Property of the Military - a 1937 Longines Majetek

hello watch lovers welcome back to the channel my name is Dion and today we have this very cool old pilots watch on the bench this is a watch that was made by lone Jean for the Czech Air Force before the second World War and right off the bat I have a question for you guys you see these holes in the case what are they for let me know in the comment section the back of these swatches has this inscription in a check my yetis bravi yeah that is my best check and there is a number so does that mean this watch was made in 1977 I see the watch runs and it's in a good visual condition and on the time graph for uh dial-up is pretty fantastic to be honest for an old watch that has been serviced in a long time but as soon as we turn the watch over it starts becoming quite different so something is going on here hopefully it's just the dirt but we'll find out the watch belongs to Young and he has a couple of other watches as well so we might see his name or hear his name again later but let's not turn to opening this watch it's a pretty simple case construction there are no screws it's the clamshell type where you have a sort of a container for the movement and then you place the rest of the case on top of it the dial is in very nice condition I do suspect that the original radium Loom has been replaced because the dial is not Radioactive and honestly the hands aren't that nicely loomed and we also encounter a problem here pretty early on the second Center comes off the tube you'll see later on what caused that and how we can repair it for now let's get the movement out of the back case this is the launching 15.94 movement if anyone knows what that number stands for then let me know after unscrewing the case screws we've got the movement out these old big movements sometimes have more than two and dial screws this one has three for instance and with the dial off we see this lovely and golden longine movement we're putting the hands on a dial in this neat little storage box so that they're safely stored the hour wheel is somehow a bit stuck it does come off in the end and then we can turn to the train side of things and then let down the power on the mainspring the movement looks to be in very nice condition it hasn't been worked on that much which is quite rare of course for an old watch like this from what I could find from the model number Etc it's from 1937. these watches actually are quite valuable nowadays and interestingly there were also are we launched quite recently by London the relaunched our models stay very close to the original and the price is also quite close actually I think they started around three and a half thousand Francs and a good conditional original one will be a bit more than that but one that is a little bit more worn you can probably get for around that price just checking that the train is fine that there are no uh big in shakes in the train or side shakes and then we can simply disassemble everything the layout of the mechanism is quite typical for pocket watch movements from this era around 100 years ago quite a few Bridges and corks earlier and which movements were kind of miniaturized clock movements with a full plate or a three-quarter plate on top on this layout with a lot of individual Bridges and were popularized by a watchmaker called John Antoine Le pin so you can sometimes hear the pin movement style or an open layout and of course facilitates individual repairs much better taking off the wheels will then come down to the fourth wheel which has the second sand attached to it and you might remember that the tube for the second sand came off so it's still stuck on the extended pivot on the other side of the movement so to get that off I used the pinwise I'm going to look at this tube and the Hand quite a lot of detail a little bit later the key list works on this watch is actually quite interesting quite different from most watches it does have the stem set and wind so it is kind of the modern way of doing that has this really really tall or thick setting lever we're going to see how that works when we reassemble it but for now let's just get all the parts off and we can Peg the jewel holes and get everything ready for the cleaning machine so it by the way seems that the heat wave here in Europe is now over at least for the time being we've been experiencing uh high 30s temperatures for quite a while now and that is much harder than it should be and much harder than comfortable I would say I've been kind of feeling like a vampire every time I go out it's like I'm afraid to just being burnt crisp in the Sun it burns it burns yeah that was my best impression of an English actor playing a Romanian vampire not that good I know so we have the same under bridge winding Arrangement as we've seen in a few other watches lately that is a good way to do it in a lot of ways it does reduce the wear on the bridge from the barrel Arbor and also knowing the lighting isn't all that great in this footage here I was disassembling this quite late at night so that probably has something to do with it oh man I just got a terrible thought maybe my long fingernails and pension for a working late isn't actually just due to not cutting my fingernails and working late maybe I'm turning into vampire and again I never really liked blood pudding so anyway we are getting the main spring out we saw that the amplitude on the watch was very good so we do think we can use the mainspring again even though it does turn out to be of the old type the old typing uh relatively simple spiral or a newer main Springs has an S shape the S shape does help the mainspring maintain a flatter curve of power delivery which is of course preferable so that your watch will run at about the same rate all until it stops all right with the pivots cleaned we have the movement Parts laid out and we can put them in the cleaning machine this one also uh give a warm thanks to my members both on YouTube and on patreon we have a great Community already we're using a Discord server to discuss projects helping each other out and so forth members also get access to exclusive videos which focus on common repairs ways to do things how to think and so forth so if that sounds interesting then check out the join button below or go to patreon.com at this URL all right with a movement on a slow boil in the cleaning machine Let's then look at the case the young wants to keep the strap as it is in this case has fixed logs which means that I cannot get the straps off without cutting them off the way they are made so we're going to clean the top case just very simply and then you're going to use the ultrasonic for the bottom case and a friendly warning that the ultrasonic sound isn't all that Pleasant even though a commenter said it reminded of the sound of crickets there must be some monster crickets man so we got the movement Parts back from the cleaning machine first thing we're going to do is lubricate the Capstone on the balance these old movements and do not have shock settings so it's not so easy to lubricate the Capstone we have to take it off by unscrewing from the underside interestingly Inca block had actually introduced their shock setting system at this point but it was far from mainstream so it is quite rare to find shock settings on the watch from before the war or from the years after the war there was quite a lot of Gunk on both the capstones not sure if that has anything to do with the strange behavior in different positions but it absolutely might so I cleaned the capstones a few times and with the Capstone scrupulously clean we can then put them into a fix or drop that's a liquid to help lubrication stay better in place it contains steric acid which you might remember from candles in the Norwegian we call them sterine candles so it's this little bit greasy kind of thing that will also residue on the pivots unless we clean them so that's what I'm doing here and then we can lubricate the capstones I'm going to start with the one in the balance again steady these are quite small things of course you could also lubricate this one from the underside here but why keep it simple one way to see that this movement has not been worked on so much is that these screws on the underside of the are not chewed up well sorry very commonly chewed up because people don't use the proper screwdrivers this ones look almost new so that's great and then we can repeat the oiling on the other side the Capstone there and then we should be able to see if the balance wants to oscillate freely one word of caution for this type of movement which has a very big thick plates and they very often have a very tight and thick steady pins which might make the car care for instance difficult to get in place I'll be very gentle if you press it on like I'm doing now we want to make sure that the pivot doesn't get caught in between something and breaks off and that looks just fine so then we can get on with the rest of this as a note that we're going to reuse the main spring I wanted to show you how to clean the mainspring and manually and also then to put it into the barrel manually for cleaning it I simply use some watch tissue which are then dip in cleaning solution could be alcohol or essence of Renata as I use and then you simply drag the image spring through that a couple of times putting the mainspring into the barrel by hand is not ideal sometimes you have to do that this main spring for instance is not really let's say standard anymore so finding a new one would be difficult and I don't have a mainspring Winder that fits it anyway so when I'm doing this by hand we want to be as careful as possible with the bending or kinking the mainspring obviously we also want to use cuts on both hands for this because especially old main spring this one isn't that old but older main Springs made of steel would be prone to rusting so we got the mainspring into the barrel that's the first step of course and it looks like we managed to get it in without making too much of a distortion to it of course the proof is in the taste of the pudding so we'll see a little bit later how it turns out on the time graph for now all systems go we almost lubricate where there is a friction point in a mechanical watch we certainly don't want it over lubricate but uh tiny little bead of oil on the friction point will help so here for instance where the crown wheel rotates where the click rotates put a little tiny bit of oil there one common discussion is the cost of things if you work on watches so let's say as a hobbyist if you want to buy the necessary lubricants for instance a little tiny vial of lubricant let's say two milliliters or five milliliters might cost 50 or euros which is you know pretty steep so probably more than its weight in gold but you won't pretty much ever be able to finish a bottle so in that case it's actually not that expensive maybe a lot of money but it's not expensive that was actually the first thing I was taught to do back in the very early days of my life when I was a telephone sales person for the Norwegian Yellow Pages if someone reacted to the price I would ask is it expensive or is it a lot of money because something that is expensive just doesn't have the value that you pay for it but something that costs a lot of money might have great value all right so we're putting the train back together let's watch as a simple and straightforward train quite unlike the previous watch we did on the channel then rocketta 2209 but it's a beautiful old movement you won't see a quite similar layout in more modern watches as well but let's say iconic movements like the IWC 89 for instance and when designing a movement then it's absolutely a virtue to keep it simple of course San London has not always been known for that worked in quite a few old movements that are a bit over engineered but not this one and of course longine has always been known for a great quality they were absolutely a leading brand back in the old days back before the Court's crisis one of my favorite brands for sure I think vintage longine is really some of the best watches you can find and I like to think they are finding their Mojo again that's not just the Swatch group will allow them that is and that's a big discussion let me know what your favorite vintage brand is there were so many to choose from back in the day I remember my very first watch was called Uranus after the planet and probably a cheap pin palette watch press they remember that watch kind of loved it got it when I was six years old I think not a brand I would find anywhere today but for a six-year-old boy that was a great thing all right we're back on the dial side I'm gonna put together the keyless works as mentioned this watch has a bit of an interesting way of using the setting lever and the setting never spring the setting lyrics uh very tall so it actually engages on two different levels with the Yoke and the setting Every Spring putting in the yolk here the yolk is of course pushed out by the setting lever when we pull the crown out and yes it is reverse threaded and then the setting never spring comes in from the other side of the movement and then over lace the yoke and then engages with a setting of a spring on top of the oak so certainly a solid way of doing it not very common to see this but uh very cool given the thickness of these parts there will be a lot of friction when we pull the crown out so we have to make sure we lubricate well there again not too much so we're going to remove any residue with the erotico the wheels are then held down by this little plate which is beautifully finished nice bevel simple brushing but still looks very nice and undamaged pretty much entirely so yeah not a lot of hands having worked on this watch before I didn't mention it before but this beautiful Golden Palace Fork it's really something to behold and even though the movement doesn't have let's say really high grade finishing it is a very beautiful movement if you like gold that is all right with the palette for again we're gonna lubricate one of the pellet Stones so that will spread over to the Escape real teeth as you might imagine this is a low Beat Movement meaning it takes and talks five times every second which is still quite fast if you ask me but uh it does mean that we can lubricate this exit pellet Stone here the Red Jewel with an oil instead of a grease because with fast repeating movements the oil could more rapidly be a sort of flung off if you will all right with the escapement lubricated we kind of give it a little bit more of a wine to the watch and then see if we can get it up and running gently place the lower pivot into the lower pivot hole of the balance and there it goes again we're going to be very cautious when we press down on this it is very tight I don't want to break the pivot and uh of course I've never done that as just um read in a book that the friend had done all right before we put the watch on the time grapher let's oil all the different uh Jewel holes except for the pallet Fort that is um the watch performs kind of happy to see that just a tiny little bit of Regulation I needed but that's really Testament to the quality of London really really good so with that we can put the arrow in and then the dial enhance the dial has this black paint of course these dials were made to be legible not beautiful per se to have this big numerals pretty big hands there are a few marks in the dial of course we see that scratch close to the three o'clock position there but that's to be expected and no there's no simple way of doing anything about those things you would have to redo the entire dial and it would be a terrible shame for an old watch like this no we have the hour minute hands so we need to put on the second set so let's get back to our problem this is the tube somehow it's like severely indented so I'm suspecting someone put the wrong tube on and then just squeezed it to make it stick on the second hand pivot so I'm using a replacement tube the first simply press it into the hole in the hand and then we have to rivet it a little bit so I'm using the staking tool for that first find the correct hole and then we Center the hold ideally you would want a dome spreading stake but this hand is just way too small for that so I'm simply using a pointed stick it should spread the top of the hand tube a little bit and then we're using a flat stake afterwards to press it down I'm not hammering at all here I'm just using my fingertips but as you probably know watchmakers are extremely strong after all we do lift metal every day all the time so we have to be very gentle when we apply Force to make sure that the hand tube fits the pivot with an first tested of course and was a little bit too tight and get them fit the hand into this holder and then we're going to use these approaches to open the tube a little bit when I say a little bit I mean a little tiny bit after the cutting brush but then you set a smoothing brooch to make the hole a little bit smoother one thing to be a very conscious of when we're doing these things is that we can remove metal but we cannot put it back we do train a little bit of reaming and then we test the hand and tighten a little bit more and then test and so forth but in the end we got there so we can put the seconds hand back on and then we need to make sure that the hour hand does not rub on the seconds hand which should be okay all right and then we can case the movement to do that we simply take out the stem and then Place movement into this holder this ring so this is the one we screw the movement tightly onto and then we'll place this one inside the clamshell pack now one thing someone might have been curious about so far is how come there are no gaskets and uh what were those holes in the case for well this is uh Pilot's watch and uh up in the sky there isn't that much water unless you count clouds obviously but there's very little chance of a watch becoming really wet inside a plane what there is a chance of if that the air pressure is going to be too high so those holes are simply equalize the pressure from inside the watch to the outside of the watch inside the cabin and if you figure that out then Kudos it's not an easy thing to come up with all by yourself so I might have said it a couple of times already but the last thing or pretty much the last thing at least is to take up some of the scratches in a crystal so you're seeing a few different grits of wet and dry paper for that and then we'll finish it off with some Polo watch yeah that deep size the reflection of what is called the monotonous and repetitive work in the HR circles sitting there and rubbing that back and forth for two minutes is indeed repetitive but it does help the crystal looks a bit better and then we can put the watch case back together as well the bezel can be rotated to use for instance GMT or to set some other times so we set it to 12 now before we are seeing the watch on the wrist just want to remind everyone that that vintagewoodservices.eu you'll always find more than 100 beautiful watches and as a YouTube subscriber you can use this color checkout for 10 tough and there we have it a wonderful 1937 longinek my attic actually just means property in check and then inscription on the back says property of the military so it's uh not more exotic than that but it is a really cool watch hope you enjoyed this video if you did then clicking like And subscribe will really help also check out the membership options I'll be back with another video shortly then Tata

Channel: Vintage Watch Services

Views: 27,438

Keywords: vintage watches, watch repair, watch servicing, mechanical watch, old watch, vintage watch, horology, watchmaker, watch services, watch restoration, watchmaking, old watches, oddly satisfying, relaxing video, legendary watches, mesmerizing videos, wristwatch revival, nekkid watchmaker, red dead restoration, Longines Majetek, Longines 15.94, watch hand repair, majetek vojenske spravy, repairing a watch hand, watch second hand repair, watch seconds hand repair, watch review

Id: nMdJQPQNq7c

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023