Restoring a Rusty Kingston Datofix Triple Calendar Moonphase

Hello there and welcome back to another video here on wrist watch revival. My name is Marshall. Thank you so much for coming along this time on the bench. Take a look at this little beauty. This is well, this is called a triple calendar moon phase watch. This particular one is made by Kingston Watch Company and it's called a Dattofix. That's what they call their model of it. But this was made by multiple different companies, a similar design. And it is from probably the mid to late 1940s would be a good guess. And yeah, it is exactly what it says. It keeps track of multiple things. And let's see if it's actually working. No, that pusher is not working. That one. No. This one. Okay, this one is actually working. So as you can see, the day of the month goes around the outside of the dial and there's that red pointer that actually points to which day of the month it is. And then there's also the day of the week. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that type of thing. And then the month and then also the moon phase on top of it. This is a really cool watch. And let's take a look at the inside. As you can see, it's not running. Oh, I see some rust there on the inside of the case back. Is the balance wheel free? Actually? Yeah. And it does look like it's trying to run as well. So that's really good news. Okay, it looks like it stopped, but there's every chance that the balance wheel is broken. The balance staff, the part that kind of holds it up, could have been broken, but it looks like that's not the case here. Well, we can go ahead and take this movement out of the case. I do not know what to expect from this one. This was given to me as a project watch by my friend Patrick. I'll tell you about him in a little bit. But he said, here, you can try this one for the channel. And I thought, well, this thing is absolutely gorgeous. Like right up my alley, right? Vintage. Oh, really nice dial on it too. Cool complications. And it's broken. Gimme. And that's what we're going to do today. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me for my little journeys here. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to try to get this watch running. We're going to try to make sure all the functions are working, and we're going to get it in good working shape so that Patrick can enjoy it for a long time. There's the case with the three pushers. I'm just going to leave them in there for now. And yeah, really nice. Oh, I see. Do you see how the dial's actually loose too? That's also an issue. It's not firmly planted, and that could be a problem too. Okay. Well, we're going to need to start by taking off the hands of the watch. It's always good to do that. They're really delicate. And once you get the watch out of the case, my first priority is usually to get the hands off and get them safely secured just so that nothing can happen to them. They can get snagged on any little thing and get bent up really easy, and it can be difficult to replace them. These ones look like they have a bit of corrosion on them, which is another sign that it's possible that some water got into the case of this watch. These watches are old enough that they're not really waterproof at all. Now there's two screws on the sides here, and it's kind of funny because they're not actually screws. They're what's called an eccentric. They're down below. It has a screw head on the top, but it's elongated, and it has a wedge that you can turn over into the dial feet. Okay. Well, it looks like the dial doesn't want to come off, though the moon phase disc did. Fair enough. I guess I'll just keep working it here. There we go. Now we've got the dial off. Yeah, that looks like more rusty stains underneath there, although the good part of the dial looks like it's in very good shape, and it's wonderful. Just a fantastic vintage dial. Oh, yeah. Definitely some rust there. So you can see that's the month disc, and it is rusted. Can I remove it? No. Okay, but it looks like the day of the week is moving, so I'll be able to take that off. And yeah, you can see some rust staining, though it doesn't look like it's in the worst shape overall. Yeah, this one's the one that's in really rough shape. I don't want to pry it off and bend it, but it does look like it's stuck in place because of that rust. It's rusted to the post. Well, I can start taking apart the other stuff along the calendar side of this movement here, and what I'm going to be doing is this is a fairly complicated watch, right? You can see there's a whole lot going on with the triple calendar plus the moon phase, and what I'm going to do is a trick that I like to do on chronographs as well, which is I'm going to take off the parts that I need to, and then I'm going to replace the screw where it goes on the movement. And this way I can be 100% sure that that screw goes in that spot. Normally on a movement, you know, the the screws are they kind of fall into different categories, and you learn it over time to just sort of remember which types go where and what those ones might look like. But on something like this with a whole bunch of extra screws, it's a little bit more difficult, and there's really no need to make it harder on yourself or on myself. So I'm gonna, like I said, just be replacing those. Each of these are springs that act as like a jumper. They will move, allow these different components of the calendar to move around into a specific slot each time. That's what these springs actually do. They're not the thing that moves it in most cases, although some of them do. You can see this is a shouldered screw. There's a shoulder underneath the bottom, and that that allows it to hold that spring in place. Yeah, that doesn't want to come out still. I'm just going to keep working my way around the outside edge of this movement. And while I do that, I wanted to mention that if you want to try to do projects like this, I would not recommend this as a first-time project, by the way. But you know, vintage watches, maybe from eBay or for a family member or a friend like this one I have here. We have watch kits at the website I started with my friend Alex. It's called SutcliffeHanson.com. There's a link down below. Or maybe you know somebody who would be interested in a hobby like this. I found it so rewarding and so interesting to dive into these little mechanical wonders. And if you know somebody like that, we've got a toolkit over there for you. The other thing that we do at Sutcliffe Hanson is we repair watches. We do watch restorations. Honestly, on watches like this, like if you took this thing into a normal vintage shop, they would not address it. They would just say, yeah, I'm not going to get parts for it. There's rust on this thing. No way. You know, because these watches aren't worth thousands and thousands of dollars. You know, they're valuable. I mean, these watches will go for $500 to $1,000. But you know, we're not talking $20,000 or something like that. And it'll cost more than that to get the watch repaired easy. And yeah, so that's what we do over there. Oh, this is great. Okay. That disc did come free. And yes, it was definitely rusted to that post. You can see that post is quite rusty right there as well. Anyway, and the reason I bring it up is because Patrick, who owns this watch, he's the one who actually set up the shop for us. So, you know, Alex and I are smart enough to know that we don't know how to run a professional watchmaking shop. This is my hobby. You know, Alex runs Sutcliffe Hanson for us and he knows a lot about business and all that kind of stuff. But you know, there's specifics that you need to run an operation like that. So we hired Patrick. And he's fantastic. He set up our shop for us. He hired everybody that we have. And he ran the shop for quite a while. Some life stuff came his way and he ended up having to leave our company unfortunately. But we had a really great run with him. And yeah, he I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little bit nervous to work on his watch because if he watches this video, he knows a lot more about watchmaking than I do. And maybe he'll hopefully he won't judge me too harshly. But anyway, we do watch restoration over there at Sutcliffe Hanson. Again, you can go to SutcliffeHanson.com. There's a link down below for that. Yeah, Patrick has been in the industry for quite a long time. And I'll put a link to his Instagram down in the show notes as well. Is this reverse threaded? It does feel like it actually, as I'm untightening it, it actually feels like it's getting tighter. I think I need to go the other direction. So I'm going to try to just go ahead and remove the crown wheel here. I'm curious to see if the rust also got into the movement side. This is this side of the watch is what we call the movement side. And there is a way for water to get in even if there's not that much of it. But we won't know until we take off these two upper bridges. As you saw on the other side, it definitely, definitely got into that side. And I'm not surprised, as I mentioned before, these are not waterproof. Okay, let's try to do reverse threaded here. Yes. Okay, that is exactly what it was. You know, some of the screws that are reverse threaded will market for you by putting three stripes on the top, it'll have the screw slot and then two stripes, one on either side. This one doesn't. And that happens. It's not a hard and fast rule or anything like that. So that was just a feel thing. But that's one that you get over time because normally these barrels are not reverse threaded, the barrel screw is not reverse threaded, but I could feel it almost right away. And there's a little spidey sense in the back of your head that says, slow down, figure out what's going on. Because if I kept going, it just would have put the top of that screw right off. Okay, so now we can remove the barrel bridge. And that'll give us our first look underneath. Oh, interesting. Take a look at this. These two screws are the same size, but this one's actually shorter. So I need to make a mental note that one of those the one that's closest to the crown there is actually shorter. Oh, interesting. This is actually a little bit difficult to remove because of the eccentric that I mentioned that holds on the dial. Let's see. Oh, I don't see any rust on this side. Any under here sometimes I can get on the bridge. No, no. Excuse me on the barrel. No, I didn't see any there either. Well, this is excellent news. I was kind of afraid that we might have a bunch of rust. Let's look at the train of wheels as I take the train wheel bridge off and see if there's any in there. No. Okay, that's excellent. That's really, really good news. It means that yes, some water did get into this watch. It looks like a very long time ago, but it was mostly localized to the calendar side. So any restoration, you know, functionally of that type of stuff is going to be localized to there. And it means that I should be able to get this movement up and running again because my assumption is that either a combination of the rust or the fact that this hasn't been serviced in a long time, because it clearly hasn't, is why the watch stopped. Because as you could see, it did want to go and there was power being held in the watch. If you look before I let the power down out of the mainspring and there was power in it, it just wasn't able to flow through the train of wheels. So that often can mean that it is, for lack of a better term, gunked up. The oil has ceased to do its job. Oops. Okay, now we're back over on the dial side. Again, I call it the movement side and the dial side. That's what most people call it. There's a rusted part, but I can try to address that. And a little bit of rust here. This is very typical as well, is the water comes through where the crown goes in. And that means that the keyless works and anything close to it is what catches the brunt of the water and therefore the rust. And that's what happened here, it looks like. Because all of these parts have a little bit, at least some amount of rust on them. This is another big shouldered screw. This one holds on the yoke spring, which is actually kind of nice because it's not held under tension unless the yoke is in there. And normally that's the one I call the born to fly spring. I mean, that's the one that likes to jump because it's thick. You know, that's a heavy spring, especially by watch terms. Let's take a look at the mainspring now. As I said, it was holding power, so we know that it's functional. But I am really curious to see if it is. Yes, I was really curious to see this, if it's the old school style. This is what they call a blued mainspring. Take a look at it. And do you see how it has that blued color to it, that steel? That is a type of steel that predates the modern alloys that we use. And it's not nearly as strong. In fact, I will likely, I think I'm going to try to replace that mainspring because those old school ones, they can get pretty tired and I don't want to have that be the problem. You know, I want to eliminate that as a potential issue for the watch. Okay. Everything can go into these little baskets now and then into a bigger basket. This is all in preparation for the watch cleaning machine. So we will set that aside. Now let's take a look at the case here. And as you can see, there's three pushers and these control three different aspects of the front side of the watch, the dial side of the watch. One of them clicks over the month. Another one clicks over the day of the month. That's the one that I showed you with a pointer arrow. And the other one incrementally pushes forward the moon phase. There isn't one to push forward the day of the week. That happens as the watch goes from one day to the next, but you can't, there's no quick set for it. All right. Another thing we're going to need to do is replace this crystal. And what that means is do a quick measurement on it. This one is 30.4 millimeters. And what I'll do is I'll order a 30.4 and then I'll also order a 30.6 and a 30.2. They're only about five bucks each and I keep the extras and then I build them up as my stock. And sometimes I don't have to order them that way. Yeah, there's some definite rust going on on the case there. I'm going to go ahead instead of scraping at it with the pegwood and just put it into the ultrasonic cleaner now to try to get the bulk of it off of there. And then we'll take a look at it after to make sure that we're good. Okay. We're going to go ahead and just leave that in there in the ultrasonic cleaner. And now we can put everything into the watch cleaning machine. This is a L&R Mastermatic. And I mean, this is probably made like really right around the same exact time that this watch was made in the 40s, maybe 50s, early 50s, I would guess. And it's still doing a great job. And hopefully this watch will be joining it in the doing a great job camp shortly here. While that does get cleaned up, I wanted to say thank you to everybody who supports me over on Patreon. Patreon is a place where you can support your favorite content creators. And if I happen to be one of them, I would love it if you come over. You get to see the videos a little early. They're ad free. Just a couple of little bonuses and perks for supporting me. And I really appreciate it for content creators like me. It means the world. And it means we get to keep doing what we do. So thank you to everybody who supports me on Patreon. Okay, and while that's finishing up, we can go ahead and take the case parts out of the ultrasonic cleaner. These are cleaned in a kind of a clinical detergent. It's really nothing super fancy. But it does do a really good job in combination with the ultrasonic waves that this machine produces. Now, with everything out of both of those machines, take a look at this. Yes, it's a little bit intimidating seeing all those parts laid out. But they look great. And it makes me hopeful that we're going to be able to get this thing back together. Now, the first thing that I want to do is take a look at some of the parts that have rust on them, because some of the rust just looks kind of like rust staining, rather than active rust that's eating up at the metal. But some of it does look maybe slightly worse than that. And so I do want to address it. And the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to use a product called Evaporust. And this stuff is really, really great. Anybody who works with stuff like this a lot is probably familiar with it. It's a really good product. Yeah, you see, you can see some of the rust on the stem there. And I want to make sure that that stem's still okay to use as well. So this is Evaporust. And basically, what it does is it's not like acidic, like this stuff is not dangerous as a material or whatever. What it actually does is it kind of converts the rust into this black dust and neutralizes it. So you end up with parts that you can kind of clean away where the rust was. But the rust is no more. It is no longer eating at the metal. And it kind of lets you know what you're working with. After it sat in the Evaporust for about a day, I'll usually take it out, rinse it off in some water, and take a look at what we've got. And it looks like it's done a good job. I mean, most of these parts just had just a little bit of that, like I said, I would call it like rust staining rather than active rust on it. And it seems to have taken it off. The parts that I'm most concerned about are actually the stem and then the setting lever spring that has that post on it that one of the calendar mechanisms go that part right there. So I'll just dry them off. And, and then we can get an idea for what we're looking at. Now, I'm also just going to go ahead and use a brush here just a soft brush to kind of make sure that any of the extra debris is removed from it. And then I can also use a little bit harder of a brush. This is a fiberglass tipped brush. And that'll allow me to really see what's going on with this stem by removing any of the that black material that's left behind by the evaporust. And then that way, I'll have a good idea if the stem is in good enough shape to use. I think it is. It didn't look that bad to me. I just wanted to make sure that that was the case. So let's take a look here. Oh, yeah, that looks much better. As you can see, the rust is gone. And yeah, the stem looks totally fine now. So the rust didn't get to it too bad. It was mostly surface level and just a little bit of light pitting on there. And I think we're good to go with those. Okay, that means that we can start the reassembly process now. And I did find a new mainspring for this movement. And since it is brand new, I can just simply press it into place out of its metal shell here. That's weird. It's not actually giving. What is going on? Hmm. Well, it didn't quite fit. I have a theory, but I won't really know exactly why. Luckily, I have a tool for this. I have my mainspring winders, which I use on almost all my restorations where I keep the mainspring. And I'm just going to have to use them here. So when you buy a mainspring like this, they come in many different sizes. There's a height to the mainspring, there's a thickness to it, there's a length, and then there's the barrel size that it's meant to go in. And it looks to me like maybe this barrel size is just the absolute slightest too big for this barrel. That doesn't mean that the mainspring won't work overall. If it won't fit at all, then it's not going to work. But this one was just so slightly too big that I think if I use just the right size here that you can see it now in my mainspring winder, I can get it in there. Let's see if it goes in. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I think it just had that little tiny tolerance of being slightly too big. But when you're working on old vintage watches, you don't have the luxury of just knowing exactly what part to get, ordering it, having it come in, and having it perfectly fit every time. It doesn't work like that. You do the best you can with what you have, and you match up the parts the best you can. And so sometimes that happens like this. Thankfully, this mainspring did fit in here ultimately. I just had to do a little bit of extra work to get it done. Okay, now I can secure the lid onto the mainspring barrel, and that situation is done. And that's really nice. Replacing that old school kind of carbon style mainspring I think is a good step in the right direction for the performance of this watch. Okay, now we can grab the setting lever screw. That takes a little bit of blue grease, as when you remove or reinstall the crown and stem, that's the screw that you need to undo and redo to have it go back into the watch. And now that that's in there, we can go ahead and put the train of wheels in place. We'll start with the escape wheel, then the fourth wheel. This fourth wheel has an extended pivot. You can see that pivot on the bottom is extra long. It actually goes all the way through to the other side, and it sticks out, and that's what you put the seconds hand on. Again, this being an older watch, it actually has a separate seconds hand, a sub seconds hand, if you will, rather than one that's built into the center stack where the hour and minutes are. And that's because, you know, watches went from pocket watches that had that. The seconds hand was effectively always off of the center stack. And then they started making wristwatches when they got popular, which is around this time. And they kept the sub seconds hands going. And then somebody finally figured out a good way to get the seconds hand in the middle, and it looks really nice, and it's a cool effect. It has that big long seconds hand rather than a little baby one. And the trend basically moved over to that and hasn't gone back since. But at the time that this watch was made, that wasn't necessarily in full swing. And yeah, the cool part is, is that with the gearing of each of these wheels, the fourth wheel actually turns at the exact rate that you want for a seconds hand. In other words, every minute it does a full rotation. So it's kind of perfect. All you got to do is just stick a hand on the end of it, and it'll turn at that exact rate. Okay, so a quick fit of the barrel bridge, and then I can go ahead and put on the train wheel bridge here as well. This is always a delicate process. You can see each of those jewels in the middle. That acts as a bearing for each of the pivots on the escape wheel, fourth wheel, and third wheel. And they all have to be lined up both top and bottom. And as you saw before, there we go, they're very small, those pivots. And if that's the case, they're also very breakable. So it's just the right thing to do is just to take your time and to make sure that everything's in place. I'll use this clear pointer stick here too to stabilize everything so that I don't accidentally bump stuff and have it move around without my knowledge, and then go to tighten it down and realize that I've screwed it up. Okay, this next part going in is the click spring. And that means that I can also put on the click itself. This is a little bit of a tricky operation. The click has a little post on the bottom of it that that spring pushes up against, but that spring needs to be moved over like this, and then the click has to go into place. And it likes to jump off of its post as well. So this is a little bit of a two-handed operation. And once it's in place, I can let go of the spring. I'll go ahead and grab the click screw here, and I can go ahead and tighten that down. I'll give it a quick test just to make sure that the click is working properly, and it does look like it is. Now there's this little metal ring that goes over the crown wheel post here. It's made of steel, the post is made of brass, so I suppose it's just there for to be stronger. And then I can put the crown wheel itself into place. I put a tiny bit of oil where the screw will meet up with it, because what happens is, is this screw stays still and the crown wheel turns around it. Now there's two things to note there. One is that this is a reverse threaded screw, and that's why. As that crown wheel turns, it's spinning in the opposite direction that that screw would need to become unscrewed, so it will stay in place and not back itself out. And the other thing to note is that there's a little bit of oil that goes between the screw and that crown wheel because there is some friction there. Okay, now I can put the ratchet wheel in place, and you just have to get the square top of the barrel arbor lined up with the square hole in that ratchet wheel. And once you do, you can turn it the correct direction. Remember that one's also reverse threaded for some reason on this particular movement. Now, this is the underside of the center wheel. I can put just a very light coating of grease on that, and then I can put the cannon pinion in place. There we go. And now we can start rebuilding the keyless works. Again, it looks like it's mostly survived. This is the clutch wheel. And again, I'm using blue grease on any of these parts that are high friction. And this is a really cool part. On one end, it interacts with the clutch wheel, making it so that it can spin one way but not the other. And on the other end, it interacts with an intermediate wheel that allows you to transfer a turning motion into the center part of the watch where you can actually affect the cannon pinion, which is what will ultimately set the time, and in this case, the date as well. Okay, I can go ahead and put the crown and stem back in. And then this is the setting lever. Yeah, most of these parts look like they survived, just not too bad. I bought a couple of parts on eBay as a backup plan, and we'll see if I actually have to use them or not. So far, no. And this red oil is a medium viscosity oil. It's a very useful oil for anything that has that kind of right in between. Maybe it's not high pressure metal-on-metal. Maybe it's a slow-moving pivot, that type of thing. This type of oil holds up really well and stays in place well. There's a lighter version of it as well that I'll use on the train of wheels and a few of the other parts there. This part is once again the blue grease, and I need to put this on where it meets up with the setting lever. That's the yoke meeting up with the setting lever because that is high friction and metal-on-metal. And again, whenever you have both of those things going on, you really do need to end up using kind of your toughest lubricant, in this case, this blue grease. It's made by a company named Mobius. This grease is called 9501. It is funny, the types of lubricants used when this watch was actually made were not quite as nice as these ones. These modern synthetic lubricants are incredibly consistent and well-made. And back in the day, they did not have access to that type of stuff. So this watch is getting the real spa treatment today. And here's that setting lever spring with the post on it that we fixed up. This one's held in place by two screws. You can usually identify which they are because they have a very, very thin profile for the head of the screw. And that's because they need to basically end up being flush with that part. And that's because the dial and other parts are going to go on over top. But if you look at how closely those screws actually get down, it's really nice. Okay. So that looks like it's working, but we do, of course, need to lubricate that part as well. Always important. Lubrication on parts like this doesn't actually affect the performance of the running of the watch, but it does perfect, excuse me, it does affect how well it behaves in your hand. When you go to set the time, it just feels nicer. It's a smoother operation. And of course, it adds significantly to the longevity of the watch as well, because when you have that metal on metal, you can have little shavings come off, that type of stuff. And that gets elsewhere in the watch, and it can really wreak havoc. Okay. A little bit of solvent here for the pallet fork. I also use a little bit of Rodico there just to clean up the faces of the pallet stones. But then I can go ahead and put it into place. And we're getting really close to seeing if we have a running watch again. That is my first order of business. The whole thing with the calendar is a whole other thing that I need to figure out. But if this watch isn't running, then the calendar is not going to work anyway. So first things first. Okay. The pallet bridge goes into place. And I can go ahead and put a little bit of wind in the watch. And it does look like it's holding a wind with the new mainspring. And yes, it does look like the power is getting transferred down to the pallets. So that means it is a moment of truth. Let's put this balance back in and see if this watch wants to spring to life or if it's going to be stubborn. I have to make sure everything's lined up. Nothing yet. Ooh, looks like it grabbed on. And there it goes. Hey, hey, we have a running watch. Once again, the best feeling in watchmaking. Anytime you do one of these restorations, you kind of hold your breath, honestly, at that part. Because if it doesn't start up, it's like you're back at square one again. Oh, that is a beautiful sight to see. Now we're going to go ahead and put this thing on the microscope. And we'll get these pivots oiled as well. This is where I'm using the really light viscosity one here on these kind of high motion pivots. You really only need a tiny amount. This one is that medium viscosity that goes on one of the bigger pivots here. That's for the center wheel. Isn't it beautiful? I do recommend getting a microscope if you're going to be working on watches, as it really can't help. I remember I couldn't understand how the keyless works worked when I first started, and I put it on a microscope, and then I was able to figure it out. Okay. One thing, though, about these older watches, they can be a bit of a pain. In order to lubricate the jewels on the balance itself, you have to completely disassemble the balance. On a modern watch, you don't have to do that anymore. But on this one, we will. But I've got some really nice tools to make this easier. I have this little all-purpose parts holder. That allows me to hold onto parts that are irregularly shaped. Now that the top of the balance bridge is upside down and secured, I can use one of my small screwdrivers to unscrew the two screws that hold it all together. Then I can remove those screws. You have to be really careful. These are the tiniest of the tiny. It's kind of a miracle that they made these. In fact, I already let that one fall to the side. You know, I think the best way to actually get it, because I can't get it with my tweezer here, I think I'm just going to turn the thing over and let it fall out. Yeah, that worked. I mean, I don't know. I don't want to sit there, pick at it, and have it fall further down. But anyway, now I can go ahead and release the tension that holds it into place. Then that'll allow me to disassemble this bridge here. In fact, look at that. It just came apart right away. The reason that I need to get in here is because there's two jewels that are sandwiched together. It can make it really easy for dirt and debris, old oil, to get stuck in between, even through the watch cleaning machine. In this case, it actually looked like the watch cleaning machine did a pretty good job. But you always want to get in there and make sure, and even do a little bit of manual cleaning with some pegwood on the surface. You can do this too. This is called pegging out the jewels, turning a really finely sharpened piece of pegwood, just to make sure that there's no dirt, debris, or old oil in there. It's pretty important because this is an absolutely critical part of the watch. How it runs and how well it runs is largely dictated by this balance setup. Now what I can do is I can reassemble the balance. I mentioned two tools. I have that little parts holder thing. I've also got what they call an automatic oiler that I found really nice for these old school ones. If you don't do it, you have to put a droplet of oil right there in the center of that jewel, and then have it not get displaced as you put together everything else. It can be really tricky to do that. These parts just kind of move around. If the oil gets snagged by the other half of it and then gets pushed around, then you don't have any oil where you actually need it. What the automatic oiler lets you do is just reassemble it as normal. This is what the automatic oiler looks like right here. It's got this little needle. You push it into place, and then you pull on a little plunger. What it does is it deposits just the right amount of oil in between those two jewels, and it's a done deal. Now I need to reassemble the balance. Once again, there's two different things to do that. There's a little holder for the outside part of the regulator arm, and then there's what they call the stud screw. That's what holds the spring to the balance assembly. Reinstalled, and it looks like it's still running very well. I'm really happy to see that. With that, we can take it over to the time grapher and see how it's doing. This is the time grapher. It measures many different aspects of the health of the watch. Very nice. Good amplitude, 260, 271. Thank God the beat error is actually below where I need it to be under one millisecond, but the rate is way off. I'm going to show you how I adjust that. It's going too fast right now, so I adjusted it towards the S or slow portion of it. You can see I just move it a little tiny bit, and then take a look at what it does. Now that was too much. It was plus 36, and you can see the trace as it moves forward, how it's going downward now. Downward means too slow, upward means too fast, and then the distance between those lines is the beat error. There's a visual component plus the number readout. Now I need to come back just a little bit because it's going a little bit too slow at minus 10 seconds. This is the process. You just go back and forth, and you just keep tweaking it over and over and over again until you get it into a good spot. Let's see where we can get this one. As you can see, this one's a little finicky. Some of the more modern ones are a little more ... I don't know. When you make an adjustment, it doesn't feel like it's flying all over the place, but this one does, and that's not that uncommon on these older watches. You really have to learn how to do just the absolute tiniest amount of change to it. Sometimes you can't even hardly see that you're actually changing it. As you can see, I've gone back and forth a bunch here on this particular one, but that isn't too uncommon. You've just got to let it settle in. You've got to just let it sit for a little while, and check that out. 272, minus one to minus four seconds a day, and one millisecond of beat error. That is fantastic. I am really happy with that. With the movement checkbox, now we need to turn our attention back to the rather complicated things going on with the calendar mechanisms on this watch. The first thing I want to do is see if I can salvage this month wheel. It is rusty, both on the bottom and the top. The first thing I'm going to do is just see if I can just use a little bit of water to remove some of the rust staining. Luckily, it does actually look like it's coming off here. This is one of those things where this part is more or less a lost cause anyway, so I'll just get in there with the water. Again, I'm not using solvent. I don't use alcohol. I'm not using anything crazy on it. It's just water and a soft swab. That seems to really be doing the trick here to get this thing looking much better. Now, it's still going to look vintage and a little bit stained. That's fine. In fact, I like it. If it looks stark white, I don't think I would really like it. Now, on the other side, there's some more rust staining. I'll give that a clean up and also clean up around where that star wheel is on the bottom. This one's not nearly as bad. I'll do the same treatment on it, but to me, this one doesn't look bad at all, so I'm just going to give it just a once over to make sure that there's no actual dust or debris that's gotten on it. I'll clean off the bottom as well. Now, taking a look at the moon phase disc, it has a little bit of damage on it, but so what? That part barely even shows, if at all. Again, I'm just going to be cleaning it with a little bit of water. Now, I do need to use some lubrication here on these different parts of the calendar mechanism. As you can see, it's pretty complicated. There's kind of a lot going on here. This is the part that actually turns over the calendar, the day of the month and the day of the week as well. Then, this part sits on top and kind of sandwiches it. Then, like I said, we've got all these little springs and arms and they have different jobs. A part like this, this is a spring that's going to hold tension onto, in this case, actually two different parts. This is a very clever little one here, but most of them will hold tension onto one. The others are more like a jumper spring and that's the type of spring that holds tension against like a star or a wheel shape where it can go from one notch to the next because, remember, these wheels have to be lined up perfectly with the dial holes, the date holes that you see on the front of the dial. There's really no wiggle room there. If it's off even by a little bit, it'll be off-center, it'll look weird, and you won't be able to read it. Yeah, this one's funny. As you can see, this spring, it actually pulls on this one and then pushes on this other. It's really clever. Oops. It's a very clever design. I'm putting some of this blue grease on there where it meets up with the two parts that it holds in place, but unfortunately, when I did that, I actually knocked it off place. I'll just need to put it back and no big deal there. Now, I can now tighten down this spring as well to make sure that it is doing its job. You can see it's pushing on this one part and then this other part, it's doing the same thing and that's a very, very clever design. One thing that I do want to do though is on this plate that moves back and forth, I want to put a little bit of oil where the screws meet up with the plate underneath it and that's because it does slide back and forth. Even though those screws are shouldered so that they're meant to allow that plate to slide, I want to make sure that it can slide smoothly. Now, what I can do is there's this little stack here where this part pushes down on that wheel in the middle and make sure that it doesn't come up and then this part reaches all the way over across the side and provides, again, that jumper spring tension on one of the calendar wheels. Since I put the screw back in the exact same place where it was before, I can just simply put it back in. That worked out nicely. Once again, I can just take this one off and then I can put on, once again, another one of these jumper springs. This is one that actually is going to go onto the moon phase function and it's going to go on the outside teeth of that and allow it, again, to always rest at specific intervals. Then this part right here is what one of the pushers actually pushes up against and, once again, it will advance. In this case, it's for the month function so that you can move it forward manually. There's this metal ring around the outside of this post. I've never actually seen that quite in that way before. This is a spring that will hold tension on that one corrector that the pusher pushes up against. I can go ahead and replace the screw, but I also have to make sure that the tension is proper. I think that this screw allows me to adjust that a little bit myself if I want. I can make sure that this part reaches, yes, to the outside of this and then pulls it inwards. That's what its job is. Oh, that's funny. Ah, I did not realize that. It's funny. Remember when I put on those two parts onto that one spot over there? There's actually a third one of these correctors that go there. Actually, that spot, that screw is holding down three separate things, so I need to redo that really quickly. The one I forgot actually goes all the way at the very bottom. Again, this is another corrector for one of the date wheels. This is a pretty complicated movement. This thing's no joke. It isn't crazy. When you first work on a chronograph or something like that, there's a real lot going on there with the different modes and how, if it's in one mode, it stops you from doing certain functions, that type of thing, where this one's not really quite like that, but there are a lot of parts and there's a lot going on on the dial side here, much more than a regular calendar movement. Huh, that's funny. Then also, the other thing I noticed when I was turning that golden-looking center wheel is that there was nothing actually holding it in place. There was no jumper acting on it. I think that's because I got these two in the reverse order. I think this longer one is actually supposed to reach over to that wheel. Yeah, see right there, and then you can see how it kind of bends up and then comes to meet it, and then this one needs to sit up higher so that it can interact with the moon phase disc. I put them in the wrong order. Thankfully, I noticed that, but otherwise, whatever, it's a quick fix anyway. Okay, so now that's back in place. I once again can use a little bit of the medium viscosity oil, just a tiny amount, just to make sure that everything can interact smoothly with these discs and jumpers and all that type of stuff. This is a spot where you definitely don't want to use too much, that you would actually hinder the movement potentially. Okay, let's take a look at these hands now. I did notice that they caught a bit of the brunt of the moisture damage. Nothing horrendous, but if you look closely, you can see that there's corrosion on these hands, and it puts me in a little bit of a predicament because if I were to completely restore these hands, they would be like shiny brass, right, and I think they would look pretty out of place, but I also don't want to reinstall them on the watch with this much corrosion just sitting on them, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do some manual cleaning of them to remove any dust or debris and corrosion that's just sort of sitting on the top part of the hands, but I'm not going to be polishing them or you know doing anything crazy to try to fully restore them. I want them to look like they belong on this watch, but I don't want them to be dirty or have corrosion on them, so I'm going to go for the middle ground here. You know, it's always a question when you're working on watches like this, you know, do you want to put brand new parts in, do you want to restore things to factory-looking finish or to brand new, or do you want to use original parts and keep it looking aged like it is, and you know, that's a personal decision that you have to make, and I'll make different decisions based on different watches and the owners of them, but in this case, I'm pretty happy to just use a bit of elbow grease here to take off some of this sitting corrosion. I think it'll improve the appearance of the hands, but it'll also keep them original and looking appropriate for the age of the watch as well. Yes, and I also have to do this for the little baby seconds hand, and then what I can do is I can just take a little bit of alcohol, this is just isopropyl alcohol, just to again run it over the top just to make sure that there's nothing left on there and that I've cleaned these up sufficiently. Let's take a look at how they look. Yeah, see, that's much, much better than how they were before. That debris is gone, and we even got a little bit of the shine revealed underneath them, but again, not overwhelming, and that's kind of exactly what I wanted. Okay, let's take a look at the case here. It went through the ultrasonic cleaner, and it did a pretty good job, but there's still some rust debris, something around the edge here, so I'm just going to use my pegwood to make sure that that's busted free. I can run it through the ultrasonic cleaner one more time just to make sure that it's looking correct as well, and with that done, I can now put the pushers in place. You can take a look at them here. They're very, very small. They're not the same thing as pushers on a, like a chronograph, where you're kind of meant to use them a lot. This is just for adjusting the date, so it should be something that doesn't happen very often, so they made them very low-key. They're small, they only stick out a little bit from the case, and they're actually difficult to push with your finger. In fact, they're not really meant to be pushed with your finger. You're supposed to use your fingernail or, you know, some little hard surface to do it. So, a quick look at this crystal again. It's going to have to go, but as you remember, we measured it before, and in fact, the slightly bigger size looks like it's the right one here this time, so uh-huh, that's why you do that. You order, again, I think order the size you measured, plus a bigger one is a good thing. Sometimes I'll order a smaller one as well, but that's also if I don't have that size already, and I'd like to have it in my box of crystals. Now, I can use my Rover press to install the crystal. This is a really easy process with a press like this. It has this nice wheel on the top that allows you to control the pressure really well. It squeezes the outside diameter of the crystal in, and then it seats itself inside of this bezel, and then when you let that pressure off, it just simply expands into place. Okay, so that's looking good. Now, I have to do the movement in kind of a weird way here because I really can't put this movement in place with the dial on because I have to do this. I have to make sure that each of these little pushers and correctors are lined up with each other properly, and with the dial in place, you can't do that, and these things don't just slide into place, so I'm going to do this a little bit weird. I'm going to put the movement into place first, and then what I can do is secure it into the movement, and then I will put on the dial afterwards. Taking a quick look at this crown, though, it's kind of bugged me from the beginning. I don't even know if this is the correct crown for this watch. It certainly doesn't fit well, and the branding on the outside doesn't look like it has anything to do with Kingston, I don't know what their mascot was or whatever, so I'm going to try to find a crown out of my box of crowns, and I actually found one that I think will work much better for this watch, so let's give it a quick test fit here and see how it looks. I'm going to, of course, keep the crown for Patrick, and if he wants to use that one, it's not hard to find a stem or to just replace it on this one, especially for him because he knows what he's doing, but I do not like that crown on here. It was sticking out way too far, and it also wasn't the right type of crown. You know, it didn't go over the post that sticks out. It kind of just sat alongside of it, so what I need to do, though, is I do need to trim this down because it's sticking out too far. It looks like the correct type, but I need to trim just a little bit of this off. In fact, 0.8 of a millimeter of this off, so what I'm going to do is leave my calipers at 0.8, and then I'm going to use a Sharpie to mark off what I need to cut, and then I can use these end cutters here to do so. Now, this is a little bit tricky because it's such a tiny amount, so what I like to do is get it lined up, and then what I'll do is I'll clip off just slightly less than I need because I need to file this down anyway to get the burr off of the end, and I can use these files to do this and just get a little bit of micro-adjustment afterwards, and you know what they say, you know, once you cut it too far, well, now this thing won't work at all, so you always want to be really, really careful about that. Work your way up to it. Let's see how I did. Hey, that looks fantastic. Actually, that looks really good on this watch. I'm really happy with that. I have a whole pile of watch crowns, and I'm really glad that I was able to find one that worked a bit better, and hopefully, Patrick agrees with me on that. Like I said, like with any time I work on a watch, I always give all the extra parts that I replaced back to the owner, and in this case, it's particularly pertinent because he actually knows how to reinstall them if he'd like. Okay, so we'll start with the month, and then we'll move over to this moon phase disc, and as you can see, that little jumper just goes right on the outside of it. The jumpers for both the day of the week and the month are underneath the actual dial, so I have to move over the jumper, then seat it, then let go, and then you can kind of feel when it's falling into place. Now, I can put the crown and the stem back in. It's a little tricky to get it in there correctly, but it will go, and tighten that down. Now, the other thing I need to do is put on the case screws here, but I've noticed that something's not right. One of the case screws is actually too small, and it's allowing the movement to go through the back, so I dug through my assortment of screws for case screws, and I found one that has the same threads, but the screw head is just a little bit bigger, so it'll actually hold the movement in place, and that'll now allow me to actually fully put on this crown and stem because when I was pushing it in, the movement wanted to come out the other side where it's really not supposed to. Okay, now I can go ahead and put the dial on. I find this design a little bit concerning, honestly, because the only thing that really holds down those discs is this dial, like there's nothing else, but it does seem to work. Okay, so the month seems to work. This one's for the moon phase. Watch it. Yep, see how it bumps forward one, and then as I move the date around, there we go. I saw the day of the week flip over, so that means it's at midnight, and that means, once again, I can put on the day of the month, the date pointer. Technically, I can put it on to any day that I choose. I'm going to do 31 to start with, and go ahead and secure it in place, and then once again, I'm going to go till the next midnight. There we go, and that's great. That means that both the pointer date and the day of the week are working, and that means that I can just simply put the hands on at midnight here. There's the hour hand and the minute hand, and that's kind of it. I mean, I guess I've got the seconds hand, and I have to put the bezel in place, but overall, I think this thing is coming together. Lots of little gremlins with this one, and there's always a lot for me to learn along the way, no doubt about it. I'll use my air blower here to make sure that there's no dust or lint or anything on the bottom of the crystal, and then I'm actually just going to make a little sandwich here, because these are both just press fit with your thumbs, but you don't really want to press on either side without it the other side being there, so I'm going to go ahead and do that, and look at that. This thing is so sweet. God, this is just like the perfect vintage watch. I absolutely love these things, and yeah, it does look like it's working, and yep, I can advance the day of the month. I can advance the month, and yep, I can move the moon phase forward as well. Perfect. Wow, this is super cool. I'm really happy with how this one came out. I'm going to put a brand new watch strap on this for Patrick as well, and hopefully he enjoys this watch for a long time to come, and hopefully you enjoyed the video. I really appreciate you taking the time to go on the journey with me. Let's see how this thing ended up at the end of the day with its new watch strap running well and all functions under control. Awesome. Absolutely love this watch. This is exactly why I started this channel. Thank you so much for hanging out with me for this restoration. I really do appreciate it. If you want to find me over on Instagram, I am wristwatch underscore revival over there. I love it if you stop and say hi, and with that, we'll see you on the next one.