This one is a purchase from my Facebook Selling Group and from a personal watch friend of mine that I have done work for and bought watches from him in the past.
I have had my eye on this model for years but they are either too rough or too expensive for what I want to pay. This one came up for £45 but on mates rates I bought it for £35 which is a good deal for this.
It was missing a crown and stem and the crystal was badly scratched with a crack / fracture.
Here is how it turned up.
I just love that dial layout. Classic jump hour, there is a running second hand in the middle, hour to the left, minutes to the top and date to the right. Not the easiest watch to read at a glance.
The watch is not running and my friend Pete could not wind it to test due to no crown. I removed the caseback thinking that this would be simple enough. I am expecting a pin pallet BFG movement and I have a pile of spares for these.
So here is a first for me a 17 jewel pin pallet movement. I am sure there are reasons for this but its not obvious to me. Having no jewels to the pallet but jewels on pivots just seems odd. I am guessing perhaps some legal reasons or just upping the jewel count to make it sound more prestigious, who knows.
Main thing I notice here is apart from all the finger prints is the hairspring. something is really wrong. So I remove the balance wheel to find that the spring is not in the regulator arm and that the top is closed so it cant have escaped. Clearly deliberate. I make short work of correcting this and then fitting back to the movement.
I manually wind the mainspring using the screw on the barrel but nothing. not even a hint of life…
Okay its time to dive in and strip some back.
With that done I put the plates and wheels into the cleaner and flip the movement over to the dial side.
I am confronted with what appears to be something from the wheel of fortune TV show!
I tried to pry up the centre wheel but it will not move, its on tight and even my 2.5mm hand levers will not fit the sides of the disc so not wanting to damage I figured I best leave intact.
I flip the movement over again and peg and Rodico all the holes in preparation to rebuild the train.
This was a simple affair other than the pallet which is not the easiest to place but once together and with some wind the movement springs into life. I regulated as best I could and got a reasonable trace on the timegrapher, at least for a pin pallet.
Not perfect by any means but once left to run in the traces did get slightly better.
Happy with this I then sanded and polished back the acrylic crystal. I taped off all the case to protect it especially as it is chrome plated so I would not want to damage that.
With all this work done I get out my pot of dead BFG movements and go on the search for a stem and crown.
Once fitted I case the movement and put into more testing. This is where I found the next issue. The watch would run until around about 55 minutes to the hour and then would not jump to the next hour. This would not stop the movement though as the second hand would happily keep spinning around.
I found this issue quite weird and assumed that at 55 minutes the discs were loading on the jumper spring and perhaps the load was too much to push it over.
I reached out to my Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/Retro.Vintage.Watches.Restorations
A kind member gave me the answer and thus saved me hours of problem solving.
On the barrel lid there is another drive wheel, these can become loose over time and need to be tightened by using a staking set to tighten up the collar in the middle. I quickly stripped the movement back and did this fix which then worked perfectly! (Members photo)
Here is the finished watch. One I have wanted to add to my jump hour collection for many years. Okay the crystal is cracked but its only visible from side views and I will happily live with this for now.
