Raketa "Perpetual Calendar" Vintage Watch Restoration

hello there and welcome back to another video here on wrist watch revival my name is marshall i'm your host and this time we're going in a different direction uh the last few watches i've worked on have been really kind of expensive uh important watches to me this one's not um this is actually a raketa it's a soviet watch it's from the former soviet union in the 80s probably is when this was made i got it for less than 50 on ebay less than 50 bucks for a vintage watch that is well it's interesting to say the least um i don't it's hard to describe the dial it's got so much going on with the roman numerals and the numbers kind of floating in this turning thing that you can see kind of on the bottom it's a weird watch but a cool conversation starter and it's a neat vintage piece and the reason i wanted to get into this is because a i've never have i don't have i never had a raketa or any of the soviet watches and i've heard a lot about them and b because i know that a lot of you wanted to get into vintage watches or into watchmaking and you know some of the pieces i've been working on are way too expensive to be starter pieces this thing's under 50 bucks you can get these things on ebay all day long and there's even a bunch of different models from them as you can see this one's in pretty bad shape the one that i happen to get here but i wanted to find out what these things were all about and i wanted to also extend that to you because again i know that a lot of you are looking to get into watchmaking or looking to get into vintage watches and these might be a cool place to start out so together onward let's find out if this thing's a total piece of junk or if it's actually a pretty cool watch that you can wear and enjoy okay so the first thing we need to do though before we get into the watch of course is see how it does on the time grapher so let's throw it on the time grapher and see what it gives us for an initial reading oh no oh no this is bad so as you can see it's giving us a bit of a snow globe effect there as well as pretty terrible everything uh the rate you know three minutes a day off it's losing three minutes a day etc so clearly it needs a service at the very least but with that let's get into this first let's just take off the case back here and see what the movement looks like i'm really curious to see what the quality is like on these movements they made these for years and years all right i see a few jewels and it's ticking away i i guess i would say it certainly could be worse than this that case back looks pretty rough uh these are plated it looks you know kind of like a chrome plated case back it seems and it seems to have uh really kind of just come off around the edges this is a pretty well worn piece it seems but you know looking at it well i mean that's there's a watch in there so there's this extra little crown that turns that other part apparently we'll look at it later on the dial but apparently you're able to deduce some type of date range information as you can see the crystal's pretty badly cracked here too so that'll have to go but at any rate i don't know what this thing is supposed to be telling us i'm not even going to bother to find out again they call it a perpetual calendar but it's obviously not it has some years and some months and then a bunch of cyrillic on there i don't know it looks cool i i mean at least in a quirky weird kind of so ugly it's cool sense uh and maybe it'd be a good conversation starter or something i don't know but first things first of course uh we got to get the movement out of the case here and it looks like this is just held in by two uh movement screws again i've never actually worked on a russian watch before or raketa uh more more specifically and i am really curious to see about the build on these you know stuff that came out of the former soviet union was kind of not thought of as particularly high quality stuff and i would assume the same for this especially given the price that i paid for the thing i mean sure it's in bad shape but i think i can clean this thing up and for 50 bucks if i could get anything i could wear or give to a friend or whatever i'd be happy so first things first i got to get this movement out of here but it doesn't want to go and looking at the top this feels like it might be one of those weird watches where the movement actually comes out of the front so i'm just going to take off this broken crystal i'm going to use this crystal grabber thing that i have i'm sure there's another way i could get this thing off but i couldn't figure it out so boom there it comes off and again it was broken and i knew that so that's fine and you get a better look at the dial and whatever the heck is going on on the dial it really is kind of a mishmash of a bunch of different styles as you can see this crystal's done though but i still can't figure out how to get the movement off and then i'm looking a little closer and i'm like oh the bezel comes off that's what i needed to take off so it turns out i didn't actually need to take the crystal off in that way i could have probably just pushed it out or taking it off with my crystal press but that's fine i needed to come off anyway and that was a perfectly safe way to do it so with the bezel off now i'm assuming that this movement should just pop right out and there it goes comes right off and we can take a look at the case it actually looks like it's an okay shape on the inside at least no rust or anything either and this is that ring that goes around the edge that i was turning that has some type of vital information on it that is i don't know is it useful who cares probably but it looks cool it's got all these years and weird stuff on there going back from the 80s up to the looks like the mid 90s or something i don't know so there's the dial definitely looks like it's an original good condition here again you do have to be careful buying these on ebay i've read a little bit in it that it said that people will frankenstein or franken watch these quite a bit meaning that they'll take parts from all different types of things and put them together and that could even be the case on this one like especially in in the case of the case back which looked like it wasn't as worn as the rest but who knows but it looks like this dial is very much original again this thing's kind of barely ticking so let's get the dial off so that we can continue our journey into this thing i will say that at this point not bad i mean yeah this isn't up to like you know swiss or japanese standards or anything but this is a i don't know for 50 bucks it seems like okay especially if i can get the dang thing running and it is a day date has both the the month of the day there so this just pops off and underneath we can see at least the beginnings of the calendar and motion works the calendar works well that's probably self-explanatory it's what runs the calendar and the motion works is what runs the hands so that's the canon pinion in the middle and then i'm just kind of browsing here because i need to try to figure out how the each thing works this is a little different than some of the other movements that i've worked on and that makes sense i mean this was you know made in a different country you'll see little movements little movement differences between countries or styles of design or engineering or something like that there we go and this is a cover plate for the calendar works and so we can take that out and again i mean this movement looks like it hasn't been touched in a heck of a long time but it's far from a disaster there's a bunch of like gummed up lubricant and tiny bit of rust staining but it doesn't look like this has been abused or anything so i got that to be thankful for because again this is a real crap shot i mean when you order something like this off of ebay this one came from ukraine you know it took three weeks or something it's just one of those things where you just do not know what you're gonna get and you know that's kind of part of the deal it's 50 bucks and if it turns up and it's a piece of junk well you kind of knew that going in is how i see it so continuing along here we're taking apart the the calendar works seems a little stubborn and that looks like the cam that pushes the calendar over or something spring acts on it so far so good things coming right apart and it looks relatively straightforward here's my canon pinion remover and this is a special tool to safely remove the cannon pinion rather than using tweezers which risks bending the pivot that it sits on there's a thin piece of metal you know that the canon pinion kind of hugs and if you go twisting on it with your tweezers you could bend or break that where the canon pinion remover takes it off pretty cleanly all right let's get this thing in the movement holder and continue along first things first we'll take the balance off mainly just to protect it it's the uh it's the most important part of a watch it's also the most delicate with the uh they call it the hair spring or the balance spring is what i like to call it but either way very delicate spring they call it a hairspring for an obvious reason it's about the size of a human here as far as thickness goes all right now we can take the pallet forks out i'll see you i know i noticed a lot of you in the comments and on instagram have asked about how you remember which part goes where which screws go where and uh for me the answer is a combination of two things one experience which admittedly i don't have a ton of as an amateur at this uh you know i've only been doing it for a year or two or something but um and here comes out the pallet forks by the way um but you do start to see these things uh speaking of experience i do have a lot more experience working on other things like for example cars i've i haven't recently but for a good portion of my life i worked on cars and you know you you start to really get a feel for mechanical things like screws or bolts or things like that that really does translate over i'm not gonna lie it help it's helped me a lot uh to have that kind of aptitude for that stuff um so experience is one of them where you just go well it can't be any of those screws so it's either this screw or this screw and then maybe you try one out and if it's wrong you just do the other one the other thing though that i think is really important and if you are starting off in watchmaking i was certainly taught to do this again a lot of my uh teachings came from mark luvik over at the watch repair channel here on youtube excellent stuff i mean seriously the gold standard for all of this stuff a big inspiration to me as well but you know he also has a training course at watch repair lessons dot com and knowing he's not paying me or anything for that i i happen to have taken it and enjoyed it and got a lot out of it and i figured i would uh you know pass that along to you in case you were interested in trying it out because it really does start from the ground up and gives you that kind of one-on-one feel where you're watching these videos that he's made but he explains it it's in written and video form so you can go at your own pace in your own way and it really helped me out a lot there's three courses with apparently a fourth one coming i'm excited about that but what he taught me to do was to take a photo of what i was working on and interestingly that's actually how this channel kind of got going was i mean i do video work and stuff like that for my my regular job if you will and so i was like well instead of a photos i'll just uh take a video like i've got cameras i'll just set up a camera real quick and just take a video and then if i ever get stuck i can just go back and watch the video well that led to me going well if i can take a video that's kind of crappy i could probably take a video that's kind of good and if i'm going to take a video and then my creative brain got going and i thought well i'll just you know put it up on youtube and i'll just do a little voiceover and i'll just record a little extra thing and hey another camera next thing you know i was starting a youtube channel which is kind of par for the course for me but i digress i was doing the videos and when i'm reassembling a watch i will get that video up on the computer in front of me and if i get stuck i'll reference it now when it comes to the final edit here that you see i'll cut the parts off where i'm just staring at the video because well that's kind of boring to watch but i do use that as a reference if i get stuck or if i can't remember exactly how a thing goes and i recommend doing that as well it's very very helpful okay so we have really gotten pretty far into this watch now it's time to take off the train bridge which means that the train of wheels is uh one of the only things left to go here just that and the cue this works so here we go that's also why you'll see me kind of inspect each of these like as a habit sometimes i edit that part out but you know like here i'll take a look and just see which way is this orientated right does it has the pinion on the top does it have a little gear part on the top and that helps me commit it to my memory so that when i go back to put the watch together i can go right i remember how that went together now and then again if i get stuck i can always look at the video too and it looks like there's a bridge here just for that main wheel underneath i already took out the escape wheel and the other ones and again none of these components are com are really burly awesome things but they're all reasonably made nothing i've seen here has made me think well this thing's just a piece of junk and it won't last uh i'm not exactly blown away by the by the quality of these components they're not high quality in the sense of like when we worked on the rolex or something like that and you go wow okay i can see how much extra effort the company put in to really make these things super robust and bulletproof that isn't what you see here at all this is thin stamped out you know cheap parts i guess you would say but not below the threshold where you go okay this is junk you know this was meant to be thrown away that isn't the case these are reusable serviceable real parts so you know i'm kind of impressed honestly again for the amount of money this is definitely above what i expected once i got into the watch i thought this thing was going to be really bad okay take the yolk out here and i'm just being careful with the oak spring there standard stuff you know just try your best to not let the things fly away i've done it many times i've spent a lot of time on my hands and knees with the light with a flashlight trying to find a little spring like that and if you can if you can avoid it it's definitely better to avoid it this is the last of the keyless works coming apart now that's a setting lever and this thing really does need a good cleaning this watch is quite filthy as you can see there's a lot of dried up oil and grease on this watch that needs to be addressed and so i'm happy that we're giving it a good service and i'm really starting to get hopeful here that i can bring this thing back to like a decent state as well especially given that nothing's actually broken inside here last thing that we need to do before we get to cleaning though is we need to take the main spring out of the barrel yikes oh there's yeah look at that's just grease that's just dirt and grease just caked on the top of it there should not be that much of that in there and as you can see the main spring looks pretty dirty too yeah this is all just evidence that this watch has been neglected and it's not necessarily surprising but at the same time it's kind of interesting because when i find a watch like this that clearly hasn't been serviced in forever you know this is kind of what you want because you get these for so much cheaper because they're running bad or not running at all but sometimes that's because one of the components is just outright broken right in which case you have to source a new one which can be a pain or can be more expensive but when they just need a good cleaning lubrication little attention to detail you know you can really have a good expectation on bringing these type of watches back to a darn good state okay everything needs to go into the watch cleaning machine now so that means putting everything in these little baskets and then in the bigger basket and then into the watch cleaning machine i do have a video on the channel of the watch cleaning machine that i got and how it works if you're interested one thing i always forget is to put the balance back on this way when it goes into the watch cleaning machine the balance gets cleaned as well but it's not loose where they can get hurt and there you go all the parts of the watch you can see the broken crystal that needs to get replaced of course and that means that with them all cleaned and ready to go we can start putting things back together there's a numerous types of oils and greases that you use in watches like this there's not as many as you think though but there's a couple specialty ones this one is called mobius which is the company 8200 and this is specifically for these uh main springs and what i do here is just put a little tiny bit on my finger cots there and then just put a thin film over it this isn't meant to be actually like a lubrication it's meant to be like a thin surface film so that it doesn't get corroded and that it doesn't stick or do anything like that so that means that now it's time to wind the mainspring back into the barrel which is a tedious and weird uh thing to do if you don't have one of these this is a mainspring winder so this lets you wind it back up into a little space and then push it back into the barrel it's a specialty tool it's very expensive it's extremely handy though if you do a lot of the work that i'm doing here where i'm oftentimes reusing a mainspring because on a bunch of these watches they can be a real pain to find a new one or a replacement one and if they're still in good shape i will reuse them god i love that noise seriously that's like a watchmaker thing if you if you do a lot of watch you know if you were around this stuff the the noise that that spring i i love it i absolutely love it okay so the arbor goes in now that the main spring's in there and we need to put a little bit of oil on there as well and then i picked up this little thing that lets you put the cap back on a little safer than just sort of pushing it on with your fingers apparently it was cheap i got it on ebay what you'll see is there's a lot of tools made by the big swiss companies bergeon is kind of the the most commonly seen high level one they make excellent stuff really their tools and stuff are fantastic but they're very expensive and it's interesting because the chinese manufacturing market as they've done with many things has said well look we can make that and in some cases they actually can you know something a simple tool like this little plastic thing that does that is actually quite easy to make you know up to standards you know in china but then some of the stuff isn't right like some of the really complicated stuff can be quite difficult to make for a cheap price and you wouldn't want to skimp on that okay so let's get the main plate back out and again we've got the uh the balance here and i'll just set that aside once again just to keep it safe because that doesn't go until quite a bit later and we need to be maneuvering around the movement quite a bit you know oiling things putting on the components and all of that kind of stuff and i don't need that balance just sitting there getting knocked around especially when you're at the level that i'm at where you know some things you feel like hey i'm getting this like i'm getting pretty good at this and then other things you do and you go am i an idiot or what right you know it is uh one of those things that as you're learning you can pick up some stuff and start to feel confident but then you get constant reminders that you're very much an amateur and so i like to play it safe when it comes to the balance so put the wheel in there and then we can go ahead and put this bridge back on as well and this is a good example of just like which screw was it again i think it's this one and now i'm going to do some oiling you can see that i've got my loop out there to start to do just a little bit of the early oiling on these parts that are going in and now the rest of the train wheels can start to go in and as usual you know just trying to be as careful as i can i think that that's my the thing i'm trying to work on the most as a watchmaker is just really taking your time and not rushing anything that's the escape wheel going in kind of snug it underneath that bridge and that's of course the main spring barrel when you when you look at all of the sort of traditionally designed watches even this one the main spring barrel is actually what they you would call that the first wheel it's sort of the the originator of all the power then there's a second wheel a third wheel a fourth wheel and then an escape wheel and you can always kind of see how they're laid out in different ways and how they go but the trick to remembering which is which is to know that the barrel is the first one but nobody ever calls it the first wheel that's that's where it gets kind of weird all right and now we get to do a little dance where we have to get these pivots that's a little points at the end and they have to go into their jewel hole those are the little red dots there that are very low friction sapphire synthetic sapphires but in order for everything to get set up right each of those wheels that has a pivot at the top which is all of them has to go directly on the top and bottom into their respective jewel holes and if any one of them is out it won't spin and it won't sit right but once you kind of locate the holes then you can see just even a little bit of pressure on any of the wheels we'll turn all of the other ones even the first wheel or the mainspring browse we discussed and then again i learned this from from watch repair channel from mark is you know it can help especially if it's not really sitting beautifully to use a piece of peg wood to kind of stabilize the bridge as you go to initially tighten down the screws that hold it down the reason for this is simple if something shifted and you didn't notice and one of the pivots is not in its jewel hole and then you went and tightened it down you could break it so easy i mean these pivots are tiny pieces of metal you you could break them without much effort at all and that's why you use the peg wood and do all the little double checking just to keep making sure that the trains the train wheel is spinning freely because if it is then that means that those pegs those uh pivots are in their jewel holes in your safe so here's one last check just to make sure that everything seems to be spinning smooth and it looks fine now we can put the barrel bridge on and normally and in this case the barrel bridge holds the barrel in place with that big bushing right in the middle there but it also holds some other components on it typically you'll see it hold the ways that the way that you actually wind the barrel meaning that you know you when you turn the the crown on the side of your watch when you're wearing it to wind it up well that turning motion has to get transferred over to that mainspring barrel the spring inside of that barrel and the works that does that is usually attached to this barrel bridge as well just it just seems to be the way that most of these are made and that's the way that this one's made as well and once again i'm getting in and doing a little bit of oiling here i'm using a loop to make sure that i can actually see exactly that the right amount and the right oil is going in i'm using hp 1300 that's a mid viscosity oil i guess you would say it's it's the one that you use on parts that aren't super high impact for a watch but that aren't super delicate either it's like the mid grade watch the super impact stuff actually gets a grease a synthetic crease that i use again from mobius i think it's called 9541 i might be wrong about that 9501 yeah that sounds right and then there's one called 90 10 that you use on the very delicate pivots like that one right there is that hp 1300 again it's a synthetic oil so that was the ratchet wheel that i put on the big one there and now i'm putting on the crown wheel and again these are the parts that i was just mentioning a minute ago these are the ones that actually wind up the watch that take the power of you winding the crown on the side of your watch and transfer it over to where the main spring is there's also the click and the click spring going on and that just is a way that you can wind the watch one way but not let it unwind the other way so we'll get the click in place but i also still have to to screw down the crown wheel screw there and one thing that you'll notice about it is that it's got three lines on the top of it i'm going to screw that one in just a second that one right there and that means that it's reverse threaded so you actually turn it to the left as you can see to tighten it down which feels very weird but that is actually how it works okay now we can get in and oil the jewels themselves again we're using mobius 9010 which is a very fine synthetic oil and you don't need very much you really just need a little tiny bit it's the challenge is actually putting on enough in the sense of not putting on too much and then of course we also need to take care of what we call the cap jewels here so we're on the microscope now so you can see how this is done that thing that i'm taking off there is called an inca block this one actually is an ecoblock but it's a shock setting that is actually a spring it's meant to flex in the case that you drop your watch i know that sounds kind of weird but the parts that go into that hole there break very easily and they're also attached to some fairly heavy things namely the balance wheel and that's one of the heavier parts on the watch and these are extremely finicky as you can see i'm doing this on the microscope and one false move and that little spring will go flying and it is so small you would not imagine it i mean this is the type of thing that can get stuck on a fiber of your shirt like it doesn't have enough gravity to just fall away if it touches that so i'm trying to be very very touchy here and this is something that i've gotten better at but definitely you can still get stung by these stupid little things they also can be fragile especially when they're old like this one is and these can break if they're in good shape they won't they're actually pretty strong but anyway these were invented because again if you were to drop your watch it would jostle that in such a way that it would actually break the pivot kind of back in the day or whatever now it just bumps that spring up a little bit so look what i'm doing here i got some radical here and i actually put it over the spring first so that it couldn't fly away i felt very clever at having done this and and now having cleaned and oiled the cap i'm ready to put this back in and of course i dropped it right away and it landed on the escape wheel not great but the the watchmaking gods were kind to us because as it landed on the escape wheel i looked down and i noticed that there was a fiber you see that kind of fiber sitting on there from a shirt or something and that is not where you want to have anything like that and i was able to get that off of there so maybe that was you know again the watchmaking gods looking out for us i don't really know anyway getting this back in i decided to abandon my plan of trying to stick a piece of radical on there just wouldn't stay and it wasn't working right and go for the two tweezer plan and of course this is very very nerve-wracking stuff because this thing is just ready to go flying away at any moment but i got it so we got that back in there and now we can turn our focus back to finishing our build now that we have the train of wheels on the other side we can put the canon pinion back on and then start working our way through the rebuild here again i'm using that mobius hp 1300 on some of these parts and then some of the ones that are more heavy duty i'm using the the 9501 grease which is that kind of blue synthetic grease all of the lubricants that i'm using here are synthetic by the way at this point they last longer they're more consistent i was reading a watchmaking book that i got um that's apparently just a reprint of a very old book and some of the stuff they suggested using in there were pretty was pretty funny they had like animal fats and like god what was it i think it was um like beeswax or something to seal something up i was like wow times have definitely changed and i don't think the book was that old but maybe i'm wrong i am glad we don't have to use stuff like that now though okay setting lever going into place here and again using that 9501 as i work towards putting the yoke back on this is all for the keyless works this part actually interfaces with the calendar to let you do a quick date change on it it's actually a really clever little system that i'll show you when it's all back together but you actually pull out on the crown and it's like a spring-loaded pull-out and it and it advances the day one day per time you do that it's actually really kind of neat okay now getting that calendar in under the spring and of course back to the keyless works we need to put the yolk spring in as well hopefully without it flying away there we go and again these are very high friction points so i'm using the grease but i keep getting a little bit too much on there so i can use some radical to kind of clean that up and this is a commonly used thing as well it's kind of a cover plate and spring combo and now we can put in the main parts of the keyless work here which i apologies for being out of focus here but the the sliding clutch and the clutch wheel they need a little bit of grease on them as well because these are probably the parts of the watch that take the most physical abuse you know they're really kind of being jammed around and shoved around a bunch and so you do have to be cognizant of that same thing with the winding stem that needs decent amount of grease on it as well and for the same reason everything has to kind of line up here for us to be able to get this thing done and there we go and i had to take out the yolk there because i had put it when i put it on before i had not put in the sliding clutch yet so i get to do this part again but we get it back in there okay and now i can put that cover plate spring combo back on as well yeah sometimes that happens i'll have to i'll notice hey i forgot something and i'll have to backtrack i've had it happen uh where i've had to backtrack embarrassingly big chunks of the project but lately uh my mistakes have been more along the lines of this where i just go whoops and have to back up a step or two thankfully but it's all part of the learning process yeah these rakata watches though riketa means rocket in russian and you can tell that many of them are inspired by space or you know space exploration the space race from the 80s or 60s through the 80s i suppose [Music] they're pretty cool uh raquetta actually makes multiple models as i test out the uh keyless works here and then get the calendar going back on again this one's called a perpetual calendar at least that's what english speakers have nicknamed it again it isn't actually a perpetual calendar but it does have some type of thing where you can do some calculation based on what's on there and i don't know if you had a calculator maybe you could figure it out but it looks cool and stuff but again there's other models too and they're all reasonably priced on ebay again it's a little bit of a it's a little sketchy of a market um and you don't have a lot of recourse if you get something that you didn't want so you do have to be a little bit picky but the prices are definitely good especially after having kind of gone through the majority of the stripped down and the rebuild on this watch i'm like hey this is a fine watch uh you know it's a totally okay movement in here again and we're not talking about beautifully finished in fact it's quite ugly as far as finish goes but functionality wise look at this there's the pull out function that i was talking about so you actually pull the crown out and it kicks the the day over which is really neat it's a it's a cool take on a quick set date and this is the day so that goes in and things are really kind of shaping up here we are almost done with this build and like i said i've been impressed i think that if you're looking to get into vintage watches and you don't mind something kind of quirky this might be a good place to start one of these raketo watches and i think that they're pretty cool from like a conversation starter it's kind of like what's going on with that watch it's got russian on it it's got roman numerals it has date you know years on it somehow this weird rotating thing what i'm doing here by the way is i'm putting the pallet forks and the balance in one dip which is a solvent that cleans off anything that was not cleaned off prior after having gone through the watch cleaning machine as these are really important parts of the watch and with that we can begin the final stretch here as we get the pallet forks put into place again looking at the pallet fork bridge here look that thing's a cheap piece of stamped metal but it works and again just making sure that the that the pallet fork is seated properly and this is a big moment of truth it was running before i expect it to run now but this is always an exciting point in the rebuild to see if it'll kick back up or if we have a lot more work to do it's also just kind of a thrill i mean honestly this is like if you work on cars when you finally get done with a big project and then you get to fire up the engine for the first time okay get the balance down and let's see if it'll fire up there we go beautiful also it looks like it's running quite strong um after having worked on a bunch of watches you kind of get a feel for when one's barely chugging along that would mean a low amplitude or when it's you know got some real life in it and this one really seems to have some life in it it's cruising along nice and i haven't even put a full wine in it yet you really do have to wind the watch up all the way before you know how it's going to perform so this is fantastic um the rebuild has gone well and this thing seems to be running beautifully i'm kind of thinking this is awesome at this point yeah you know i think that the reason that these are so cheap is because of how mass produced they were they were produced infinite of these things over in the former soviet union during the time when these were with during the time when these uh factories were in full swing because i mean you know they were state-owned or whatever so that it was what you could get if you wanted to watch there was a few other brands as well but uh you know different system okay so now we need to spend some time here getting this thing shaped in good shape though to put on as you can see there's some staining or some maybe some rust staining on the edges of this i have to be careful because this does have a printed surface on it and i don't want to take it off so i'm just going to take a little bit of rotico and just see if i can't get the majority of the worst staining off without damaging or picking up any of the print because if it's going to pick up the print then i won't bother but as you can see it looks a little better already just having gotten just a little bit of that staining off some of it was too stubborn though now we can turn our attention to the watch case itself and it's pretty gross actually uh i'm gonna just use peg wood to get the big chunks off of it but there's actually a lot of dirt piled up you can see it's starting to get on my workbench even as this thing is in kind of dire need of a clean now we won't be able to do any case work on it of any sort as it is plated you can't polish that it'll just go through but look at that so again just going to go over all the edges with a piece of peg wood here that's the bezel as well just to try to get the big chunks off and then i'm thinking we're going to need to throw this thing in the ultrasonic cleaner this is the back of that bezel and it's got a whole lot of dirt and kind of grime built up on it as well so yeah a lot of dirt needs to come off of this to make sure that it keeps looking and functioning well and yeah please no more on my workbench thank you very much but ultrasonic cleaners are really great for stuff like this they can get into spaces that you can and here's our ultrasonic now i'm just going to put those three main components of the case in there because i don't want to put the uh the indicator dial ring thing because it could mess with the finish on it and it's just not worth it because if it takes that off that really sucks i don't want that to happen so it comes out a quick rinse in the sink and then we can dry off the parts and then inspect them let's see how they look oh much better much much better so now that's what i'm talking about and i'm looking is there a little bit of no that's just some pitting or staining that's not going to come off so yeah this thing's good to go and we can reassemble the rest of the case now we do have a little bit more work to do though before we can actually put this thing fully together and that of course is replacing this crystal not only is this crystal discolored damaged and cracked uh it needs so it definitely needs to be replaced so the way you do this is you have to measure the crystal or you can measure the slot that it goes in or you can measure both so let's see what this one measures up to just as it sits 36.15 millimeters looks like about where it wants to sit and so when you go to order your crystal you're going to want to get as close to that as possible so i got a 362 which is actually 36 point in fact here i'll just show you there you go 36.2 millimeters and it looks like the right shape as well these are it can always be a little weird to figure out um you know because they have like domed and over domed and all these kind of weird words but this one seemed to be the best for me so what i like to do is just a quick test fit this will not actually snap in because the crystal's bigger than the space it goes so that it can put pressure on the outside once it's seated so as i was taught by mark i'm going to use my rover press and this is a very i did not understand how these worked until he taught did a video on it but now i get it and basically what you do is you take the crystal so first you take the case part that it's going to go to and put it below then you take the crystal and put it on the soft die on the bottom and you pick one of the aluminum dies on the top that is just the right size for the crystal and when you push it down it actually just bends the crystal down around that soft die and that has the effect of decreasing the diameter of the crystal now if you did this too much it would snap it would break the crystal but these are very tough crystals then you can bring the case part up to the crystal and once it's seated you just undo the pressure from the rubber and then the crystal releases the tension into the bezel in this case pretty cool and it makes it a real snap to do it not hard at all and this crystal looks fantastic exactly what we needed so job done there i'm happy with that and now we can start actually putting this thing all the way back together and that means re-casing the movement and putting the bezel back on and i'm thinking we might need a new watch strap for this thing too didn't come with one so this is a little bit weird because of this uh whatever information ring i don't really know what to call it but it's a very very simple thing it has those teeth around the outside and then there's a little crown on the outside of the case that attaches to a little toothed gear that runs it around it's that little bronze crown at the bottom that's it so there are now the movements back in and we need to just use the movement screws to make sure that it's seated properly and held in place and we are almost done with this thing the back still looks really rough but who cares it's the back of the watch right i mean i'm looking to get a bargain on like a cool functional timepiece here the fact that the back looks horrible and it does doesn't really bother me that much and there we go you can see that ring now turning around the outside that means i can put the case on or the case back on i should say and now we can turn our attention to the dial where we now can put the hands back on and what i'm doing here is getting the date to just click over to the next day and that means it's midnight and then i can put the hands on at the 12 o'clock position which is in this case midnight and that way the calendar will turn over at exactly the right time every single night if there's no calendar it doesn't matter which hour you set you set the hands out you can set it at three o'clock or whatever as long as they're lined up right but this one does have calendar function and that means you got to have that calendar turn over at the right time otherwise you're never going to know what day it is on this one it's written in russian so i'll never know what day it is anyway but uh good practice right and then what you want to do is sort of look to the side and i'm actually just going to kind of use the hand setting tool to just tweak the hand very very slightly but basically you just want to make sure that the hands have a little bit of room so that they don't run into each other as they go around the dial because that'll stop the watch or knock one of the hands off and you'll have to open it back up and fix it so best just to get it right okay the seconds hand goes on as well and now i can do a quick test and what you want to do here is just make sure that the hands can go around a good you know the whole way and not hit into anything that the minute hand's not hitting the second hand or the hour hand that nothing's dragging on the dial and also just that it's working like that nothing's getting out of uh balance here where like the minute hand gets off of where it's supposed to be and then i'm of course also checking that the calendar works and it looks like it turned over at midnight or shortly thereafter which is pretty normal and there once again i'm showing you how that works and there we go now we can put the bezel back on the top again these these watches have a removable bezel so it but it's really easy to put them back on just use some compressed air here to make sure that there's no dust or little fibers or anything on the dial or on the inside of the crystal and then these are just friction fit friction fit just means pressed on that's all that means if you hear that so with this bezel there we go and it just clicks into place and that looks fantastic i have to say especially with that new crystal beautiful now i mentioned that it's time for a new strap on this because it didn't come with one and i got this little thing from from esslinger it's a that's a website american website for watchmaking that i use quite a bit and they uh have this little thing that was a buck or something and it just lets you measure the lug width really quick and easy you can use any tool that you want to do it but that's just the easiest way and then i got this watch band from barton which is uh if you're looking i mentioned bulong and sons as one that i really like this one is like american brand that's really cheap i mean these these things are 20 or 25 bucks total and they're pretty good and they have the little things that let you put it back on let you put it on um easily you don't need to use any tools to do it even though i happen to have them okay last thing now let's check and see how it performs ooh wow this is so much better than it was before look at that just a few seconds a day 0.1 millisecond beat error is totally acceptable and a nice healthy amplitude of 293. these are the type of numbers that you want to see and yeah this thing just needed a really great service and wow i gotta say this actually exceeded my expectations i had pretty darn low expectations for this watch if i'm being honest because it was so cheap and yeah it's quirky and cool and kind of neat but i mean we're not talking about a really nice you know swiss timepiece here or even you know anything else it's just kind of a junker but that being said it's good enough the build quality on this after having gone through it was totally acceptable there was not one part that i was thinking okay guys come on you really went too cheap on this it was all fine again not pretty but fine and functional and look what you get a cool watch i mean this is a cool watch for 50 bucks especially after having serviced it and now it runs really well and it looks great too and when you show it to people you know they are gonna go what is going on with this watch it's really funny because you can wear a really nice watch and nobody cares like that's the thing that uh you know people that are into watches discover at some point which is that nobody cares about what you're wearing it's it's for you it's a thing that you get to look at and you get to enjoy for yourself but with something like this that has weird writing on it and all that stuff people actually do go what is going on with that thing and you know now this is a ricketta perpetual calendar less than 50 on ebay mass-produced to the hilt by the former soviet union and you can get them now they'll send them over from from ukraine or from russia proper and uh and you can have these and uh i gotta say if you're trying to get into watchmaking these might be a really good place to start where you could kind of mess up a little bit and not get punished too bad that is going to do it for this one i want to thank you for joining me if you like the video you can do the whole like subscribe that you know what to do if you like stuff on youtube you know what to do i don't need to tell you uh you can find me on instagram for project updates in between videos going up at wristwatch underscore revival and we'll see you next time

Channel: Wristwatch Revival

Views: 131,027

Rating: 4.8527207 out of 5

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Id: y6WtM1esdko

Length: 56min 36sec (3396 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020