Omega Seamaster Automatic From the 50's With a Killer Dial Vintage Watch Restoration

Hello there and welcome back to another video here on Wristwatch Revival. My name is Marshall. Thank you so much for coming along. This time on the bench we've got this really sweet old Omega Seamaster. This has an automatic movement. It's from the 50s and as you can see that, well, it's in rough shape overall, but the dial has this really cool patina on it where it's, I don't know, probably got wet at some point and it's turned into this kind of golden creamy color that's really sweet. And I kind of have an idea for this watch that I'd like to try to restore it so that the crystal and the case and everything else looks really nice and shiny and new, but the dial still looks really like that. That really cool old school look with that neat pattern on it. So that's what I'm going to do. I bought this watch off of eBay. It was listed as not running well. Now let's find out. Let's put it on the timegrapher here and see how it does. Oh, it is not running well. Well, they were not kidding about that. Minus 312 seconds per day is the rate. That's really bad. The amplitude is 155 degrees, which is very low. We would hope that to be well up into the 200s for a watch of this age. So we've got some work to do to get this thing running. And of course, that is going to be our primary concern is making sure that it runs correctly. And then we'll take a look at the aesthetic aspects as well as we dive in. Ooh, yikes. Okay. Well, taking a quick look at the movement here, we can see that this is a really aesthetically pleasing movement from Omega. This is a bumper automatic movement. This is what they did before they had the free spinning rotors that you'll see in some of the other automatic movements. And the basic premise is that that rotor slides back and forth as you move your hand around. And every time it does that, it winds up the watch just a little tiny bit. And that way you don't have to wind it every day. As long as you wear it regularly, it'll keep going. But as we know, while the watch is running, it is really not running well. And we're going to have to do at least a service on this watch to try to figure out why that amplitude is so low. Amplitude is, think of it kind of like the horsepower of the watch. It's how much power is making it down to the balance wheel. And that's the part of the watch that regulates time. So that it's another way to say how healthy the watch is running, how much power is getting through. So we need to get that amplitude up. 150 degrees isn't going to do it. Taking a quick look at the watch out of the case. And yeah, look at that patina. I'm really curious what happened to this watch to give it that look. But I'm telling you one thing right now, I am not touching that dial. I think it looks really cool. And I want that to come out in the final form. I just want to kind of clean up everything around it to sort of showcase that dial. At least that's my goal. So we'll start off by taking off the hands. You can see that this watch has a seconds hand that's not central. And this was one of the ways that they did this before they kind of figured out how to easily put the watch hands in the center of the dial. And it's kind of an aesthetic choice. It makes the watch look older, as basically all watches were made this way for a very long time. It gives a little more of a vintage feel maybe. You can see I've got this special box that holds the hands. It actually has like a plastic membrane inside that kind of suspends them in there. Just for safekeeping. Okay, so let's get into this movement and start disassembling it. Now we've got a couple of challenges ahead of us. The first thing is just that this has kind of a weird you know bumper automatic system. And I haven't worked on this movement before, which is usually the case when I'm working on a watch here for the channel. So not a huge deal there. But it does mean we have to figure out how this bumper automatic movement transfers the movement of that bumper rotor that slides back and forth right there. You can see it has a big weight on the bottom to help it move back and forth easier. How it transfers that power to winding the watch. As you can see the watch is running. And that means that there's some at least some amount of power in the mainspring. And with that, that means that we need to let down the mainspring. Now we should be able to take off the rest of these automatic works like that. And basically we've just turned the watch into a manual wind watch. But if I move this click out of the way, I can allow the mainspring to slowly unwind. And eventually the watch will stop on its own. It looks like it still has a little bit of juice left in it. But as long as it isn't going to do the thing where it kind of snaps to a close, I'm fine with that. As usual, we'll start by taking off the balance assembly. This has the balance spring in it. Some people call it the hairspring as well. And that's really one of the most delicate parts of the watch. So it's it's worth it to get it out of the way early just to reduce the chance of damage. Now we can take the dial off of the watch. Like I said, that dial is kind of the superstar of this watch. It's so cool. So we'll put that in a dial holder for safekeeping. This kind of does a similar thing to what the hands holder does. It sort of suspends the dial in there just so, again, it just doesn't get dinged or damaged while it's sitting around waiting to be reinstalled. Now we can take off the hour wheel and then the cannon pinion. I've got that cannon pinion removal tool. Really does a great job with just taking those off straight away in a safe way as well. Bend the part that it's attached to, which is the center wheel, by the way. And now we can very carefully take off this bumper assembly. Those springs you see at the bottom there, those are what the bumper can hit up against and not just be slamming against another piece of metal over and over again. And so they put springs in there so that it kind of sends it back the other direction to help it wind. And continuing the disassembly, we can go for the crown wheel here, which has very, very small screws holding it in place. It's quite difficult to get in here. There we go. Yeah, those are very tight, especially for how small of a screw it was. And then this part comes off as a two-piece. And now we can take off the ratchet wheel. A little sticky, but it comes straight up. Okay, continuing the disassembly, the click can now come off. This is held on by a screw and then there's a spring underneath that provides tension for it to rub up against the ratchet wheel. And that spring comes out pretty easily here with the aid of a plastic stick so it doesn't go jumping off on us. And now I can start to look at taking off the barrel bridge. As you can see, it's three screws that hold down the barrel bridge. That part really does need to be held on firmly because it provides kind of the structure for the barrel and all of the winding. There we go. And we can continue to take off the barrel bridge here. Well, it looks pretty dirty. Definitely going to need some good cleaning there. And now I can remove the winding stem and part of the keyless works as well like that. I should be able to get the... there we go. I should be able to get that barrel out of there now. It comes out easily. And then I can finally take off this kind of automatic spring bumper holder thing. And you can see there's the springs underneath that again kind of send that bumper rotor back the other direction. Really clever design to be able to come up with a way for a watch to wind itself, right? It's like there has to be power, right? There needs to be some amount of energy to do that. And the people that thought of this thought, well, people wear watches. They don't sit on a desk by themselves. And so there's plenty of power kind of floating around just by the fact that human beings move their arms around, which is kind of an ingenious way to look at it. And then they figured out a way to take that power, that movement of the arm, and turn that into a winding. It's incredible, honestly, that they figured this out. Okay, it looks like the center wheel wants to come off with the train wheel bridge. Yeah, it's just stuck in there. So usually is an indicator of dried on oil. That's what I'm going to assume here. But it's pretty obvious that this watch needs a service badly. It's just very dirty, running slow and poorly, kind of a lot of indicators there. We'll hope that that's the extent of the issue. Can take off the pallet bridge and the pallet fork now. And as you can see, we're most of the way through taking this movement apart already. And there comes out that bridge and then the pallet fork is the last piece on this side. But there is the other side of the movement to address here as well that has the keyless works. Oh, this is a stubborn one too. There we go. Boy, this thing feels like it hasn't been serviced in a while. This is the setting lever spring, but it also acts as a cover plate for some of the other parts of the keyless work. So it's kind of a dual role part. Take that out, we can take the minute wheel out. And then once again, we do have to be careful here with the yoke. That yoke spring there is actually, where'd it go? Oh God. Thank God. I was just going to say that yoke spring can fly away on you. And that's exactly what happened, but it just sort of bounced over to my desk. Now, sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes it bounces away and you have no idea where it's at. And then you're in for a little bit of a flashlight and magnet time on the ground to try to find the dang thing. I'm working in my office. This is just my computer desk that I do these restorations at. So yeah, if it goes flying, it can be a while. Okay. Let's put the balance back on before we get the watch ready for the watch cleaning machine, mainly just to protect it. If it's in situ, as they say, if it's attached to the main plate, then it really can't get damaged. There's no room for parts to get in air or anything like that. We don't set it next to other parts like screws or wheels or anything either. And I always like to just use a little bit of air just to make sure that it's spinning freely. That lets me know that it's mounted properly back on the plate. And then I can tighten down the bridge that holds it in place. Now we need to take apart the main spring barrel here as well. This has the main spring and as well as the arbor inside of it. Kind of expect this to be pretty dirty and it does not disappoint. Yes, that is pretty dirty. Confirmed. Okay, now we can remove the main spring itself. The only real way to do this is by hand. When we put the main spring back in, we'll use a special tool to do so that keeps it flat and concentric. But for removing it, it's got to come out. So better to do it gently by hand. And there's the spring there. Now we still need to take apart the rest of the automatic works. Those are the parts that I put put back in my holder a little while ago. And as you can see, the rotor and the part below it are held together by three screws. After taking it apart, I don't really think I actually needed to take this apart. There's no friction or moving parts between the two. It's probably just to make it replaceable. But fair enough. This one does seem to have some friction slash moving parts together though that will probably require some lubrication. So I'm going to go ahead and take this apart even though it's just these absolutely tiny screws. It really makes you wonder how they made these, right? I mean, they made screws of this size going back to the 1800s. They are just so small. It's really kind of an incredible engineering feat. Makes you appreciate these little watches. Okay, well, that came apart reasonably. And now we can put everything into the cleaning basket so that we can do the watch cleaning machine. All the stuff needs to go into baskets here. Everything that's going to be through the watch cleaning machine has to be in either one of these tiny baskets or in some section of the bigger basket that kind of holds everything. And then that whole basket there will all get submerged into the cleaning fluids and go through each of the cycles for the watch cleaning machine. And as you can see, there's everything. Yeah, even the mainspring is going to go in. And this mainspring seems to be in fine shape. Planning on reusing it. Okay, now before we put that in the cleaning machine though, let's take a look at the case and see what we're looking at. First things first, this crystal is done for. So we're going to replace that for sure. And how does the case look? This is a little tough. At first I thought it might be plated, but I actually don't think it is. I think it's just got some deep pitting on it. You can see there's some staining and some dirt as well. This is going to be tough. I might be able to bring this back to life at least somewhat. But the problem is that there's a couple of things. One, there's this pitting, which means that you'd have to polish it down to that pit level, which can take away too much material. And I don't want to do that. It could make it not work as well. And two, it looks like there's supposed to be a bezel on the outside of the watch. And there doesn't seem to be, it seems to be missing. I don't think I'm going to be able to find one. I'll look to see if I can find, but these cases, they made a whole bunch of different variations of them. It's not like just one version. So I may just need to try to dress that up and see what it looks like without the bezel. And you can see the, there are some watchmakers markings on the inside. Back in the day watchmakers would scratch initials or codes inside to say who worked on it and when. So this watch has been serviced in its lifetime. It's just been a really long time since this is an old watch. Okay. And it goes into the watch cleaning machine. And while we're here and getting set up for this, I want to mention, I do have a Patreon for my channel. If you like what I'm doing here and you'd like to support me, you can head over to patreon.com slash wrist watch revival. And you get a thank you card with a sticker in the mail and you get some cool bonuses too. You can see the video is a little early, stuff like that. I really, I want to say thank you to everybody over there and especially to Zach, Trevor, eclectic, uh, Steven Spencer, S man, Santa Ross, Robert Ray, Ralph Nico, NT Mitchell, Michael, Mikey, Mark Marcus, Luke Lee, Kyle, Kim, Kevin, Kevin, Jim, Jeff, Jason, Jason, James, Jack Hammond, Jerry Garrett, George Franklin, uh, Evan, Erica, Dustin drew Dr. Uh, David Cosmo, Corey, Colin, Chris, Chris chiseled Brinton, Brian, Brian, Brett, Brett, Brander, Brad Bola, Anthony and Sophie, Andrew, Alex, and Adrian. Thank you so much for your support over there. I really do appreciate it. And with that, the watch is clean. If you've ever wanted to see what an entire watch looks like all taken apart, nice and shiny. Now this is it. Every little part that's going to go back into this watch. And when we reassemble, it is laid out here in front of your eyes. Isn't it nice. I won't say that way for long. Cause we got work to do here. First things first, let's get the, uh, let's get the main spring back into the barrel. I'm going to use a little bit of Mobius 8,200. This is a special grease just for main Springs. I'm going to take a little bit on my finger cots. And yeah, I know those are kind of funny. The reason why we don't wear gloves and we wear these finger cots instead is there's a couple of reasons. One, they're just more comfortable. They let you move your hands around more freely, uh, for precise work like this too. They're just less wasteful, right? Like you don't need to wear an entire glove every single time you work. So you're using a little bit less material. And three, they're just industry standard. They're just kind of what everybody uses for this stuff. So anyway, I put a little bit of that grease on there and then rub it along the length of that main spring, just to put a protective layer. And now I'm going to use my main spring winders to, uh, to safely put the main spring back into the barrel again, all in one kind of hit, right? You can do this by hand, but it's, it's usually destructive to the main spring and it's almost impossible not to at least dirty it. Use a little bit of Rodico just to clean up any of the extra grease. And now, oh yeah, you know, it's coming. Oh, that's just one of the best sounds in watchmaking. This hobby has a whole bunch of cool stuff going on, but that has to be one of the best feelings when that main spring clicks back into place like that. Okay. So now we can put the barrel arbor in and I'm going to put a little tiny bit of grease or of oil, excuse me, on the top, just because it does interact with that lid there. And I just want to make sure that it can spin freely and we can start the reconstruction here of the actual movement itself. First, we'll start with the train of wheels. So this is the escape wheel going into place. And yeah, this looks like the fourth wheel. Yeah. Cause it has that extended pivot. One thing that's kind of interesting is there's a long pivot on the bottom of this wheel that I'm actually having kind of a hard time placing. There we go. And that long pivot sticks out the other side of the movement and all the way through out the other side of the dial. And that's actually what you put the seconds hand on, because that wheel happens to go around one time every minute. And so if you put a seconds hand on it and put 60 seconds around it, you've got yourself a seconds hand. How cool is that? You're actually putting the hand directly onto that wheel. It's just the other post that sticks out the other side. Okay. So with the main spring, excuse me, the main spring barrel in place and the third wheel and the center wheel, now we can attempt to put on the train wheel bridge. And this is always a tricky operation as you can see each of those wheels. Yeah, that didn't work. So I immediately knocked out the escape wheel. So that means I have to kind of start over again here, get that reseated, make sure the other ones are, because when you put that plate on the top, the bridge on the top, it can very easily knock out any one of those pivots. And it either can come out the top or not be engaged in the bottom. And if any of those happen, then it won't see correctly and you can't tighten it down. So it is an exercise in patience. And as you can see, I'm going to use this red stick to help me just apply a little bit of extra pressure to the plate. You don't want to push too hard because you can bend a pivot, but there we go, starting to get there. And I'm just gently moving around the wheels underneath to hopefully maneuver the pivots just a little bit so that they'll fall into place in their jewel holes or in the bridge. And yeah, this isn't working. Okay. Take a deep breath. And as you can see, in this case, that third wheel has come out of its pivot. And so I need to relocate that, make sure each of these is seated correctly, and then try it again. And this is just how it goes sometimes. I mean, if you look, we are trying to line up four pivots on the top there all at once. So it's kind of a lot to ask, but if you're patient with it, it will eventually seat. You just have to... Oh, there we go. Just like that. Did you see how it went down? That's what we wanted to see. And now if I move the wheels, ah, yes, all of the wheels then in conjunction turn. So finally, we've gotten it. And sometimes it just takes a while. That's just how it is. Now we can screw down the train wheel bridge. And again, just a gentle check to make sure that all the wheels are spinning freely before we continue with the rebuild. And they are. So now I can put on the barrel bridge again. So far, so good. Everything seems to be kind of happily going back into place. All right. And now we can screw down the barrel bridge and give it yet another test. Looking good. Proceed with the click and the click spring. This is the type of spring that when it jumps away on you, you're in big trouble. Because it's so small and so light that, you know, it can go on a piece of clothing and get snagged. It can go into your hair and you can't feel it. And if you, God forbid, have carpet where you're working, which I happen to, you are in big trouble. So you got to be really careful with it. Now we can put on the ratchet wheel back on top and secure it into place. So I'm going to put a little bit of oil here on the surface where the crown wheel actually interacts. And I just have to line up these kind of absurdly small screws. Look how tiny. It's just, it's funny. This is a medium small movement, I would call it. You know, it's dwarfed by something like a pocket watch, but it isn't quite as small as some of the like ladies watches that we've worked on the movement, those old movements. But alas, on we go. So now I can, I don't really know how to put these springs back in. I think I just kind of jam them in there. Yeah, that looks like it worked. I can see somebody kind of carve something into the, into the bridge there. I, I don't like it when people do that. I mean, you're, you know, your goal is to try to leave as few markings as possible. I mean, to be honest, like it's kind of impossible, but like you're doing it on purpose when you're actually carving numbers or names or arrows or things like that into, I don't think that's really great. Okay. Somehow more tiny screws to hold this bridge in place. I have to get really close to these to get them down because they're so small. Okay. Now we can once again, just give this a quick, that doesn't look right. Do you see how much that barrel is moving back and forth? That is supposed to be flat. Uh, we need to investigate this. That did not feel right to me. I was just testing to make sure that everything was lined up, but that barrel was rocking back and forth more than you would hope. So let's take off that and take a look at the, Oh no. Yeah, this is a big problem. So do you see that hole? Check this out. I'll put it on the microscope so you can see, this is what they call side shake. And you're, you're supposed to test the side shake on things like this. This is way too much. There should not be that big gap. Also, you can see that the hole has become kind of elongated. It's almost like, yeah. And that, that shouldn't happen. See when I move it, do you see how the barrel, uh, lid can actually hit that wheel there? That means that there's way too much play. So we're going to do something I've never done before. I'm going to try to fix it. Now. There's a couple of ways to do this. You should have a watchmaker's lathe bore out the hole, trim down a piece of brass and press it into place. But I don't have that. And I've watched, um, our friends over at the chrono glide channel. There's a guy named Kali there who does really great tutorials on watchmaking. And he showed a video series once where he showed a way that you can, uh, repair this type of issue using a staking set, rounded stakes that match up with each other. And what you're, what I do here is I'm actually going to use a hammer to tap this down gently to bring that material in, to close up the hole a little bit and then use a broach. See, here we go. Oh God, this makes me really nervous though. Cause I've never done it before. My worst case is that I'm going to have to find a replacement part for this, but this is, um, I watched him do it on the video and I'm going to try it myself. Then I can use a broach to open up the hole to the right size again. Well, okay. So let's take a look at what I've done here. So a, will it fit over the arbor? No, it will not. So that means that I have brought the hole down in size, which is what I wanted to do. But I also kind of, I don't know, you could see that the hole where I tapped on it at first, wasn't really lined up properly. And so it kind of dented the side. And I don't know if that's going to be structural or just, it doesn't look very nice. If it doesn't look very nice, then that's fine because it's going to be covered up anyway. But if I actually managed to like structurally mess this up, then I'm going to have to just get a new part. So I'm going to take the broach here and I'm going to gently open up that hole again until it's the correct size, which should have just a little bit of side play, a little side shake, like I mentioned. So let's see if this will now fit over it. Because again, that dent that I made in the side, if it didn't affect the integrity of that inner circle, then it doesn't matter. As you can see, I have not opened the hole up quite enough, which is fine. I want to do this just a little tiny bit at a time using these broaches to just a little, you know, hundredth of a millimeter or two at a time until I can get it to fit just right where it can freely spin. But there is an excessive side shake. So let's take a look now at how it fits. Actually, yeah, that is fitting. And it does look like I've made a really good circle, although I will say this has effectively no side shake. And yeah, it's not spinning freely. It does spin, but it needs a little bit more space there. So we're going to open it up again. And it looks like the hole has stayed really round and concentric. I just made an extra dent, I guess, in the area there. So for a first time, I'll take it. Let's see how this looks after I open it up just a tiny bit more. There we go. Now it's spinning freely. Let's give it a quick check. That's what you want to see. See, a little tiny bit of side shake is okay. It's just when you have way too much like we did before that it becomes an issue. And you know what? That can affect amplitude because that part can drag against a wheel or a bridge. And if that happens, guess what? It slows down the watch. So that might have been the reason why we had the slow amplitude that and also the fact that the watch clearly needs to be serviced. Okay. So let's just give it a quick check. And yeah, that is exactly what we want to see. So a new repair technique added to the repertoire. Now, again, there's a proper air quotes way to do this, but I just don't have the tools or the expertise to do it yet. And that'll have to wait for me down the line. So let's reinstall the wheel on the top here, the ratchet wheel, and then just give it a quick... How does it... See, look at that. No movement. Just a tiny, tiny bit. Remember before how it was rocking all over the place? We fixed it. That feels really good. It's also just really cool that I learned how to do this from a fellow YouTuber, right? I mean, I basically learned everything I know about watchmaking from other YouTubers. Mark Lovick from the Watch Repair channel here on YouTube was my inspiration for all of this stuff. And I took all of his classes. I highly recommend them. You can find them at watchfix.com. And he can take you through all the basics that I went through when I was first starting as well. And I, like I said, I highly recommend them. And no, this isn't paid or anything. I don't get anything for it. I just really like him and his classes, and he's been a big inspiration for me. And I just think it's cool, you know, that, you know, we can have a community here on YouTube that kind of inspire each other to try new things. And I mean, this hobby's been one of my favorite things. All right, we can continue now with the keyless works here. Putting on the yoke, a little bit of medium oil here for these posts, which hold an intermediate wheel as well as the minute wheel. And once again, here's the yoke spring. Born to fly, these things. But it looks like we got away with it this time. And now we can put in the winding stem and make sure that everything's lined up and working properly. There's a setting lever, and there's a minute wheel. And now the keyless works are almost back together. I'm going to tighten down the setting lever spring and just give it a quick test. Yeah, it's a little... there we go. Once you see it click over, then I'll usually use this grease here right where that part clicks over, and that helps it operate just a little bit better because it is a fairly high friction part. I mean, it's meant to be difficult to pull that out. And there, after it gets a little bit of grease on it, you can see that it works much better. And that's just switching from winding to hand setting. For automatic watches, you don't need to wind them with the stem if you don't want, but oftentimes you want to give it a little wind if you haven't worn it for a while. Here, I'm going to use some of the medium oil once again, and I'm trying to kind of get it into... there we go, trying to get it to flow in between where the barrel and the bridge meet so that they can flow freely. Once again, just trying to get us the most amplitude that we can. Well, while we have it over here, let's go ahead and take care of oiling the This is a process where you put our lightest viscosity oil in between the pivot of a wheel and the jewel that it sits in. It's really simple, but it's actually kind of a tricky thing to do because you don't want oil splashing around all over the place. Okay, with that, we can now start to put together the automatic works once again, and this is a very, very tricky part to put on. There's a tension spring on the other side that kind of holds it down, but you have to put this screw in while it's under tension, so I'm trying to hold it down with the tweezers, but they're kind of in the way, and can I get this screw? Yes! Okay, well, I did it, and maybe it wasn't quite as tricky as I thought, but as you can see, now it's held under tension, and that just means... that's basically a way to make it so that a wheel can turn one direction but not the other. Now I need to reassemble this component of the automatic winding works, and this is, once again, I mean, look at the size of this screw! Do you see how... it is so small! It baffles the mind that they were able to even manufacture these, let alone that I have to somehow get these things together here. Really incredible feat of engineering to make something this small, because remember, they had to make huge quantities of these, and they had to all be the same. Like, the quality control on these has to be identical. Like, you cannot let these things slip through if they're not perfect. Into place they go, finally, and now we can reinstall this part. I have no idea what this thing's called, but this is the inner... this is the part that interacts with two things. One, the crown wheel, which you can see below it. As it turns, then it turns the ratchet wheel, so that's how the watch gets wound. And then on the other side, where it interacts with the center piece here of this rotor. So it's really the kind of intermediate between the rotor flying around as your hand moves, and that being turned into a winding action on the watch itself. So I'm going to use a piece of rotoco to kind of create a little bit of a platform for me to get this rotor back together, just because this under part... again, I don't think I actually needed to take this apart in retrospect. These are not... that isn't a friction piece, but it is something that they probably made separate from the rotor so that you could replace that inner gear part without having to replace the entire rotor. At any rate, no harm, no foul. So we will continue with the reassembly, and I have to figure out how to line all these parts up, and I'm not 100% sure how to do it. So let's do a test fit here of this upper bridge that kind of holds it all together, like so. And then we can roll this around, and... okay, well it doesn't seem to want to go all the way over to the left. That's not right. It should be able to go all the way to the spring so that it can bumper back in the other direction. So I'm going to have to do some troubleshooting here, and that means taking it apart, putting it back together, taking it apart, putting it back together. Just this automatic works to kind of figure out how to line it up properly. So after doing so, let's see if we've got it sorted out now. There we go. See how it reaches all the way to that spring on the bottom, and now as it loops back around, it can reach... that's what we needed to see. That'll create the most efficient winding that you can get from a bumper movement like this. A little bit of the medium oil there on the top, just to make sure that it can spin as freely as possible, and we can go in with the pallet fork and the pallet fork bridge, and... all right, let's see if we can get this watch running again. We're getting really close to seeing if it'll run, and also how well it will run. I can put a wind in it manually and just give it a quick check of the pallet fork. Yep, yep, there we go. So let's put the balance in, and let's see if we can get this watch running well. This is your hold your breath moment. Does it want to run? Oh, it does want to run. It stopped. Okay, just a little bump and some wind, and look at that. It's off to the races again, and we've got another running watch, and by the way, I can tell just visually that the amplitude is much better than before, and that just isn't the prettiest thing you've ever seen. I don't know what is. This is why we do it. Let's take a look, though, at the movement now under the microscope, because we also need to address the cap jewels for the balance, and these are kind of a two-piece set, so we take it off with some Rodico, and I'll show you over here what we do with them. So as you can see, these two parts come apart. The clear part is the cap jewel, and then the bottom part is a jewel setting. It's a brass setting with another sapphire, or excuse me, a ruby jewel inside of it, and what we need to do is clean these. This is an extremely important part of getting the best performance out of a watch, because that needs to be lubricated the most. It is under the most tension, and it spins, you know, it oscillates. I shouldn't say spins. It oscillates thousands and thousands of times per hour, and that means that it needs ample lubrication, and this setup allows you to basically suspend oil right where it needs to be. So you can see I just put the oil on there, and now I can put this cap on, and boom, it's all ready to go, and what will happen is the oil will sit directly in the middle, which is right where the pivot goes, and if you look closely here, you can actually see the ring of oil on the inside there. You can see where that circle of oil kind of has suspended itself, and that's right where the pivot ends up being as well. So once that's all set to go, I can reset the IncaBlock shock setting. That's what this is. It's actually a spring, and that spring means that if your watch gets dropped, it bends rather than the parts, and that was an ingenious invention as well that ended up being really, really important because it means that the balance staff, that part that's sticking out right there at the bottom that's spinning around, doesn't get broken off nearly as much, and you don't need to take your watch in for repairs nearly as often. All right, same treatment here. I'm going to put these in a solvent called OneDip. It basically dissolves any dirt or oil that's left on the jewel in the jewel setting so that it can be as clean as absolutely possible before we reapply new oil and do it, and this is why watchmakers are always telling people that they should have their watches serviced because that oil that I'm going to put on here, it will dry at some point, and it will no longer serve its function, and once that happens, the watch is going to run a lot worse, and you do run the risk of wear. Okay, there we go. That jewel setting is back together, and this is just the bottom, by the way. There's one on the top and bottom, which of course makes sense, and I can put that into place and then button it back up. I've gotten much, much more comfortable working on these IncaBlock settings. They're still a little bit finicky, but when I first started doing watchmaking, I really felt like I couldn't do it, and now, I don't know. You just don't really think about it anymore, and yes, this fiber is also bothering me, and I'm going to take it out just for you. Okay, let's put this thing on the time grapher and see what kind of results we get after regulating it. Oh man, look how much better that is. Zero, minus three, minus one, 284 degrees of amplitude up from 150, and we've got ourselves a nicely running watch. I am super happy with that. We can set the movement aside, and let's address this case. So, what I'm going to do with this case is I'm going to give it the once-over, I guess. I don't think that this case is really, I don't think it's possible to give this case a full restoration because it's just missing too much material. Like, I would have to have a laser welder which can actually add material in, and then you can then polish or, you know, resurface it from there, but I mean, I'm a hobbyist. I don't have a laser welder or anything like that, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give it the once-over with my files here, and basically these are sanding sticks that are rated from coarsest to finest, and if you do a good job with them, they can actually give you pretty darn good results, even if it is a little slow doing it by hand, but I'm hesitant to do this using my Dremel tool because these lugs just don't have a lot left in them. They've been polished to death, and they've actually got just material missing off of them, and so I want to just go as slow and careful as I can, and it does make for kind of a long process here as you can see, but my hope is that we can get this case looking just a bit better. I mean, I don't have high expectations that it's going to look brand new. There's just too much pitting and and material missing, but if we can get it looking like decently shiny and, you know, kind of just cleaned up a bit, I think it'll be a nice contrast for the dial, and that's really what I want. I want it to look like the rest of the watch looks nice and clean, and then the dial still has that really dark patina on it, and as you can see, getting into this groove here is quite difficult. I've kind of made a tool for myself with some pegwood and some of the sandpaper there to try to get some of that pitting and dark staining. It might even just be rust out of there. As I mentioned before, it is my belief that this case actually originally came with a bezel around the edge as well. It looks like it was designed that way, but I don't have the bezel, so we're gonna have to make do without it. Okay, put some finishing touches on this case, and you know what? It came out actually okay. Not too bad. You can see it still has some pitting on the inside and around the edges and stuff. That I don't think is going to be able to be resolved. Again, it's just too deep, but I think it'll still serve as a nice contrast against the patina dial. You can see the edge turned out nice. That part didn't actually have any pitting on it, and I polished up the back a little bit too. Again, just to take off that heavy scratch. I'm not trying to get that to be perfect or anything like that. Okay, now we can replace the crystal. I've got my crystal press tool here that I use for that, and this tool is invaluable. If you're replacing crystals often, it makes it an absolute snap. All you do is just sort of bend the edges of the crystal down using this aluminum die on the top, and that allows you to fit the case inside, and then when you release the pressure, the crystal simply fills in the gaps on its own just from expansion, and you can actually see that happen here as I release the pressure. Now the crystal's sitting firmly inside of the case. I think this is going to go a long way to the goal that I have of making this watch shine from the dial, and as you can see, brand new crystal there. Okay, final assembly. To come together, we can put the hour wheel in now if it wants to sit. There we go, and I've got a dial washer to put on here as well. The dial washer actually just makes sure that that hour hand stays connected with the minute hand below because otherwise it can become disconnected, and then the hands aren't in sync anymore, and we can grab the dial. As I said before, I'm not touching this dial. I'm not going to try to clean it. I'm not doing anything to it. I love that patina look on it, and I want to maintain it. Okay, we can put the dial into place, and now we can put the hands as well. Got a bit of a contraption set up here to try to make a flat surface for my hand press tool, but it looks like it works, and there we go. The hour hand goes into place. Now we can put the minute hand in as well like that, and make sure that nothing's touching, and we've, of course, got the seconds hand to put on, and this is, again, the other side of that fourth wheel. Pretty cool, and just make sure it's aligned. There we go, and it looks like it's running along just fine. Get the case clamps in there, and we can put the case back on, and it looks like we've got another finished project here. Let's see how it looks in its dressed-up case at least, and look at that dial. It is so cool showing all that wear. I also like the fact that this is a Seamaster watch, and it looks like that dial's been out to sea for a while, and yeah, really cool little watch to wear around. As you can see, it really does carry that patina quite nicely. Let's put a watch strap on this as well. I'll probably try out a couple of different colors. It always is kind of a feel thing. I don't think that there's really any hard and fast rules about which strap is going to look best. It's just kind of, you know, when you got it type thing, but we'll throw a strap on here just to take a look at it to see kind of how it would look as a finished product. Boy, what a cool restoration. We learned some stuff along the way, and ended up with a pretty cool looking little vintage watch that we got off of eBay and restored up to look nice and shiny. Thank you so much for joining me for yet another restoration here. I'm really happy that you decided to come along with me as I learn and enjoy the hobby of watchmaking. If you want to find me on social media, you can find me at Instagram. It's wristwatch underscore revival, and I'll post pictures of like tools and my watches and project updates and that kind of stuff over there. I'd love to say hi, and with that, we'll see you next time.