i could have filmed something from my day-to-day service and repair work in the workshop but that would have been too ordinary too chronic too sane for you guys and i kind of know what my viewers want to see now you guys want to see something that's been severely punished and beaten within an inch of its life brought back from the dead we all love to see drastic extreme before and afters and sadly i don't have any legendary watches with legendary movements at the moment in such a severe condition i do however have this watch from the legendary citizen watch co which was on its way to the bin but then i had a look inside it and i thought i have to film this now a quick warning if any of you are eating your dinner right now then you might want to watch this later good lord that was my initial reaction in the background to discovering all this delicious arm cheese but take a look at these beautiful autumnal colors beautiful i mean look at this poor thing i should open up some sort of charitable organization or some sort of foundation like the rspca but instead of the rspca it should be the rspcw the royal society for prevention of cruelty against watches i mean all this thing wanted to do was sit on somebody's wrist happily and just tell the time but instead it's been drowned and beaten and abused so while trying to take out the stem it's actually snapped in half and half of it stuck inside the movement and half of it stuck on the crown now the hands were all attached but while i was grappling with the case back they all decided to abandon their posts we just want to go around in circles and point out numbers we don't deserve all this abuse salty water and arm cheese come on boys we're leaving this post oh no i'm dust go without me and it kind of was my fault a little bit while i was grappling with the case back before filming i may have been a bit too vigorous and this vigor may have caused a small crack on the glass i mean talk about kicking a dog while he's down i should report myself to the rspcw now there are a number of ways that the water could have got into this watch and i'd like to point some of these out so that it may help you guys in the future to prevent a similar situation now the crystal on this watch was pretty badly damaged there were tiny chips on the edges which had gone all the way through so the water could have gone in through there the other ways that the water could have gone in are through the chronograph pushers or the crown or the case back and now that i've removed this inner chapter ring you can see that the water has damaged the paintwork on it and so i'll just continue to disassemble the watch to see if there is something that we can salvage but it's not looking too promising at the moment and in the rspca if an animal is too badly wounded or it's suffering then they will put it down and it may be something we have to consider with this watch we may just have to harvest its organs in order to save another watch and now you're looking at the duration bar on this video and thinking hold on a minute there's a fair way to go surely he doesn't throw it in the bin well you just have to wait and see that solar panel is toast that's never charging anything and the dial is very stained and there is some corrosion but we may be able to salvage the dial it's like an exfoliating skin peel at least we can salvage this plastic case ring yay now since this watch doesn't have a mechanical movement for me to service an oil i thought i'd pay particular attention to the restoration of the case and bracelet and provide some hints and tips on how to look after your bracelet correctly let's inspect and enjoy some more arm cheese so i'm going to remove this bezel which is also held in by a rubber o-ring or gasket and i'll also inspect it to make sure the water didn't enter through this part of the watch and upon closer inspection i can see that the o-ring is okay and most of those corrosion stains seem to be around that glass casket so i would imagine the water actually entered through the small chip in the glass the chronograph pushers are very stiff i can hardly push them in this may be due to a buildup of dirt and grime or there may be a deeper underlying issue but we will remove them to investigate further and also we need to remove them in order to finish the case off properly mmm delicious more arm cheese so let's have a closer look at this case just to see how we will approach it and as you can see there are parts where there is a mirrored polished finish and other parts have a satin brushed finish and so we will try and keep to the original factory finish i have also inspected the areas around the crown and the chronograph pushers and there doesn't seem to be any staining around these areas so i can assume that these parts did not fail causing the ingress of water so i'm just going to remove these chronograph pushes which are held in by a couple of circlips c-clips whatever you want to call them yeah you better run so the chronograph pusher is water sealed using this metal washer and two rubber o-rings and here i'm just gently removing them like removing ear wax from your kids ear and here's another tip for you if you need to use your chronograph function for water-based activities then always use the chronograph pushers while you're out of the water if you push the chronograph pusher underwater it could cause a temporary break in the seals allowing water to get inside the case there are some watches out there which have a magnetic system so that the seal is never broken therefore you can actually use the chronograph pushers whilst you're submerged in the water so now i'm just gonna see if we can rescue this crown so i'm just gonna use this pin vise to gently unwind the stem out of the crown now we have to be very careful here as the stem is almost dust so if you feel too much resistance then abandoned the plant and soaked the stem and crown in some sort of acetone solution to loosen any kind of adhesive that may have been used but on this occasion it came off quite easily and i think we can save the crown the crown is another area where water can accidentally enter if the o-rings are damaged or if the crown has been left out after adjusting the time or if it has not been screwed back in as some watches have screwed down crowns now as with the case we will also try and apply the original factory finish to the bracelet as well apart from the poor cosmetic condition of the bracelet you can also see that it is quite stretched and there is a lot of play within the links and as i mentioned earlier i will try and provide a few tips and hints on how to avoid this oh dear as you can hear from the background the arm cheese is not agreeing with me and so as i was saying the reason why these bracelets or links become stretched or have a lot of play in them are down to a few reasons one of those reasons is when you wear the watch quite loosely on your wrist therefore allowing a lot of room for the watch to move around and this constant movement of the bracelet causes a lot of wear on the pins and the holes and if the bracelet was pulled with some force it could also cause the pins to bend thus stretching out the links even further another reason is due to buildup of dirt grime and grit inside the links thus grinding down the pins and holes so what i'll try and do is dismantle as much of this bracelet as i can and inspect the pins and if they are bent i will replace them with new ones some of the pins are removable and these can easily be pushed out while the other links it's not so straightforward so as i remove as many of the links as possible i'm inspecting them and all the pins seem quite nice and straight it's just the holes in the links which seem to have enlarged due to wear now these links are not solid stainless steel links they're actually folded links so small sheets of stainless steel have been folded in order to create this link and this is also a factor in the excessive wear to the links and there are ways to repair these bracelets however it's not something i'll be covering in this video and while i'm on the subject of cost effectiveness a lot of you in the comments have asked me in the previous videos whether it's cost effective to restore a watch like this and the simple answer is no you can buy this particular piece on the second hand market for about 80 90 pound and its original retail price would have been less than 200 pound so it is not cost effective to have it sent off and to have it repaired hence why i create these videos so that it may encourage you guys to try and attempt it at home yourself and so repairing the bracelet and removing all the play may be a bit too much for this project so i'll have a quick rummage through my box of abandoned citizens and also my stash of organs that i harvested from previous watches to see if i can find something uh to complete this project some of these watches have had a very tough past and have been neglected and abandoned but i try to find them a good home in my plastic tub and put them to good use and as i mentioned earlier about the cost effectiveness this is probably the most cost effective way to repair a really badly damaged watch as ordering parts from the manufacturer can get quite expensive many of these watches have interchangeable parts and i don't expect you guys to have a huge pile of parts at home but if you do have a watch that you really love and you have damaged it but it's not cost effective then it may be a good idea to find a similar watch on the internet for parts so as you can see here i have found a similar bezel and although we don't require another bezel we could do with a better inner capturing now i've decided to use this second bezel that i've just found as it has a bit more damage than the other one and therefore making it a bit more interesting for us to finish it and polish it so i'll spend a little bit of time on trying to clean this dial up to see how it looks and whether we can use it now the dial is predominantly plastic so there isn't actually any rust on there it's just stains that have occurred from the rest of the watch so we'll gently try and remove as much as we can being very careful when it comes to the print and the numbers on the dial as these could easily come off the stains are proven to be very stubborn so i'm not too happy with the dial after the cleaning so i'll see if i can dismantle it a bit further and once i have split the dial in two i can give it a further clean to see if i can get it any better now i've had to turn off the background sound here as my ultrasonic machine was on in the background which causes a bit of a racket and some of you have mentioned that you don't like the video when it goes totally silent and to feel that eerie silence i could hum or sing to you guys but you don't want to hear the sound of a cat being strangled do you [Music] so much somebody please call the rspca there is a cat being strangled somewhere i think this eerie silence is much more preferable and that was the sound of the ultrasonic machine so i've had all the parts in the ultrasonic machine just to remove all that dirt and grime and arm cheese so that i can inspect it before polishing and you don't want all that dirt and grime to contaminate your polishing maps now that i have everything cleaned and i have dismantled the bracelet i can now show you the cause of the play in the bracelet now the split pins or cotter pins used in this bracelet are actually fine but it's the hole in the center of the links that has increased in diameter due to wear and tear so we can address this by using bigger pins but if you're going to use bigger pins then you will have to widen the holes on the end of the links you can also try and experiment with the tube and pin system or you can even try and experiment with some spring bars which i'll show you in a second so you can see how tightly the spring bar fits into the hole and this will obviously reduce the play so you can see there is a big difference between this one link where i change the pin and the rest of the bracelet so i've reassembled the bracelet and we will try and achieve the original factory polish which is um just mirror polished on that section i'm just pointing at and everything else is brushed finished the bezel will be completely mirror polished and the case has sections which are mirror polished as in the sides and parts of the lugs are brushed finished the clasp is also brushed but there are a couple of accents on the side which are mirror polished so we need a movement to finish this project and during my rummaging i have found one and that was put away and labeled with a few issues okay so i don't know if you guys can see but at some point somebody put this stem most likely through here and it ended up going all the way through here you can see it's bent here and this ended up all the way here and there is a lot of debris ground up bits of metal which you can probably just see there and so because of this incorrect installation of the stem it's damaged the keyless works somewhere so i'll just put on a stem for now just to try it out right so now i'm going to test this and see what the actual problem is right so we can you can see the our wheel is turning so that part of it works and then we'll see if the date change is over okay so the date change is over in normal time setting mode however in quick set mode you can see it's not changing the date over so i would imagine when the stem went in through the wrong way it caused some damage to the to the quick set date corrector here so we'll just remove that and investigate a little bit further okay so you have these three screws [Music] that's number two and we have another one just there okay so now we can remove this cover plate here and remove the date ring now we can see the damage caused by the incorrect stem installation as you can see here the teeth somebody smashed the teeth in so we need a good dentist or a new date disc and not only that but you can actually see where the stem is supposed to go in and where the actual stem went in incorrectly and just took a big gush out of this part here and it's we'll just clean up this bit here the date corrector wheel yeah it must be okay so we'll just clean all this up here and just investigate a little bit further okay that needs a bit more cleaning we have a replacement date disk as you can see this one is pretty badly busted up you can see from the underside we flashed up so this section that was pushed um sort of upwards by the stem i've tried to flatten that out to its original shape and so now we'll try and put this disk back on you should be able to see there is a small post just there where the date corrector wheel will sit okay that's the spring in and we just tuck it underneath this rim here okay i'm just going to try and engage that spring there you go and now you can put the cover plate on so we seem to have resolved the quick set issue now i've been collecting these solar panels in the hope of having enough one day to put on my roof to generate some free electricity for the hamster's wheel but since i'm still short by a few hundred thousand me taking one out of the pile won't make much of a difference now as for the dials we have this old one that we could use we have this one here which would also fit but obviously it's not the same correct model this one also has some damage to it as you can see here or we can use a new dial now you can have loads of hands here which i'm sure i can pick out for this particular project and i have got a couple of sets here for this particular model now at this point as i'm installing the seconds hand the seconds hand should start working immediately even without the capacitor or rechargeable cell as the solar panel should be supplying continuous amounts of energy to the movement even without the rechargeable cell and the reason why it wasn't working is because i left out one of the connecting springs so then i had to remove the hands and the dial and the solar panel all over again and reinstall it with the spring and i'll just demonstrate here by installing the seconds hand first to show you that even with the small amount of daylight the movement will start working even without the rechargeable cell it doesn't matter if the chronograph hands are not installed completely bank on zero they can be repositioned afterwards using the pushes you

Channel: Nekkid Watchmaker

Views: 235,230

Rating: 4.8635483 out of 5

Keywords: watch restoration, citizien watch restoration, citizen eco drive repair, water damaged watch repair, how to repair watch, online education, online learning, how to become a watchmaker, learn english, how to speak british english, how to start your own watch business, how to make money online selling watch, start watch repair business, asmr, asmr videos, funny videos, inspirational videos, how to change profession, how to learn new skills, how to retrain yourself

Id: HMY3RYZ8l2c

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020