Restoring And Finding The Owner Of A Lost 1936 Gruen Curvex Watch

hey guys today i'm going to be repairing a gruen curvex i got this at my local pawn shop so you can see from the crystal it's in pretty rough shape i mean it is an old watch so you're gonna get that but we'll see if we can uh make it look a little better so the model of this one is a royal you can actually see it in this ad um to the top right there so we're gonna take this thing apart i'm just gonna speed it up so the video is not hours long so if you guys notice there's actually a name on the back of this watch sometimes people put um a description of for their birthday or for christmas or some event they did or a retirement watch things like that so we're actually gonna see if we can find the family of the person who bought this watch and try to give it back to him i think that'd be pretty cool so the watch isn't running at the moment when i bought it the watch was fully wound up so the main spring had full power the gear train had tension on it you're able to move the pallet fork without any problem the balance itself oscillated but it wasn't driving the watch so what do you think the problem is if you guys want to guess leave it in the comments so a little history about the curvex it debuted in 1935 the thing that was special about the kervex was that it filled the entire case most of the watches at the time that had the square shaped case like this or the curved case had to use small flat movements because they couldn't actually fill it in it took a lot of work to actually make a movement that was curved and filled in the whole thing and grew and patented that design so a lot of them weren't able to do it like they were the curve x turned out to be a very successful series for current it helped them stay afloat through the depression when a lot of other american brands were forced to close down their doors so the caliber the watch i'm working on here is the 311 which is the first variant of the curvex they made [Music] this watch retailed for 60 dollars when it first came out this doesn't seem like a lot but at the time you could buy a car for 580 dollars and this was during the depression so most people couldn't afford cars if it retailed today counting for inflation it would cost over a thousand dollars so i'm actually a big fan of grew and watches i think for american watches they're probably the best in my opinion just in aesthetics and quality i like how they look and how they design the bridges in the 20s 30s and 40s i think they did a great job when it starts getting to the 50s and 60s i think they started going downhill a little bit but so did a lot of companies at the time you'll be seeing a lot more agreements on this channel i'm a big fan of them and i collect them [Music] so when i took this mainspring out the tail of it broke off so i'm gonna have to replace it these older main springs that are blued sometimes lose their strength because of how the processes that they temper it with so i would probably had to replace it anyways because the strength probably wasn't there for its age so i'll have to get a replacement for that okay so this was what the problem was if you look at the roller table it's actually loose on the balance staff so that means it wasn't interacting properly with the pallet fork that weird brown thing you see by the staff is shellac it must have been what the previous watchmaker tried to use to hold the roller table on which isn't correct you should use it friction shellac is a common glue used in watchmaking most notably you can see it on the pallet fork if you look at the jewels that's actually what's holding the jewels in place now i'm going to run everything through the cleaner and we're going to try to clean up the case while that's cleaning so i'm going to first put this in the ultrasonic and then i'm going to try to put a new crystal on it because this crystal's very bad this is my first time working with a square crystal so it's a learning experience for me as well i'm gonna secure it with gs cement and then after it dries i'm gonna scrape the rest off with pigwood [Music] you got to be really careful when working with vintage watch crystals because all them are made of acrylic or plastic so they scratch with everything even just cleaning them with a cloth will scratch them so just try to not touch them do [Music] [Music] okay so here's the new mainspring i ordered ideally you want to do this with a mainspring winder but i don't have that with me so i'm just gonna have to use my hands do [Music] you can see that little hook on the arbor which holds it in place then we're just gonna close the lid [Music] so here's the capsule for the top of the balance this is what the pivot rides on so we cleaned it and we're gonna put it all together and then oil it this is a little tricky with vintage watches that don't have shock springs at this time shock springs weren't invented yet so first you're gonna put in the oil and then you're going to take a sharp needle and bleed it in and that'll suck it into the top jewel and this is how it should look see that light circle in the middle that's the oil that got sucked in so i just did the rest of the jewel caps because it's a boring process i put the balance back on and this is it so far see how much freer it turns this is a tricky process with the setting lever you have to hold it in place as you screw it into that setting screw forgive the slipping but i'm trying to watch the computer screen while i do it so i'm just going to install the stem parts which is the stem sliding pinion and winding pinion now i don't know if anyone caught that but i put the sliding pinion the opposite way it should be i think it's just because i'm trying to record and make sure i'm in the shot and everything so i really wasn't paying attention i'll correct that later but for right now it's in wrong [Music] this is the underside of the barrel just adding a click it's a cool way they designed this having the ratchet wheel on the underside of the bridge usually it's on the top everything's hidden on this one there's a lot of oiling points i have to hit think of it like a car you know if if you run with a dry car it's not going to run long or it's not going to be good so you got to make sure you oil everything correctly do [Music] [Applause] i like to put the gear train bridges on starting with the most fragile part and working my way to the more bulky components this way the pivots are protected so there's the escape wheel bridge and i wouldn't advise doing any of this at home if you put one of those bridges on wrong just a little bit it'll snap the pivot right off and you're kind of done it's very hard to get parts for these and if you don't know what you're doing it's very easy to break them when i first started i broke so many watches spend a lot of time here making sure that the pivots lined up in the holes [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is a crown wheel it's called that because it almost looks like a crown a lot of the older watches had these they were pretty hard to make because of their dimensions newer watches don't have it i think it's pretty cool though just because you know all the time i went into producing one of those [Music] [Music] [Music] so i'm just oiling the gear train this is the fun part and the vecocity of the oil gets thicker the farther you move up the line it just depends upon the rotation of the wheels [Music] and i'm just winding the gear train up a little bit just so the oil is working [Music] next we're going to install the pallet fork do [Music] [Music] [Music] and i'm gonna wind it all the way up before i put the balance on but first i had to get the stamp of approval so this is what you want see how the palette just needs a little push and it goes the rest of the way that's what you're looking for that shows that the gear train is free and wanting to push it [Music] and there's the heartbeat and i should add i'm gonna oil the escapement i'm not gonna show it because it's very hard to show but i'm just oiling the teeth on the escape wheel which is that wheel under that single bridge [Music] [Music] so their timing didn't turn out that bad for being almost 100 years old and the technology of the time the timing wasn't too bad you can't expect it to be like a modern watch so don't expect it to run perfectly so i'm very happy with this [Music] [Music] so we're ready to dial the watch up i'm just going to install the canon pinion and the hour wheel [Music] do [Music] on the side of the movement are the screws that hold the dial in place [Music] the dial is actually in very good shape for the age it was deceiving because the crystal was in such bad shape and now once adding the hands [Music] i'm just cleaning off the dial a little bit now to case it up [Music] [Music] now i think it looks a lot better with the new crystal on it the lights here aren't the best so i'm going to try in a different environment but i love the look of this watch it's such an extreme curve to it there it is in the better light and the timing still looks good on it [Music] so we're gonna put a strap on and call it a day [Music] [Music] and there it is 1936 grew in royale [Music] [Music] so i managed to find the grandson of the owner [Music] i'll be returning this to him and i hope it brings him as much pleasure as i had fixing it well i hope you guys enjoyed and thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: WorkingWithTime

Views: 66,364

Keywords: Gruen, Gruen watch, Curvex, Curvex Watch, vintage, vintige, watch, Greun, Watches, Watchmaking, restoration, restorasion, watchmaker

Id: hNGtV2FpcHE

Length: 37min 56sec (2276 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021