Radioactive, not running... is this watch even worth saving?

radiation it is all around us but around some of us more than others and yes it can drive you barking mad well truth be told those dogs bark like crazy anyway and first of all my humble thanks to sir david murrow for leading us into this video we are looking at vintage zenith sporto with a radium loomed dial enhanced and we'll be talking quite a lot about radioactivity and radiation in this video first of all we can see that the case has never been polished it looks very nice it does have a few traces of its previous owners in the form of some uh dna so we'll have to clean that up see the original brushing on the case back is still there the dial enhance unsafe so we're going to pull out equipment to shield ourselves and what you hear in the background is a fume extractor that i use uh when working on things that aren't so good for my health and radium is one of those things the setup i use you can see here i try to make sure that this fume extractor basically sucks up all the gas that develops under the crystal on radium watches and also when they lose dust or residue from from the loom and as you might see as well i also wear a gas mask for this once we get all the hands off we're going to put them aside i'm going to deal with those later and we're also going to blow off with pressured air and the residue that's still on the dial before we can remove it now before i'm getting into this watch i wanted to give a very heartfelt uh thanks to all my subscribers we recently reached 10 000 while i was out with kovet but that is just very humbling and thank you so much i suppose there is actually a market for bad dad jokes followed by the worst ones the movement is the zenith one two six and as was uh customary back then and zenith gold plated their movements it's actually a pretty nifty uh thing to do because uh it's not very highly finished otherwise it looks great but it does have some issues we see the balance doesn't oscillate i have to see why that is and it's actually stuck in the bottom pivot so we gently ease it out and it looks alright so we'll have to look at the pivot and the pivot hole obviously the movement is [Music] quite straightforward it's just a three-hand movement so no date no other complications but we see a lot of things are stuck so it's been quite a while since anyone has worked on this watch and there's actually quite a lot of old oil and grease underneath some of these parts as well this is a 15 joule movement and what that in reality means is that the center wheel is not jeweled so it runs in the metal so we saw there's some play in the barrel and there's also some play in the center wheel bearings so we're gonna have to address that as well and we see there's quite a lot of old oil and gunk in these various jewels which makes the wheels stick inside the holes so we're gonna dry off some of that old grease but there's more where it came from and we have seen worse haven't we while we're doing this let's uh turn to the main subject of this video which is radioactivity or radiation radiation are the particles that basically are emitted during a radioactive process so anything that is radioactive will give radiation and it's generally in three different types you have the alpha beta and gamma and in these covid times people are more familiar with the greek alphabet than ever before i think but that's basically abc in the greek alphabet now of these three the alpha is the most dangerous one but the particles from alpha are basically so big that our skin for instance and clothes and so forth will protect us so it will not penetrate our skin if we somehow ingest radioactive material however we might literally be in for a world of pain and in watchmaking of course the stories of the radium girls it's pretty famous and well known but it was actually quite common during the industrial revolution that workers were subjected to dangerous radiation what you see in this picture here for instance is a so-called fosse jaw from a match matchstick worker that used phosphorus for the matches and when they get that vapor into their lungs and in their mouths you get alpha particles in the jaws that destroy the teeth and the jaws and that's the same thing that happened to the radium girls that worked on luminescent dials and hands the radium girl stories for us interested in watches probably the most famous one but it's also important to note that this happened in the late 1920s and radium was actually still permitted to use in watches until the mid-1950s so it's worth noting that after the factory owners were forced to start implementing proper working methods there were no more severe accidents and no more obvious deaths from radium loomed dials and hats now while i'm talking about that we managed to take apart the whole movement so we're going to put that into a cleaning machine i also wanted to show a little bit more of the details of the cleaning machine how it works for those so inclined the machine i have basically oscillates the basket very fast short distance first through a cleaning solution then rinsing solution and it spins off the solutions in the meantime all right let's also have a look at the case should we reuse this spring bar probably not let's get most of the dna of the case case back looks um pretty good we just need to clean it the bezel has some dirt there and uh pretty banged up crystals so let's replace that as well now getting back to our discussion on the dangers of radiation and radium dials in that regard the real danger of radium dial watches is for the watchmaker it's for the person who opens the watch up you might ingest dust particles or radon gas from under the dial there is of course some radiation if you wear the watch but that radiation is in general not that bad but let's look at some numbers while we enjoy this symphony of ultrasonic when talking about radiation there are first of a few different units that are in use and they're somewhat interchangeable but the most important one is the sievert the sievert is actually a really big unit one sievert will be very dangerous to you it will probably make you and develop cancer and you're gonna have no splits and that kind of thing 10 sieverts is a death sentence so with that in mind it should be logical that we don't measure radiation in sieverts we measure it in micro sieverts normally or even melee millisieverts so looking back at the initial reading that was about 4.7 micro sievert per hour that translates into 41 102 microsievert per year or 41.1 millisievert per year we're gonna see uh shortly how much of that was in these uh hands that we just took the limb out of but we're gonna gently fold the paper and we're gonna throw away that paper and of course the finger cuts as well and the toothpick i used we're not gonna use that toothpick for tooth picking again we're also gonna gently brush off the rust on these hands and we're gonna re-lube them of course not with radian now getting back to radiation levels and what is safe for you what you can expect and so forth this is actually a little bit of a developing subject in general you will read or be told that about 10 millisieverts per year is what should be acceptable for any person we are living on a rock that floats through space and is bombarded by radiation every day that was the background radiation that you saw initially before i even put the watch close to the geiger counter so there's always some radiation hitting us and that's fine that's just part of life what is uh funny or perhaps not funny actually is that the term radiation worker and mind you these are normal people radiation workers can be subjected to higher levels and uh the levels for the radiation workers range from about 20 millisievert per year to a hundred the lower end of this uh the 20 millisievert per year is considered very safe and if you remember the calculation we just did this watch would have about 40 millisieverts per year so twice that and just a note as well there is another unit called rem also big unit so 100 milligram is the same as one millisievert while we've been talking about that we have gotten to loom the hands and we're putting some strong coffee on top to make sure they don't stand out too much against the old dial we're not going to take the radium off the dial and we'll see why in a short while that can be done but it's in general not necessary so for now let's leave the radiation discussion uh we'll get back to it towards the end of the video but let's put this baby back together first remember the balance didn't oscillate because of all dirt but it looks pretty okay now before we're putting the escape wheel uh and also the palm fork in we're going to treat them with a epilom fixer drop as the product we use is called we're soaking the escape wheel and you can also soak the capstones for instance and then we're gonna just dip the pallet stones into the fixer drop and then we're going to clean the pivots of both of them these old watches typically with small seconds then have an extended pivot on the fourth wheel so we have to make sure we put that one in and uh if you remember there were some problems in the train so we're just gonna check that first and it runs freely so that's good to see the two bigger problems however was that this bridge is a bit worn so we're gonna have to fix that first for the barrel and then for the center wheel so the way we fix that is by making the holes smaller and to make the hole smaller we basically use two domed pieces of metal one punch and one stick and then we let hell reign over that piece of metal like it's that boss you never liked he was treating you like or your husband or your wife or your pet or those pesky dogs that never stop barking regardless what you do well actually the hammer is kind of small and made of plastic anyway uh make it so that the hole is a little bit too small and then we open it again with a smoothing brooch important to use the smoothing brooch there also are cutting brooches but they would be too rough so with a smoothing broach you basically compress the holes so it also becomes a little bit stronger as a bearing might have to do that a couple of times before it fits but then the slack has been taken out and then we repeat the same process for the center hole just with the smaller domed metal for the stake and the punch or just take an angle rather and yes maybe we should have put the center wheel in before we put the other wheels in but uh that's how we did it same procedure we open the hole up a little bit again with the smoothing brooch till it's the right size and you probably have to do that a couple of times as well so i'm not showing that again but it's the same process of course newer movements pretty much always have 17 joules or more and those two extra joules are then for the center wheel all right we can turn the watch over put on the canon pinion and then the keyless works quite straightforward on this watch still it's a very good movement capable of giving very good results over a very long time i'm not sure how long since the mainspring broke and hence the watch stopped but it might very well be that which stopped before that even given the very congealed lubrication but the mainspring was not the original one so the watch has been serviced before but definitely not many times there is one marking inside the case pack and there have been some questions uh in the comments about uh exactly that practice and uh in the old days uh it was customary for watchmakers to leave a mark or make a mark rather inside the case pack so typically initials and a date showing who had service to watch that is obviously something that's completely unnecessary nowadays and if someone does that you should basically be very unhappy it's completely unnecessary it's a deliberate damage of a watch you can ask yourself would you do that any other place would you uh scribble things on the dial to say that you serviced the watch no you wouldn't so why should it be more acceptable to do so in the case back exactly so that's a practice that really should be shunned and i honestly don't think many people do that anymore either thankfully all right the last uh few parts put on the ratchet wheel and as we're tightening it we give it a little bit extra so we can also see that the wheels spin freely you will see in quite a few zenith watches that they use these shims it's basically washers or shims to adjust the spacing it's not really a pretty thing but that's how it is and with the pellet fork in place we're going to give it a little wind and then we can oil the pallet stones what we do is we use oil on this old low beat movements and we actually only uh oiled the exit pallet stone and then we rub it along on the escape wheel teeth there are 15 teeth on these old movements so if you oil every five tooth then we hold it three times and that should suffice and it starts up very happily it's always nice to see let's then oil the pivots we're going to use d5 or hp 1300 on the center wheel and the third wheel and then maybe it's 9 to 10 on the rest before we put the watch on the time grapher we always de-magnetize it and then let's see how it runs after a little bit of adjustment we see the watch runs absolutely nice a little bit higher amplitude than we actually like with a vintage watch like this but it's uh probably going to drop a little bit over time so we'll be okay with that you can put the dial back on and i did measure the radiation of the dial only and it's it's not so bad and in the second we'll see the whole watch how much it actually emits now i think the dial and the hands match pretty well the hands look a little bit darker on camera than they do in real life so so that should be fine we're making sure that the hands don't touch the dial that they don't touch each other and for a watch with a sub second hand like this also very important that the hour hand does not touch the second sound all right time to case the watch we're gonna need to replace the crystal so let's do that first the way we do that is uh to place the crystal itself over this little uh anvil and when we press the crystal down it bends a little bit around the edges and with a bezel underneath we can then press the bezel uh up while we bend the crystal into the bezel you can also use a crystal lift that works perfectly fine as well snap what you might have noticed in uh in the beginning is that this watch actually has this plastic cover that is a dust cover has nothing to do with radiation but it also then serves to hold the movement into the case so the screws go all the way into the case see this beautifully per large case back after it's cleaned it looks very nice in general i watch in very nice condition now we had some fun before looking at high beat watches in the second sand now for a low beat watch like this slowing the second sand down is just you know making it really slow so it's not that much an effect let's rather turn to uh how radioactive the watch is now see i'm going from 4.7 down to 1.3 and that is of course mostly due to removing the loom in the hands but also uh due to uh letting out any radon gas that might have built up under the crystal now the main question that remains is the watch safe and the answer is qualified yes most of us are most likely doing other things that are much worse to our health than wearing watch like this and unless you wear it 24 7 and hold it close to your mouth while you sleep it's perfectly safe to wear it i wouldn't wear it every day 24 7 but as a watch lover we probably have a couple of other watches as well and with a new strap-on i think it is a beautiful watch nice little piece of watch history but it's now a lot safer to wear as well hope you liked this video if you did then clicking like and subscribe will really help the channel we'll be back shortly until then tata

Channel: Vintage Watch Services

Views: 59,491

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, zenith sporto, radium dial, radium girls, radioactive watches, radiation danger, caliber 126, wristwatch revival, nekkid watchmaker, red dead restoration

Id: N6oPf3Pq6bU

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022