This old Omega Chronostop watch doesn't run well... and there's a dirty reason

hello friends olden you watch enthusiasts and curious cats around the globe welcome back to the channel today we're going to work on this and 1967 omega genevic chrono stop a very nice and not very common watch but it has some problems let's get going the first thing we always do with the watch is to basically check if it does what it's supposed to do and the chronostop has this 60 second stopwatch functionality so by pressing this pusher it should start but it doesn't the watch does however run even though i think an astrologist would be better at reading this output than a horologist i think i see the big dipper yeah up in the middle so it certainly needs a service and we can also see that there are a couple of other things the crown is not original the dial has one blotch in particular otherwise it looks quite good the case has some marks but it might actually be unpolished and if we take the case back off we can see that it has a very nice caliber 865 but it's very dirty and there's a case screw missing so overall i'll assist you for some tender loving care so we took the strap off already and we're going to take the movement out of the case i'm not really showing that here but the movement was actually quite stuck in the case but finally got it out we can see that the dial is actually in uh very nice condition it has a bit of wear but that's all right most let's this one blotch looks like a small bubble of jam or something to the left of the center and this style has this sort of rally theme if you will there were a few different versions of the chronostop the initial version actually had a rotatable inner dial that you could then use in conjunction with the seconds hand to time more than just the seconds let's get back to that a little bit later with the movement out of the case and the dial and hands off we see that the chronograph actually does start so it's nothing really wrong with the movement apart from a lot of dirt so that's a good thing well not the dirt obviously and that it runs so first take the balance wheel out and put it away securely that way the chronograph will certainly not run that's a little bit safer for the wheels when working on chronographs we first want to release any tension there are a lot of strong springs in chronographs so those are the first ones we'll take off in this family of movements there's this double spring acting on both the cam and the hammer so we'll take those off first then we can take off the hammer that is simply loose on the post and i'm going to take off the clutch spring it's also fairly common in its old chronographs that the steady pins are very tight fits into the main plate so if we need to sort of jiggle them loose it's important we don't put too much force on the thin ends because they can more easily break or bend and taking off the clutch wheel we see that there's uh hair there it's not my hair my hair is longer and that doesn't mean that i have long hair but there was a hair there and that's not ideal the clutch is held down with this shouldered screw so it can move back and forth and basically engage or disengage the chronograph wheel the cam on this movement is actually a two piece that's easier to machine of course but it sticks together so we'll just take it off in one part it's going to come off in the cleaning machine anyway the brake has this very strong spring underneath just meant to be careful when taking that off but it's a pretty simple chronograph movement of course no minute counter function no hour counter function it's very straightforward now we can take off the chronograph bridge and the chronograph wheel the chronograph wheel or the central seconds hand if you will is always held in place with this friction spring i'm going to take that off as well and then for the driving wheel which is friction fit onto the extended fourth wheel pivot we'll use this special tool for taking that off and with all the chronograph parts off we can let down the mainspring and then everything is basically a normal movement underneath now let's talk a little bit more about the chronostop it was first released in 1966 and then as part of the seamaster line that was moved to the ancient native line very shortly after so most of the chronostops you'll find are the geneva chronostop they initially all had the same movement this one here the 865 the 865 is basically a simplified version of the 860 and probably the most famous member of the 860 family is the 861 from the moonwatch but also the real chronographs with the 860 very nice watches of course the simplified means that it took away the minute counter the hour counter there's no date on this watch even though a chronostop later also came with date that was then dubbed the 920 instead you'll also see this movement family referred to as lamanya movements lumani was part of the original like group that became the let's watch group later together with omega and tiso but they still had their own brand name now see that the barrel was a little bit stuck inside the barrel bridge it's a lot of grease and all the gunk there which would help explain the starry night running of the watch although there's a lot of dirt in the wheels for sure now getting back to the versions of the chronostop they initially as i think i mentioned came with the rotating inner dials but this reference the 145 w009 doesn't have that it has this rally inspired dial instead there are also versions made for regatta tachymeter and that kind of thing and there was also a driver version which actually has the 12 o'clock at the normal three o'clock position and i believe the reason was that the watch was actually marketed as being worn on the inside of the wrist so instead of on top of the wrist on the underside so that might be also why they had this driver version and finally there was also an italian version they call it because it was marketed specifically in italy it's also referred to as the chronostop ufo and the reason being that the case was round or roundish instead of this cushion shape that is the most common so we've come to the keyless works there's no calendar features whatsoever on this model 865. looks like it's been quite a while since anyone did anything to this movement i will see later that it has certainly been a long while taking the shock settings out there was a question in the channel whether or not it's better to take the shock settings out before or after running the watch movement through the cleaning machine it doesn't really matter to be honest you can leave the shock settings in and then clean them later you can also oil them with out taking them out at all if they're clean but you can potentially save a little bit of time if you take them out first but in the end it's really all about personal preference so we're trying to clean off a little bit more in the keyless works the setting lever is quite dirty and then we'll put the balance back on one little trick when you're putting the balance back on like this if you gently turn it around you can have the balance wheel rest on this little ledge at the underside of the and it's not gonna drop off and bounce too violently not really a big thing but the more careful we are with these things the better all right then we're pretty much ready to get the parts into the cleaning machine is a simple chronograph so there's not that many parts still enough to confuse a middle aged person like myself so good habits are also important so in that regard something i've done myself a few times taking the movement apart and then waiting a long time before starting to resemble it it's a very bad idea much better to start reassembling it as soon as possible then your memory will still be fresh okay let's get these parts into the basket and the basket to the cleaning machine and then we'll take a 33 minute break and see you then okay with all the parts cleaned we can first start by assembling the barrel we're putting in a new mainspring always important to check that the coiling is in the right direction and we need to get the end of the mainspring into the barrel and now we can make sure the rest goes in if you have to put in a new mainspring like we did with this one it can actually be beneficial to put in the mainspring that's a little bit weaker than the one that was originally there because there is a bit of wear and vintage watches and the wear will be worse if you have a very strong mainspring with a new main spring in the barrel we can turn to the shark settings putting a little bit of 1910 on the end stones and sorry about to know sarah being uh in the picture here and fun fact as you get older your nose hair also gets a gray not sure that's actually a fun fact or a sad fact or completely unnecessary to know fact let's get the shark settings back in you can see the balance oscillates already so we can take it off and store it safely again so vintage chronographs are very popular watches and i think part of the reason is that they are generally bigger and of course vintage watches are very small compared to modern standards but the chronographs are generally a bit bigger simply to accommodate all the extra levers and the wheels and what have you and i must say that the vintage chronographs have a lot going for them in terms of design really much nicer in my view most of them than today's chronographs but there are of course downsides these movements aren't that common anymore so finding parts for them if necessary can be difficult and there's quite a lot of strong force in the chronograph you see these big springs that you have to overcome to start and stop for instance so there might be some extra wear but then again people don't buy a chronograph watch to actually measure time they buy them because i think they look cool it's a little bit like people buying an suv certainly isn't because they're planning to go off-road anytime soon and for that sake people don't really buy a watch to tell time either it's more of a fashion accessory than anything else nowadays so before we can put this three-quarter plate back on we need to make sure that we oil the pieces this one has the crown wheel on the underside screw down from the top and wherever a metal rubs against metal we want to make friction less with a little bit of oil typically d5 or hp 1300 and the same thing for the center wheel where it rubs against the main plate we put the tiny little blob of d5 or hp 1300 and then we can put that three-quarter plate back on and in chronographs you'll pretty much always find that there are no multiple bridges like in other less complicated movements you need bigger thicker plates basically to accommodate all the chronograph components maybe additional hour counter that kind of thing so you'll have bigger plates and often more plates if you look at the eberhardt navy master video for instance it's basically five layers of plates which is not that uncommon in the chronograph with both our counter and multiple data complications this one is uh quite simple it's also a good introduction to chronographs if you haven't worked on one before all right we see that the wheels run freely so we can turn the movement over and start putting in the keyless works very straightforward no date no hour counter just the keyless works and the motion works so while we're doing this let's touch upon the whole subject of learning watchmaking there are a lot of good resources out there i think probably the best one on youtube is the watch repair channel very sober very good explanations and really good for learning a lot of techniques and names of things that kind of stuff and there are a lot of less educational channels that are also really good like the naked watchmaker i think is very good but it's also a question of uh how much are you looking at these channels for entertainment value and how much for actually learning a little bit maybe working on some watches yourself and if you are in the latter category then i mentioned it before but i think the british horological institute's distance learning course is a fantastic resource it's basically a set of lessons that you run through on your own time i believe it's still organized into 12 lessons where you have one binder for each lesson with the questions with practical exercises that kind of thing and of course you can supplement that with going to actual courses well not in 2020 obviously and not really in 2021 so far either but towards the end of the year they probably started up again you can of course also enroll in local watchmaking schools if you're very serious and young enough then the wash step is probably the pinnacle but for most people just tinkering a little bit at home and maybe opening up an old watch that hasn't much value anyway and i think these resources online are really good and it's a fun hobby destroying a couple of watches here and there and telling your wife that uh yeah yeah i'll fix it where's my watch you said you would fix it yes i think the dog ate it we don't even have a dog but as guys i think we'll learn by destroying basically at least that's uh the pattern i recognize with my own eight-year-old learning by destroying or picking apart rather of course when i grew up in norway it wasn't quite like that we had to walk for four hours with snow up to our chest just to destroy a watch nowadays you can basically just uh take one from your father or mother and destroy it anyway we're almost ready with the base movement put a little bit wind on and then we can oil the pallet fork which i'm not showing in this video but you can see it in for instance the latest ground cycle video okay let's put in some oil for most of the gear train we use a 90 10 so a light oil and then we use d5 or hp 1300 a little bit heavier oil for the center wheel and then we're pretty much ready for the time grapher we talked a little bit about the time graph for before but what we want to see are straight lines we see this look at pretty good we need to adjust the beat error that's 0.9 in all honesty we don't actually have to adjust that that's within the limits and if the movement didn't have a movable stud carrier we would probably leave it but on these movements and then all modern movements you can easily adjust a bit there so then we will always try to get it close to zero and once we have the beat there under control we can adjust the index there are these two little pins that straddle the hairspring and by sliding it back and forth we adjust how short or long the working length of the hairspring is and the shorter spring is stiffer and it's therefore gonna slid faster and vice versa so by adjusting those two we should be able to get the watch running nicely with the base movement in good order we can start putting back the chronograph parts first thing we put on is the driving wheel it's a friction fit on the fourth wheel legs than the pivot so the chronograph driving wheel will always be running as long as the watch itself is running so to make the chronograph wheel that is the central uh seconds hand wheel to make that wheel rotate we then need to have a clutch now what i didn't show here is that this clutch wheel what you want to do is to assemble it first and then test that it runs very very freely the clutch also has this eccentric screw or plug that's at the end that's just close to the escape wheel they may look like screws but they are eccentrics meaning that they are asymmetric so if you turn it one end is going to be longer or shorter in the actual terms unless uh adjust the distance between things so the eccentric for the clutch adjust the distance between the clutch wheel and the driving wheel as a general rule the teeth should be two-thirds of the length engaged with each other all right we put the cam back in put in this floating switching piece not sure what else to call it and we use some molecule dx or mobius 9504 and then on the posts we of course use d5 or hp 1300. now the operating lever is held in place this yoke and a very strong spring underneath which can be a bit tricky to both take off and reassemble we just have to be a bit gentle with that and not screw things down until we know they're in a good place also don't unscrew them before we know that the spring tension is released and this is the blocking lever what it does is basically hold the hammer back until you release the push button and it does so while this little pin on the underside of the hammer that then slides along this blocking lever until it's released when you let up on the pusher quite interesting in design now we can put in the chronograph wheel i'm going to put some molecule dx or 9504 on this heart-shaped cam very important that the cam is highly polished and also lubricated so that when the hammer hits it and goes straight back to a zero position and then we have just a couple more springs we have the cam spring and we have the hammer spring good idea with these springs is to screw them down so that they're held in place loosely and then put them into their position before you screw them down fully then we can put the balance back in and yes we are going to screw the down just run out of battery so with the movement running and everything tested we turn our attention to the case and the crystal crystal is actually in pretty okay shape we're just going to polish it a little bit but the case is quite dirty and especially dirty is the pusher if we look at the pusher a bit close up this green stuff that is uh let's say dna left over stuff from the skin and it's quite infected all of these parts and that is simply the reason that chronograph wouldn't start that the pusher didn't really work properly so we're gonna get all that gunk out we clean it with some peg wood and also an old broken oiler before we put things into the ultrasonic and then we're slightly polishing the pusher tube to get the last piece of the gunk off cleaning it in some degreasing fluid i use something called the essence of renata you slide the fluid or one dip and then we can see that it looks indeed a little bit cleaner it's quite common for these pushers to be screwed into the case so just fit the case over the pusher and then screw it down from the inside put a little bit of silicone on the pusher and that seems to do the trick it operates as it should the thing with mechanical watches is that everything is perfectly logical everything and anything happens for a very logical reason and for this one it was that the pusher simply didn't operate now we're putting the crystal back on i was planning to change the crystal the crystal for this model is a little bit uh special and it's in good enough condition so i decided to keep it and just polish it a little bit when putting the crystal back in a crystal press like this is very convenient just be careful you don't make any marks on the case or on the crystal itself um and finally for the case back also a lot of gunk so the amount of dna in this watch tells me that it's been at least 30 years since anyone paid any real attention to this you can see the gasket is hard and brittle which is also very common and coincidentally this degradation of old gaskets is also a big part of the reason why vintage watches are not waterproof even though they might seem waterproof of course no watches are actually waterproof but anyway the biggest culprit is typically the crown but when you have old gaskets like that they sort of merge into the metal and it's very difficult to get a very tight fit again turning our attention to the dial so the dial is in good shape there's just this one spot right there that's a little bit noticeable otherwise it's just general small wear when working with dials you just have to be very very careful especially where there's lettering even though we're only using warm water and some soft sticks it's very easy to rub off the lettering so be very careful there oh some more nose there sorry about that but my religion bans me from cutting my nose here otherwise it's a very uh flexible religion but you know after 50 years then you do get a no-sare issue with appearing in public so this dial has a few loom dots as well and the 12 o'clock marker is a loom filled luckily these are in pretty good condition so we don't have to worry too much about that so we can put the dial back on the movement and then put the hands back on the biggest issue with chronographs is always to line up the chronograph seconds hand yes the minute counter and our account are also tricky but the second sand it's just much more obvious to to the eyes if it's misaligned and it's not always easy to align it well in the first place so being very very meticulous then you might be able to do it in the first go otherwise you'll just have to take it off and try again take it off i take it off might sorry just take it off not too self delete this incoherent babble and when putting hands on it's also a good idea to use rodico for instance that way you're in no danger of scratching the dial so we did manage to get the second hand on quite well aligned so we're testing it a couple of times and then we can case the movement again one of the last things that we need to do if you remember initially we saw that the crown was not original so we sourced an original crown for the watch typically find this based on the reference number and i think a beautiful watch like this deserves an original crown before putting the crown on we just shape up the threads a little bit so we have this old watchmaker screw plate for that i'm using loctite that's not glue it's a rubbery type compound when it dries that simply makes the crown bond a little bit more to the screw to the stem all right looks like it runs that we can operate things properly last thing we need to do before putting the strap back on is to put a new gasket on the case back give it a little bit of a silicon makes it stay supple a little bit longer then we can put the case back back on and we're going to find the strap to put back on let's just make sure that everything works as it should first nothing wrong in triple and quadruple checking all right before we admire the watch on the wrist let's have a quick preview of what's up next time on the channel we're gonna look at a russian watch or a soviet watch but for now this is the omega geneva chronostop on the wrist might be fine looking watch if i may say so all right i hope you liked this video if you did then clicking like and subscribe will very much help the channel will help you get more content like this and it will help other people find the channel my name is theon from vintagewatch services signing off we'll be back shortly with a new video until then tata

Channel: Vintage Watch Services

Views: 4,496

Rating: 4.9628482 out of 5

Keywords: vintage watches, watch repair, watch servicing, mechanical watch, old watch, vintage watch, horology, watchmaker, watch services, watch restoration, watchmaking, old omega watch, omega chronostop, omega service, omega restoration, 145.009

Id: tnazijYRAQg

Length: 44min 17sec (2657 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021