Vintage Zodiac Seawolf Restoration Part 2 - Cleaning

[Music] hi guys and welcome to my retro watches this is the next episode in the zodiac Seawolf restoration and this video I'm aiming to clean the movement clean all these parts some of it by hand and the rest of it will be going in the ultra psychic and then also in the watch cleaning machine and at the end of all of the cleaning processes plan to try and put it back on the scope here and we can have a look and see if we've made any improvements or not so I'm jumping straight into it because otherwise it's going to be a long video so what we're looking at straight away is the main plate and as you can see there is quite a lot of dirt there now I'm gonna try and come in with a bit of peg wood and just see it's hard because I've got the angle but here you can see it moves quite freely and as we scan around there's a bit of where there's a lot of scratches and stuff gunk here this is where the key this would be of course we expect a lot of grease and oil there and this is on the wrong side I was going to say I saw earlier when I was looking where the barrel was and that was pretty bad so what we'll do is I'll flip it over and just get that in focus like so so with a lot of grease and gunk here especially I've also gotta wear so where it looks a bit gold that is clearly where the barrels being rubbing now I don't know how I come him how this watch was I think it was 1950s from memory so you're gonna see somewhere for certain and again we're looking at some of the jewels here we stand or two but actually so what you'd normally do is you do you try and pick out the holes for some peg would trying to get rid of some of that dirt and other holes that you can see use a bit of rowdy Co try loosen up as much as you can before you try and wash the watch in the solutions this jaw is particularly dirty as you can see now one feature I've not shown you on my microscope actually and because normally if I just move this you can't really tell but this this is a this is a glass bottom and normally I've got a white insert here because it comes with a last one or a white one and the last one is really for examining things from underneath because this microscope has a light that shines up and if I change it to that which is the camera doesn't like it if I look down the lens of the microscope I get a much more better definition and I can see the jewels much better sadly I was hoping it was going to come out and camera a lot better but it just can't cope with it can it unfortunately I'm wondering if I can reduce the setting of the brightness no doesn't make any difference really but if this is a really good now that looks good so you can get a really good look at the the jewels to see for any cracks and certainly for any dirt I've only started doing this fairly recently actually I must confess it doesn't like to resolve it does it but you can see you can just about see there like that there's a lot of grease under on that one so it's just a good feature at some point in time I will do a review of this microscope because I use it a lot in these videos I've quite a few of you comment I think some of you actually bought it on the affiliate links as well so it would be nice if you've got it what you actually think of it but yeah they're really really handy things to have so let's just go back onto the view that this thing can cope with so that is the main plate now we did look at certain components on the original video orbit I know that the original video was quite a long time ago but how about Christmas in the way and some other things so for instance this is the fourth wheel and I've now lost it there we go so there's a lot of I have trouble with this the first time around and out or something they have trouble again so there is a lot of dirt and grime and a bit of rust Ashley on the the stem here which we'll need to clean off so I'm going to cut to the bench and have a quick look at how I'm going to clean these I've got a little method and show you a bit more because I've suspect that they said there is some rust on here because if you remember it was sort of stuck in the center wheel and the centre wheel was also sort of stuck on the can opinion because there was quite a rust so we'll get those three components out in particular and I'll show you what I'm going to try and do okay here we're looking at the parts that I'm concerned with or at least these three parts here the main plate will just get a good clean now on the bench first of all so I said I was going to use paint wood now if you don't know what paper wood is you buy it in little bundles like this I'm not sure what would it actually is but it's used in watchmaking and you can just use a knife or even a pencil sharpener or something to make little points on the ends or little tools on the ends and I can then for instance find some of the dirty parts with the pegwood and try to loosen them off a bit and then you want a really good point if you can get it if you were going to pick some of the jaw holes which I will do but I tend to like going around like I say all these stubborn places first who didn't know there was some on this side as I say it just loosens it all up helps it because I've learned from experience despite the fact I'm going to be washing these twice and very thoroughly that you can still do all of the best washing and still get baked on grime that if you just done this at the start would have come off so we can just see here this is just a bit of really baked on something-or-other some grime and that probably wouldn't come out through cleaning or not very easily so I hopefully you kind of get the picture I will go over that a bit more thoroughly of course now the other parts so I was if you remember the first video and hopefully you watch that these three components are all sort of stuck together and the center wheel which is here this is the fourth wheel the fourth wheel goes through the center wheel and that was stuck and that was stuck because I'm assuming there was eva gunk or rust in the tube or the hole that it goes through and then of course there's also the can opinion as well which I'm also going to try and clean just to be to be sure so for the really small parts it's kind of difficult to know what to use but I am going to use a brooch and you might just be able to see that here and you can buy brooches in sort of kit form a bit like this these are fairly cheap ones are all different sorts of sizes and normally you'd use these sort of things to open holes up a bit they have sharp side so it's like a square shape I think or triangular can't remember and the shaft here if you like is tapered it's obviously thinner at the bottom thicker on the end and you try and find the most appropriate fit and then you can sort of open things out the crate on can opinion so if you've got a really really tight can and pinion which does happen then you can put a smoothing broach down there turn it a few times it just takes half a foul of an inch or something like that out maybe less but it's enough just to loosen it up a bit so the plan was is just to try and use this broach in these two parts hopefully it'll fit because I've not tested that yet and we'll see so again I'm just it's gone in quite easily it's hard for me to know if you can see this and I don't want it to go too far and amaya so you have to use my fingers here it's probably not the best but I can actually sit don't know again I don't know whether you guys would but I can see there's a lot of dirt on the end of the brooch which is good news really because that's what we want and then I'm going to turn that round of course and whoops carefully try and do that on the other side now I'm not really done this before or this method before because I've never had this problem so I'm only thinking on my feet that this is probably the best way to try and clean that hole and I really am NOT trying to force it on this brooch because if I do that will remove material and this stage I don't particularly want to open the hole up more than I have to this is literally I can just feel it touching the sides so it's hoping just to clean up as much of that rust as possible I can definitely see it on the tool but again I'm not too sure whether you guys would be able to so I will do that again and then of course the cannon pinion as you can see actually but the can opinion it goes up quite a way on this it's almost not the right term size broached just at the top here and yeah I don't want to be doing too much now hopefully this is going to work because if it doesn't work and we can't salvage these parts then of course I've got to source them and you'll have to excuse me but it is raining what a lot here and I've got a flat roof above me so that might be coming through on the microphone so that's that's the method I would be using on these parts I realize now that it's not really in shots I do apologize so what remains is the center we're at the fourth wheel here and I actually asked a friend of mine in the group how best to try and clean one of these and he said use fiberglass brush which I use all the time on digital watches actually I never really thought of that but is pretty good idea so the plan now is to gently get that into some rowdy Co and this is a fiberglass brush by these all the time on eBay for very little money you can twist them and the end gets bigger I'm trying to keep it as small as I can because that way it is a little bit more abrasive and I will want to try and figure out a way in which I can just clean that stem now again I will apologize the camerawork here in this video is probably going to be shocking but I'm just trying to give you ideas if you've got this sort of problem and how to how to combat it because it's hopefully at the end we'll find out whether this is going to work because the plan now will be is to as I say clean the clean the parts as best we can inspect them and then I will tented Li rebuild the movement just the movement side not the dial side just to see if it's going to run first of all then if it runs that's great because then I can take it apart oil it and do it properly and rebuild it as it should be as you should be done so again with my eye I can just about see that this is actually getting a little bit brighter so will be pleased with that I will do a little bit more work off camera because I can get a bit closer to it with my head because right now my head is about a foot and a half away and an angle and that is not very good when you're dealing with these really really small parts so I'm gonna clean those now a little bit more and then we're gonna start loading them into the Machine and I'll show you what I'm going to do there okay it's now time for the cleaning it might notice a bit of a sound difference as well potentially because I forgot to put my microphone in on the last part so it's just using my phone microphone which from experience isn't very good but there you go I'm not exactly a professional am I so I'm trying an old method longtime viewers of the channel have seen this before but new guys well you know this is one way of doing it because this movement is quite old and evidently quite dirty what I found is just running it through the watch cleaning machine is not enough I won't clean all the old deposits off now there is one way of doing it which would be to wash it all in essence of Renata but you can't get that everywhere in the world certainly get it in here in the UK it's hairspring degreaser but it's been very very good when I've used it on other components the trouble with it is it's very expensive and evaporates very rapidly I've actually got some in this jar here so what I'm going to do it's a little pot here full of just normal water and I got some dish soap and I am going to just pour only a little bit of detergent in there I don't want I won't enough to sort of degrease but if you put too much degreaser or you know detergent so I say can potentially strip some of the coating off the components which is absolutely not desirable at all I've tended to find a dish soap is pretty safe because it's not strong enough I've used other detergents before and wreck things so sticking solely with that so I'm going to put all the components into the water the small finer components or sensitive components are going to go into these little baskets that I've got here which again you can get and get off my my website or you can get them from eBay or anywhere else for that matter the balance I'm going to leave out and I've also got the point fork in here I'm gonna leave that out as well purely because I just washed those inner and outer they will go in there and that will also do a cycle at some point through the ultrasonic as well so I'm going to now just load everything up and then we'll wash them and I'll show you it going off in the other side [Music] alright ok so all the parts are loaded into the baskets and into the water as well one thing I didn't mention is the shop jewel on the main plate I've taken out and put it in the Renata I've already serviced the mainspring I did that a few weeks ago because I was doing a whole load of them so I did that as well at the same time unfortunately there was nothing wrong with it it seemed absolutely fine um one last thing before I go this is I don't if you see that part that is the broken minute wheel I think it was wasn't it was broken so the point is cleaning that and I've left all the screws in and some of the really fine springs and the reason for that is I'm it's the first time in here usually when I'm doing my psychos I know my psychos inside out with screws these ones I am not too sure on so I've photographed where all the parts were previous so I can match the screws up to the parts and what I will do basically to clean the screws is I'll just take out whichever ones are in the back compartment I'll put them in their own art I give it a shake give it a couple of minutes in that and take them out and dry them and then put them back in the same spots so I know I've got the right screws for the right components somebody actually asked me that in the group the other day or in the in the community seat section of the this channel so now there we go everything is going to go in to the ultra site incidentally these trays man what I love to sell you these trays the amount I might get asked for these I've even thought about doing it but I can't really cousins UK comm sell these they're very very very cheap and it's worth the investment I've got quite a few of them but for me to buy alone in and try and sell them to you guys certainly when you across the world the postage is going to be crazy for me so forget that so I'll put these into the water put the lid on and then we'll go to the ultra site right then here's my ultra site I've had it warming up I've got it set to 50 degrees and centigrade by the way and then we've got a timer here this all looks very back to the future I'm gonna clean these for 20 minutes I've got everything in there I've got some water in here as I say it's all nice and heated up this is a great ultrasonic it's a metal bath so it doesn't leak because I've had plastic ones before we serve rubbish they end up blowing up works really really well and it was fairly cheap I think it was less than 50 pounds in the UK this is the 2-liter version this very brand or so there's a 1.3 3 data and then he goes up and up and up I've got links for those not that I'm trying to push it but again pretty good tool to have so I'm just gonna place that in the water there and honestly weight down just a little bit with a piece of steel because the plastic thing likes to roll around in there so then I'm just going to kick it off and watch it count down [Music] rather than a bit of handheld phone action now obviously that's just finished in the ultrasonic and I wanted to try and show you the the water here so it's a sort of mild tea color so clearly it has shifted quite a lot of dirt I put on this white tissue that you can kind of see all the bits it's shaking off so that's pretty good what I'll do now is of course take all these out and then I need to load them all into other baskets ready to go into the cleaner machine which I will do now I'm not gonna bother filming that bit it seems to be pointless but will then run it through the cleaning machine and see what we get okay here's my cleaning machine and it's a vintage one it works perfectly well runs by little motor on the top me you can't really see in the shot spins this basket here which I've got all the components in in these three jars so I've actually got to talk to cleaning fluids one rinse and then over the back here is a heater and I'm just going to spin them all in there pretty much for the same sort of time so 10-15 minutes in each jar and then of course I spin in the heater to dry them off once all that is done then I can finally inspect the parts and see if they're going to be any good ready for assembly [Music] [Applause] [Music] right the cleaning has finished I hope you like the little time-lapse video there with a bit of music put on the top of it I'm trying to keep you entertained whilst chatting to you while we're doing this so I've just got a few parts out here to be fair there's some more in the baskets and of course we've got the main wheels that we were looking at earlier on so the plan is now just to put the main plate on the microscope and a few of the components we'll have a little look at those and see what we can think I will probably end up looking at everything but not on film because otherwise that would take you another hour I don't want to waste too much of your time so we'll have a look see how good they're gonna be now I've not looked at them and I've been at this stage before with old dirty watches and you've gone through all of this and trust me the cleaning was quite a long so it's 20 minutes in the ultrasonic and then each jar was about 15 minutes in each jar and then another 15 minutes in the heating so so an hour and 20 minutes all told and you can put all that effort in and then you check them on here and find out that you need to go and do it all over again so hopefully that's not going to be the case this time but we'll see so I'm going to go to the microscope now and we'll start seeing the how it's progressed right so here we go this is the main plate and straight away we'll go over to the barrel here where the barrel would sit and obviously we can see again all that wear but to be honest that looks okay so these look okay now then I do see something there that I don't like and I'm just dropping everything in the background here so you can see this hole that clearly isn't round is it so oh I do hope that that isn't going to be fatal at this moment in time this is got something to do with the how the automatic works whines the mainspring so clearly it's had a wobble on for quite some time and it's wore away doubt it's supposed to be that shape I'm gonna have to assembly to anyway at some point to find that out so it could be not a critical part certainly wear like that is not nice to see however we're here at the moment to see how good or bad the cleaning was it's around here was particularly dirty now there was a like a pin sticking up and that did actually come out in the cleaning because I found it at the end and is little screw so I put that safely away for now some of it looks like dirt doesn't it but it's not it is corrosion and scratches so again back on over to here so the jewels have all cleaned up very nicely so let's just turn that one over and have a little quick look at the other side now I told you it's not the jewel out there the shop jewel and then this had quite a lot of debris and didn't it that was all grimed baked on it's unbelievably scratched there I can't remember exactly what would be there it's gonna be part of the keyless but that's not normal damages in that so I don't know what that is but it's it doesn't look good so so far the main plate at a glance looks pretty good so let's bring in some of the wheels and see how we we fare with those okay you might remember this wheel I think this is the our wheel it's been so long since we took this apart I can't remember all that the parson he looks like how a wheel to me and this was really really bad now it has got something there and that is kind of baked on so I'm I have to get some pegwood I need my look look good but a lot of this is tarnish rather than actual stuff is still stuck on it and compared to how it was it's it's okay the teeth still intact but in all honesty that might well attack it with a bit of pegwood and I might just wash that again in a bit of rain a stir and just see if I can improve that a little bit next up will be the let's have a look at the center wheel so I've got it sitting here and still see quite a bit of I think is that corrosion or it's just on the lip isn't it actually if we look down then we can just see down the hole there so maybe just a little bit more of a clean with that one but generally I'm quite pleased because this I think was one of the main culprits let's just turn it over and try and look at those leaves the leaves are the gears if you like here on the middle getting a bit of reflection about to try and put a bit more light down here but no that doesn't look too bad at all so okay the Canon pinion so what we can see here quite nicely actually is that looks pretty good doesn't it sometimes I think there's dirt and it's just a speck it's on the thing it's on the bottom of the microscope base so there is a little bit of dirt picking up on that and again that could be just because of this thing here so I might just want to wash that again briefly as I just thought it nearly went flying but it didn't so let's move that out of the way and keep it safe and then we've got the one that's always been difficult to film the certainly fourth wheel so let me just see if I can turn that over and focus in on that axle we still got quite a lot of rust and tarnish on there I'll try and put a photo of how it was but I think that he's gonna need a little bit more work don't you think it's certainly must be improved I think but I need to have a better better Garrett trying to get a rid of some more of that rust there how I'm going to go about that don't know I'm just going to go back to the fiberglass pan I think clean it that way and then put it in some of the cleaning fluid and let it soak in there for a little while maybe leave it in there overnight perhaps and see what happens that said you know will it interfere too much in how it runs very difficult to say I mean obviously any sort of corrosion is not desirable and I don't know what sort of if we can even get this thing going how good we're going to get it and I'm reluctant to buy new parts necessarily straightaway but we'll see I think the plan will be to try and clean that up a little bit more and then I will rebuild the watch briefly to see if I'm I'm going to be able to use these pass or not I think the last one I'll do it perhaps is the balance because I've ran the balance through now in the renata let's just see if I can bring this safely up here and bring it into focus these are pesky little things under the microscope and I can't quite see there we go so sitting now nice and neatly into its hole and you know what that looks pretty good doesn't it the coils look nice and centric the terminal curve just here it looks okay to me I'm going to say straight away without hesitation that if nothing else the balance is good and that's always a relief to me because balances are my little nemesis really so I'm quite pleased Tom just actually got another bridge here so let's just put that on and again everything looks pretty good there doesn't it these jaws are all nice and clean so great stuff I think most of the cleaning is done we just need to go over a few little more of these stubborn parts to be sure okay let's bring this video to a close so I've shown you in this video the alder ting the movement was right at the start we've inspected some parts and then I've shown you the process I've gone through to clean those parts as best I can given that it's pretty old and it's all baked on I think the method I've used with a bit of detergent the ultrasonic and then the the watch painting machine has given us some pretty good results and grant it hasn't given you know hasn't cleaned all of the the mock off but what we can see really is a bit of rough certainly on that fourth wheel the fourth really is what's concerning me right now what do I do you know do I persevere try and clean it a bit more with the fiberglass pen and then clean it again through the machines or do I try and just buy a new one if I can and be done with it you know that back of my mind I'd be really interested to know whether the watch is going to run to start with in a way and then would it run with that existing fourth wheel or would it run better with a new one of course it's gonna run better with a new one really I'm answering my own questions but you know if you've got some just suggestions then please leave it in the comments below really would welcome what any of you have got to say really on that matter and while right I've got another question because hopefully some of you out there who are more experienced than me maybe you've worked on one of these watches before so it comes you're not going to see this I don't think you might not focus but it has this bezel on it and now on dive watches that I'm familiar with certainly seeker ones you can just pry these off to get them off and clean them now this is really really stiff and the concern for me is it's so flat to the case that I'm not sure how whether I should pry it off or if I did try to pry it off whether they would even break it so I'm a real loss as to what to do probably leave it for the best right now but I'm hoping that somebody may have removed one of these before and they could tell me what to do my other thought is to chuck it in the cleaning solution I know it wash but then will it take some of the plating off will it take some of the paint off you know is it best just to leave as is and it's really stubborn it will twist and turn but not only just so I'll be keen to know if I could free that open if anybody's got any suggestions so if you have once again please leave your comments down below so that's it I hope you enjoyed this one the next one in this series is going to be the rebuild and let's hope that goes according to plan but we'll find out one way or another if it rebuilds and it doesn't do any good then well you know maybe I've learned something so thanks very much for watching please if you are really into watches come and join the Facebook group retro and vintage watches and restorations there's lots of us in there and we're all as mad about this subject as possibly you guys are who are watching so come and join the fun in there and definitely check my Instagram out that's my retro watches where I try and post as much as I can of my collection or my daily wares etc etc so see you in the next one guys thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: My Retro Watches

Views: 12,244

Rating: 4.9224138 out of 5

Keywords: mark lovick, watch repair channel, my mate vince, spencer klein, Sea Wolf, Zodiac watch, watch service, watch repair, watch repairs, zodiac sea wolf, zodiac sea wolf 53, vintage zodiac seawolf, How to service a vintage watch, how to repair a mechanical watch, just one more watch, AS1624, AS1624 watch movement, watch restoration, vintage watch restoration, watchmaker, tronicsfix, cleaning watch parts, watch cleaning machine, watch cleaning, restoration videos

Id: JyPnXvSbTlo

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020