Restoring a Vintage Rolex GMT
youtube.com
youtube.com
Similar to the video here, I have my grandfathers Rolex. He wore it while trimming hedges and doing all sorts of yard work. Why not, it was his only watch and he needed to tell the time! If it's so good it ought to be able to stand up to the abuse! It's also not like he serviced it regularly, and after being in a safe for 20 years after his passing, I put it on, moved around for a day with it.. and it started to keep time about as accurately as specified.
These days you see the exact opposite behavior. Everyone has just become so precious about their goods. "It's really expensive so I need to protect it / use it sparingly / use great caution". Look at the entire ecosystem of protective cases for iPhones/Apple Watches/etc. On upscale cars you have the obsession with paint protection films, ceramic coatings, etc.
In some cases its warranted - we got my wife a (not Rolex) expensive watch 10 years ago, and the thing has had to go in for service every 2-3 years for weeks at a time to get it to keep time properly. Even if some companies like Tesla have notoriously thin paint, no ones cars are rusting in 5 years like they did in the 80s.
I have my grandfathers Rolex. He wore it while trimming
hedges and doing all sorts of yard work. Why not, it was
his only watch and he needed to tell the time!
[...]
These days you see the exact opposite behavior. Everyone
has just become so precious about their goods.
https://www.bobswatches.com/rolex-blog/history-of-time/rolex...
In the 1950s a Rolex Submariner cost about $1,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars and were some of the most rugged watches you could buy because they were designed for actual diving use. Today Rolexes start closer to $10,000 and there are obviously far more rugged and functional choices, such a $50 Casio G-Shock.
So, I don't know. I see people wearing their pricey smartwatches for all kinds of adventure stuff. I'm not sure that people are babying their watches these days.
You can stretch this out to 5 years and get away with it. Also, most mechanical watches need some kind of servicing (usually relubrication) along that time frame. Hence why before the quartz revolution, local watchmakers were both a staple of any community and a necessary service.
You should really see to it that the Rolex is serviced by a reputable watchmaker. 20 years is a long time, even for a Rolex. Rolexes can last decades upon decades if properly cared for.
Yes definitely. I just purchased a Tektronix 2232 to mess around with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYqE_F2USAM
My plan is to try making oscilloscope music (https://g.co/kgs/SmYmBL) and from what I read the old analog scopes make much better XY plots compared with new digital ones
what the wha??? i see people give their toddlers their mobile devices who then gleefully whack it on whatever surface is convenient. i see people just toss their devices around. case or no case. so many people don't even think of it as an expensive device since it's just a part of their monthly fees. seemingly, only the people that buy the phone outright are familiar with the actual costs. with insurance plans and cheap replacements, people care less about the fragility of the thing and just think of it as a kitchen utensil. so i guess the circles you and i run in are quite drastically different in this regard.
Same for portable game systems like the Gameboy brick we all used naked vs all the cases on the switch, etc.
I know other people who have it because they want better grip or they just want to customize the looks of their phone. Protection is not always the #1 reason.
Now i drop my phone once and the back is shattered. Honestly getting pretty sick of the direction apple has gone with the iphone. I just want the iphone 7 with better battery life and some hardware upgrades.
They probably looked at the numbers and realized 98% of people put cases on their phones anyway so the disadvantages of glass weren't too bad.
On the other hand, I routinely keep phones 5 years, and putting the case omit greatly increases the odds of it making it that long.
On the third(?) hand, cases themselves are kind of a crapshoot for durability. I cracked the corners of an Otterbox case, glued them, cracked them again, and finally switched to an aluminum Ghostek case that's holding up ok.
Tolerances for good(!) watches are in the range of 0.01mm to 0.001mm for some components. With polishing and a lot of testing this can be achieved on manual machines.
(Retitled, against policy, because the original one doesn't summerize it appropriately.)
Personally I love these channels where they fix old stuff be it electronic, mechanical or paintings
There was nothing wrong, it wasn't broken, so restoration feels like the wrong word to use.
That's exactly it, especially among vintage rolex collectors. They have a bunch of slang for describing different ways things have aged eg the tritium paint on the dial having faded into a desirable cream color (creamy lume!), the hand's lume matching (implying it is the original paint on both the dial and hands), the dial itself could have any variety of sun damage like spidering or spotting, and on the GMT's in particular the color on the insert can fade so you might find yourself looking at a "fuchsia GMT". There is also a huge aversion to polishing of any kind.
This also can end up creating a lot of drama with Rolex itself if they send the watch in for factory service with instructions that end up not being honored. If you poke around on forums you'll see some very angry customers who specified no polishing, no replacing of worn/patina'd components like hands or dials, who got their watch back with a bunch of factory new parts.
There are a lot of folks in the hobby who are really passionate about e.g. super affordable Seikos and Casios and don't "graduate" to super pricey stuff.
For years, I'd assumed that watch collecting was sort of a money spending contest. Not so. I've found it super welcoming, accessible, and honestly not necessarily expensive. (Though you can certainly spend unlimited amounts of money if you wish
Few favorites for people with spare time (and lots of money if one wants to buy these):
Tourbillon: a watch complication where the main mechanism is mounted on a rotating wheel so that gravity doesn't affect the watch in a single direction.
Spring drive: A very recent mechanism that produces a perfect sweeping motion of the seconds hand. It combines both mechanical power (no battery) with a quartz crystal in a super cool way.
Minute repeater: a mechanical way for a blind person to tell the time.
(Although, Seiko is doing away with their most affordable mechanical models, all the newer ones are $200+)
The watch shop asked for more than the cost of the watch to service it, so I watched a few videos and tried to do it myself.
Make no mistake, those gears are TINY. Insanely so. I had imagined that I'd put them into place carefully, lining up the teeth... But they're so small it's closer to "well I dropped you into place and bumped you a few times and it seems good now".
I got the watch to run, but somehow messed up the date window. Fiddlesticks.
I know if I go to the safe to put on, say, my Omega, I might just put it right back in there if the delta between the actual date and the date when the watch stopped is too large. LOL. I've got some no-dates (mostly dressier, hand-wound), or I can roll the dice on one of the other date-window autos.
I'm especially glad in those moments that I don't have any day-dates.
When I was a kid in the 70s, the Success Token most of the upper-middle-class men I knew opted for (if they opted for one) was a Rolex. It was usually either:
- A Submariner in all steel (think 60s Bond); or
- A steel Datejust on a two-tone Jubilee bracelet with a champagne face (a color scheme aped by a million Citizens and Seikos); or
- An all-gold Day-Date on a gold President bracelet (think Tony Soprano).
My dad took the middle path.
My brain just filters it right out.
I find it a valuable adaptation for folks who like to rotate between various mechanical watches and don't care to keep them all on winders.
(Which, let's face it, also adds wear and tear on the watches. Each of my mech watches gets worn maaaaybe two days per month and I expect this to really extend their lives. We'll see.)
But, watches are very personal. There's no right or wrong way to do the hobby as long as you're having fun!
This is doubly hilarious because I can no longer read the date window on most of my watches for one reason or another. The "cyclops" on my Rolex is scuffed, which obscures its date window, for example. Sadder is the fact that my resistance to progressives means the Seamaster's non-magnified date window may as well be theoretical to my 52 year old eyes. LOL.
(What's REALLY funny is the sheer TININESS of the date window on my wife's lady-sized Doxa dive watch. I have NO idea how anyone could ever actually USE it, and yet they ship it with a date movement.)
I treat my watch as my "approximate time" device. I usually set it a few minutes fast on purpose. If I need the exact time or the exact date I look at my phone.
But don't worry. I have a host of other OCD behaviors around watches!
Personally, I find setting the time much more annoying than the date, especially if the watch has a quick-set date.
https://www.hamiltonwatch.com/en-us/collection/khaki-field.h...
FWIW, a $100-$500 Hamilton automatic field watch is a good deal, and not "expensive" by any objective measure.
When people desire cheap watches I tend to recommend some of the old USSR pieces, they were made in the millions and so they're very available, and they're cheap and reliable too.
These days there are new options available, so you might consider searching for things made by Vostok, or similar.
(Half my watch collection is Swiss-made, the other half is mostly Soviet vintage pieces.)
- wood sticks to clean off the watch without scratching
- bright green mat for high contrast against small parts
- soft cushion pad made it easier to pick up parts on a flat surface
- the ring around the replacement main spring to make it easier to press into the barrel
(idk anything about watch servicing, just my guesses from watching the video)
(Not necessarily those very gears but gears typically used in watches.)
I have experience cutting 0.3mm and 0.1mm brass. The second is just wobbling everywhere like a reed in the wind, while those gears seems to be solid.
I had extremely limited success replicating a gear using a 0.3mm FDM Cartesian 3d printer, but even then I had to manually shave off every single tooth under a loupe.
Accutron is where the really small engineering comes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XugX5zb1rG8 the wheel is about 25mm across (I think) but you can't really see the teeth with the naked eye. (https://www.watchdoctor.biz/accutron/ has more details) but the level of accuracy and detail needed to machine that far outweighs the stuff that rolex do even now.
These index wheels were mass produced, and I still don't know how they did it.
> These index wheels were mass produced, and I still don't know how they did it.
Fascinating. My guess would be some form of etching process. But that would make it some form of MEMS years before the first commonly recognised MEMS components.
Really, really good photography and narration - worth a watch IMO.