Fixing a German WWII pocket watch chronograph!

Hello watch lovers! Welcome back to the channel. I hope you guys had a good summer break as well. Today we have John's Monopressure Pocket Watch Chronograph on the bench. This watch was typically issued to the Kriegsmarine, so the German Nazi Navy during the Second World War, but this version seems to be a civilian one. We can already see that there's something not quite right with the minute counter. It jumps already when we start the chronograph. And we see the second hand stops when it's just about to flip over the minute counter. So there is a very typical reason for that, but that is not the reason for the issues with this watch. We can see on the timegrapher it certainly needs a service. Pretty high beat error and the amplitude is a little bit all over the place. Opening the watch up we find the real star of the show, the Minerva 19-9CH, the first chronograph movement Minerva made. And it's a real beauty. To see more of it we're going to uncase the watch. And yes, the lume is radium, so we're going to have to take some precautions. I have this big filter that is going to vacuum away all the potential fragments of the lume. As well as the radon gas under the crystal. And after handling this I also throw away my finger cloths and wash my hands very carefully. So the lume itself is generally not going to be dangerous unless you actually ingest it. But better safe than sorry. So we're going to position the hands so that we can easily take them off. Since it's a chronograph we just put the second hand in line with our minute hands. You see there is some wear to all of the hands and of course the lume in the hour hand has magically disappeared. I'm directly putting the hour and minute hands, so the ones with radium, into water. Thereby reducing the risk of it floating around. To get the movement out of the case there are just two screws that we need to loosen and take out. And then the whole movement comes out from the front. On these old watches the dial is secured with screws from the train side. So we just actually tighten them a little bit and then the dial comes off. We're going to put the hands and the dial in this special box for it, to keep it safe. It's a very nice dial so we want to keep it safe. And we'll take the hour wheel and the canon pinion off and let's have a closer look at the movement. So under the microscope we're going to see there's quite a lot of dirt and old lubrication. These watches of course do not have shock settings. Shock settings were invented and had started becoming more common but were not really mainstream by the point this watch was produced. Oh, what's that in that screw? That's a piece of old screwdriver blade. So the previous person who worked on it broke off his screwdriver and didn't remove that piece. What we generally see is just a lot of dirt, tiny hairs, solidified lubrication. We don't see a lot of damage and that's a good thing. It is a nicely made old movement. So while we take off the chronograph parts, let's talk a little bit about this movement and Minerva as a manufacturer. So as most Swiss brands, they started out as family names. So two brothers named Robert, their last names, started making watches and Minerva was actually initially one of the brand names. So as Minerva started becoming more known, they renamed the whole factory so that the movements and the watches they made as well were all named Minerva. And especially the chronographs have a really high standing in the horological world, both vintage and newer ones. As many of you probably know, Minerva is part of Mont Blanc since 2006 and they are still creating some fantastic movements and watches. Getting back to this movement then, 19-9CH, we can see this U-shaped clutch that is quite characteristic. But what you will see in most Mont Blanc chronograph movements is sort of organic shapes, quite long, rounded, thin shapes. And that's really beautiful, I think. We see some of these wheels are a little bit sticky. There's a lot of old lubrication here. I'm going to take another look under the microscope when we're finished taking off the chronograph parts. One thing you'll also have seen that I do is I put the screws for the chronograph parts back in the movement. That helps avoid some of the confusion over which screws go where. This movement does not have an hour counter, so it's relatively simple in that sense. Chronograph hour counter mechanisms are generally on the dial side, but there needs to be some transferal of action from the train side to the dial side so the movement can stop and start the chronograph hour counter together with the other counters. We're now down to the base movement, and yeah, there's a lot of old lubrication still. Old dirt that's been there for a few decades. So let's have another look under the microscope. So the yellow stuff we see here is old lubrication, and this little strip of metal I'm removing is probably from the machining of the barrel bridge. See a little bit wear here and there, and a lot of old gunk, old lubrication, and it certainly isn't lubricating anything anymore. So this type of lubrication is organic, so nowadays everything is synthetic. Well, not everything, but most lubrications are synthetic, and that helps them stay liquid and lubricating a bit longer. So one thing that's nice about these old pocket watch movements is that they're all very solid. The screws are big enough to even be seen by a half-blind old man like me. Of course, one of the nice things about a pocket watch is that you can open the watch to see the movement, but that also brings in a lot of dirt. Oh, well, that's dirty now. Dirt. Dirty. The most dirt is not really bad for the watch. I mean, it makes it run worse and make it stop, perhaps. It's not going to damage the watch, so if you have it serviced every few years, then that's generally fine. But if it's left too long, then it will also start staining the underlying metal. On the dial side, the keyless works is pretty straightforward, but also here there's quite a lot of old lubrication, so it's a bit sticky. But with all the parts off, we're going to peg in the jewel holes, just trying to remove the old lubrication that might be solid there, and clean up the worst of the gunk before we've got to get everything into a cleaning machine. We're of course also going to take out the mainspring and have a look at it. That's indeed an old mainspring. This is the old spiral type mainspring, made from carbon steel, and we will replace it. The thing is, these old mainsprings, they were prone to set a bit more than modern ones, but they were also a little bit weaker per, let's say, measurement. So in general, if you are looking at an old mainspring and you want to replace it with a new one, it's safest to use a new mainspring that's a little bit thinner, otherwise you might very well get problems with too high amplitude. All right, so with that, let's get all the parts into the baskets and get it ready for the cleaning machine. I also want to extend a warm thanks to my members, both on YouTube and Patreon. Thanks a lot for the support everyone, really appreciate it. It's been a long summer, but I'm getting back to business. As a member, you get access to member-only content, and you also get access to our very good community on Discord, where we help each other solve problems and so forth. If you're curious what the memberships give you, you can check the Join button below here or go to Patreon on this URL, so do check it out. With my lovely automatic machine cleaning the movement, let's then turn to cleaning the case in the ultrasonic. Now, if this is your first time here, then brace yourself, the sound of the ultrasonic is less than pleasant. All right, so we got the movement parts back from the cleaning machine, and we have a new mainspring. So a tip if you're not sure which way the rule of thumb that it goes in with the colored side of the whole drop, but to double check it, you can place the drum into the movement to see where the teeth should mesh, and it will then tell you which way the barrel arbor goes, and hence also the mainspring. As we see, this mainspring goes counterclockwise, and that is also the most common direction. When we put it in, we press the bridle in first. That will make it easier to get the whole mainspring in. This mainspring is the DBH type, meaning that it has a little flange at the end that goes into holes in the lid and the drum. So if we don't entirely catch it, we can slide it a little bit with a screwdriver like I did. Just be cautious. And then we need to make sure that the lid also covers that little flange that keeps the mainspring in place in the barrel. Then the other thing we need to do before we can start assembling the movement is to clean and re-lubricate the capstones, typically the shock settings, but there are no shock settings in this watch. With these old watches, we have to unscrew from the underside, typically, and then we get to the capstone. And we see that the cleaning machine did not reach all the way down here. Still a lot of gunk. It's not so easy to see that on this one and a half millimeter wide jewel when it's on the camera, but under the microscope we can see this is not clean. So we're going to scrub it off with some pegwood so that there are no things really attached to the stone, and then we can clean it in our cleaning liquid afterwards. And with everything a bit cleaner, we can then put the escapement parts into epilon. That is to make the lubrication stay a little bit better in place. It also then helps a little bit in the service intervals so you can wait a bit longer to having the watch serviced again. I'm going to clean off the pivots of the pallet fork and escape wheel in some pith wood, and we're going to clean the cock a little bit more just to make sure there's no dirt there also, and then we can lubricate the capstone in the balance. And all this work is really done to minimize the friction when the balance wheel oscillates back and forth, because out of all the power that is in the mainspring, first of all there isn't that much power to begin with, and second some 70-75 percent of that power is eaten up by the train before the balance gets any impulse. So yeah, it's important to have it as frictionless as possible, and that's of course where jeweling and high polish helps, together with a little bit of lubrication. And that looks fine, so let's get on with the assembly. All military watches are expected to have a hack, or a stop lever if you will, and the reason for that in the military is that when a commanding officer gives orders, the orders typically end with synchronization of the watches, so that everyone basically will attack or perform actions at the same time. So while I'm assembling the base movement, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about myself. So I sort of reunited with one of my, let's say, old crushes this summer, and no, in case my wife is listening, not a woman, the Fiat Panda. Now you might look at this old Fiat Panda, which is actually 45 years old, and you might look at this little old car and say, hey it looks way cooler than Kim Kardashian, who's also 45, and you would be right, and it's also actually one of the coolest cars ever to drive. Weird as it might seem. And when I'm saying an old crush, I didn't actually have this car myself, but a good friend of mine had it and he lent it to me for quite a while back in 1991, I think it was. You're old! And the reason it's cool to drive is because even though it's got a super tiny engine, it's also very light, it's completely stripped of any luxury, and the wheels are all the way out in the corner, so it's a real go-kart. And the reason I remember the Fiat Panda is because this summer we went to Sardinia. Sardinia is a big island north of Sicily, just off the Italian mainland coast, and I sort of gave up counting. It's like on every street corner, every street, there was one or two Fiat Pandas, mostly the old model. And mine knew that old model is, I think, from 40 to 45 years old, but it was everywhere, which is a great testament to the quality, actually. Because if a 45 year old car is still used for a daily business, probably running, I don't know, how many hundred thousands of kilometers, then yeah, it is good quality. Bit of an unsung hero, I would say. Oh, and before I forget, the new Fiat Panda actually looks very cool, so yeah. Anyway, back to our watch. We put together the train side, we're now going to put together the dial side. This little tube that you see on the stem is what actually engages the lever for the chronograph. As mentioned, this is a one button or one pusher, mono pusher chronograph. And what that means is that there is a three-step cycle that's repeated every time you use the chronograph. You start it, you stop it, and you reset it. So there's no possibility to pause the chronograph and then restart it, as you have with two-button chronographs. Perhaps interestingly is that this watch was most likely made quite a while after two-button chronographs became popular. So Breitling introduced those in the early 1930s, but this model, as mentioned, is the World War II era. This movement was, however, produced for some 40 years, so I believe from the early 1900s until 1940-something. So that probably explains it. So with the pallet fork in place, we are going to lubricate the pallet stones, putting a tiny little bead of oil on the exit stone, and then we let the escape hole run over that, so you distribute the oil. And this is where the epilame we dipped the pallet fork into earlier really helps. Before doing this, I did let the movement run for a little while. That lets the escape wheel teeth form a little groove in the epilame layer on the pallet stone, and then the lubrication stays in place in that groove. Always nice to see that balance starting up. Gonna lubricate the various pivots, and then we're gonna demagnetize the movement and see how it fares on the timegrapher. The question I get sometimes is if I only test the base movement and not the fully assembled watch. The answer is, of course, no. Of course, you test it also when the watch is fully assembled with the chronograph running and everything, but the most important test is with the base movement assembled, because that tells you the health of the watch before putting on any complications, and you can also then more easily isolate any errors. One problem we saw here is the beat error, which was of course also new from before. So under the microscope, I'm trying to see where the pallet fork leans. You can see it leans a bit to the right, which means we have to turn the balance a little bit to the left, or clockwise. On these old watches, there's no easy quick way to adjust the beat error. We have to manually go in and turn the collet on the balance staff. It's safer to take the balance off the cock, but when you feel comfortable with it, you can do it the way I'm showing here without taking it off. But we see we were lucky and got the beat error down to 0.3, which we're going to be very happy with. So with the base movement in good health, we can then start assembling in the chronograph parts. First thing we put on is the chronograph driving wheel. We have to press that onto the extended pivot of the fourth wheel. And then it is to some degree a matter of preference which parts you assemble next. There are many ways to skin a cat. Oh man, did I almost say that again? My cats will not be happy with me. But there are of course some components that go under others and so forth, so it's not like you can completely just put on what you want. An example of that is of course this friction spring that goes underneath the chronograph wheel. Aesthetically I think this is just a really beautiful movement. I think those two concentric circles of that center wheel and then the chronograph wheel on top is just beautiful. And the traditional horizontal clutch as we have in this movement is just, yeah, very pleasing to the eye I think. Speaking of pleasing to the eye, this very organic looking clutch arm is just very nice. And also this thin intermediate minute counter wheel arm. Man, that's a long sentence. It's also very nice. It is of course a big movement. The number 19 in the movement name is actually for the size of the movement. It's a 19 Ligne. A Ligne is an old French measurement unit. It was one twelfth of a French inch. French inches at the time were a little bit bigger than a British inch, which is also a reason why people, at least English, were saying that Napoleon was a small dwarfish guy, whereas in French inches he was actually completely normal height. And also some people say that was done deliberately by the British to sort of undermine Napoleon. Anyway, we put together the chronograph parts and when we're testing the watch we see that the chronograph does work as it should, but we remember from before we even started working on the watch there was an issue with the minute counter. Now normally that issue would be that the finger on the chronograph wheel butts up against the teeth on the intermediate minute counter wheel, but here it's a completely different issue. The issue is that this intermediate minute counter wheel does not rotate. This is honestly something I should have tested better before assembling it. A big reason for not doing that is because it took too long for me to go from disassembly to assembly. It's really much better to try to assemble a watch not too long after disassembling it so that you have all the things, all the issues, fresh in mind. It's a little bit down to the construction of this particular part because it rotates on this shouldered screw instead of just being a pivot rotating in the hole. So that means we need to disassemble this and then clean everything well and re-lubricate and assemble it again. And if you're curious, yes it's also the same cause of the issue that the minute hand flipped over right away after starting the chronograph because the intermediate counter wheel simply did not budge. So let's have a closer look at this as well under the microscope. So here we have the movement in rest so to speak and after we press the chronograph button one time the chronograph starts running and we see this finger on the chronograph wheel is going to start flipping over the intermediate minute counting wheel there. There is no jumper on the minute counter wheel when I'm showing this that's why it doesn't flick over but just rotates over. Then when we press the button one more time we stop the chronograph and the third time we reset it. When we start it we also want to see that the finger on the chronograph wheel does not push the intermediate minute counter wheel over so the intermediate minute counter wheel should be out of the wave of the finger. So we're going to inspect that one more time. We see the finger just touches the intermediate counting wheel and that's fine. It's going to be caught up by the slack between the wheels anyways we're not going to see that on the dial. So with the movement running well and the chronograph functioning as it should we can then turn our attention to the hands. As you might remember the loom was completely gone from the hour hand. The difficulty when re-looming old hands is to find the right color. So I did have to do a few test runs actually before I found a color I was happy with. But the way I do it is just using a little bit of paint in the loom and then you have to try to find the right color of the paint of course and then mix it well into the loom and then it's a matter of applying the loom to the hands. We drag it out. We really do not want it to be too thick because then it's gonna start bulging through the hands and also the hands might touch each other. We don't want that. So I put the movement back in the case with the dial on. I missed the footage of putting the movement back in the case and also of putting the seconds and the minute counter wheel hands on. But with the new re-loomed hands on I think ultimately the match was pretty good from the hands to the dial loom color. Not 100% perfect but yeah. The last thing that remains for the hands is to put the chronograph hand on and then we can start the chronograph and let it run for a few minutes and see how it works. And we're gonna stop it there and when we reset it you'll hear the actual sound of the hammer hitting the heart-shaped caps. Before seeing the watch not on the wrist I just want to remind everyone that at vintagewatchservices.eu you'll always find a bunch of beautiful vintage watches and as a YouTube subscriber you can use this coupon code for 10% off. And there we have it. John's beautiful Minerva pocket watch chronograph from the second world war. Now working as it should. Lovely old watch with a beautiful movement. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you did then do click like and subscribe. I'll be back with another video shortly. Until then, ta ta!