This is my first Seiko High Beat movement and given my passion for Seiko I am surprised it has taken me until 2023 to acquire one!
This one if it was a JDM model would have been a King Seiko model but from what I can gather these unlabeled versions were for outside of Japan.
There is something very noticeable about this watch and that is the colouration. A two tone brown striped dial (so 70s) gold indices and hands but in a stainless steel case.
Reason: well this one I made from a donor! A long story short a good friend of mine and fellow Seiko collector acquired a stunning blue dial version but it came in pieces. The movement was disassembled in various containers, There was a new old stock case and a bracelet to match.
He asked me if I would rebuild the whole watch and make it good. He also supplied a donor gold version he had found and suggested that all the parts may not be present so if anything was missing I could use the donor to harvest what was required.
I had never worked on this movement before and seeing it all in parts first would mean a bit of a nice challenge. I was able to rebuild his watch using the best parts from both watches. There was one issue, the end links for the bracelet he supplied were missing! We both had not noticed this so it was a bit of a surprise. I decided I could take the gold ones, manually strip off the plating with abrasives and make them good enough to match his new old stock case.
This was a very time consuming job and fortunately I used a jewellers ring vice to hold the end links to refinish. What you see here is about 2 hours of work. You will notice dents which I was able to sand under to make them level.
I think that turned out alright in the end. My friend was pleased. As way of payment for my efforts we did a trade, he gave me a Seiko I was after an allowed me to keep the movement parts and the gold Seiko donor. He also had a spare stainless case. The gold case was in too poor a condition to use and the bracelet missing the end links so the obvious thing to do was to build a movement, use the nice brown dial and place in the stainless case.
All this was done on film for YouTube and you can watch that restoration here:
Here are the photos of the finished watch. I am very pleased with how this one turned out.
