RWG Technical

Congrats, have a great day.

My solution is to machine a new tube on the lathe, drill the case to accept the new tube, press it in place, and install new o'rings on the crown to provide a tight seal against the tube.

No shock protection at all on these older movements, which is why the balance staff's break off so often or get bent. I wear this watch all the time, wearing it now in fact...it's within 30 second a WEEK accuracy and as long as I don't drop it, it's going to be fine. Get the Waltham, you'll not regret it.

The movement looks like a 21.6K older version of the A7750, I wonder why they installed that model and not the 28.8K version? Not sure what to make of the overall watch, I do like the orange but the strap not only looks unsafe, it looks very uncomfortable on the wrist. Thanks for the detailed pictures.

Attempting to shave the dots down will probably end up causing damage to the dial. The only practical solution is to completely remove all the old lume, then apply new lume dots and flatten them out.

I believe they silk screen the dials or do it with some type of robot application, otherwise you would have to have individuals sitting down luming them by hand. Simply not practical or cost effective.

Wow, thank you so much, my pleasure as always.

Neither is best, they are both the same movement, if you look at the ETA site it will be readily apparent the differences from the Valgranes to the standard ETA. There is no difference other than the wording that the dealers are using to describe them.

Valgranes is a new line of large movements from ETA. They are not the same movements. You can see them in detail on the ETA website, www.eta.ch...

Ha ha, not at all...just trying to share my area of interest and show things that most members don't get to see or witness. Glad you like it and thanks for the feedback. If you liked this one, you may enjoy this one here...it's technical as well: Replacing a balance staff I have been around watches for over 30 years, family history going back to 1935 in watch repair, it's my hobby to keep my idle hands away from the devil

Too bad they didn't line the hands up as nicely as I did...note the main seconds off to the right but the 30 minute counter off to the left...gen's...who needs them...

Civil war? Where did that come from...a bit over the top I think. We owe it to the members here to inform them and encourage them to support their own, be it knowledge from members, modders, dealers, or whatever. You do the exact same thing on RG, but you find it offensive that we would do the same here? Double standard... Vaccum is a founding member of RWG as well as the original RWG, he's been around for 5 years and we owe it to him to lend him our support and suggest that members consider his services, the same as he offers his expertise here to our membership. I fail to see how you intepret that in a negative way.

Forget the LH movement if you can, although it is cosmetically nicer, it's the same Asian 6497 we see in all the reps, it is not superior in any way. I see you have been a member of RWG for a couple of years, and I would suggest that you support the modders from our own forum, that being our own Vaccum. Vaccum has been around for 5 years, he is the only modder I recommend, and is well respected here and supports our membership. It is always better to keep it in house and support each other.

I suspected it was always C3 but once I had the genuine dials in house, I placed some C3 on the genuine dial lume, and it was an exact match, this confirmed what I suspected. The problem is all in the photography, the camera exposes for an "overall" brightness, and because the dials are black, the lume ends up being over-exposed and looks white. If you correctly expose the lume, you will always see the correct colour. In person it never looks white, it looks pure C3 Yellow/Green. If your reference is to use pictures, then of course you will make the mistake of thinking the genuine is something lighter than C3, and this is where the old wives tale of C1/C3 mix started...and it's never going to go away like the rest of the myths of watches... Pure C3, think about it, why would you dilute the brightest lume and C3 is the best and brightest. You can test the colour change with any digitial camera and your PAM.

Good work, I agree on the numbers, a bit less red and more of a tan/ochre colour would be nice. Well done.

Beautiful workmanship, simply stunning and good photo's as well, even without the set up...

Fantastic shots JoJo, wish I had been there with you and L. Thanks for the pics, looks like it was a great evening.

I don't think this is the normal condition of watches from this or any dealer. Careful examination of the case will reveal who the dealer is...it's in the details...

Not even going to attepmt to fix this one, somethings are better left alone...

Nothing happens, it just keep on going like the energizer bunny...

A classic indeed, good luck with the sale.

Since we have a number of visitors to our site, I though this may be of interest to those with a technical interest and background. It is a re-post of an article from a while back (my apologies to the RWG members who have already seen it). I sincerely hope all the RG folks are enjoying their visit to our forum and find this post of interest. Great to have you here. I always like to challenge myself and learn new things. When it comes to watchmaking, I study and try and learn something new all the time. I thought it would be an interesting project to re-engine my Fiddy with an old pocket watch movement. The reasons I wanted to do this upgrade include: 1. Installing a higher grade 21 jewel adjusted to 5 position movement, not only for astetics, but for time keeping accuracy 2. See if I had the skills to modify the hour and cannon gears to accept my Fiddy hands 3. See if I could modify the case to accept a pocket watch movement 4. See if I could modify the stem to fit my Fiddy crown So let me walk you down the path I took to get this modification accomplished. As with any modification, you have to follow a certain set of steps, but since we are dealing with a number of unknowns, you don't know if step A is going to work until you try it, and then you don't know if step B is going to work, and so on...any way along the road I could reach a road block and the whole project is dead in the water... So knowing all of that, I start with what I think is the show stopper, modifying the existing hour and cannon pin to accept my Fiddy hands, without hands the watch isn't much good... Modifying the ETA H3 Hour wheel and H3 Cannon pinion. My plan is to remove the ETA hour wheel tube from an ETA hour wheel, and install this tube over the pocket watch hour wheel. I chuck the wheel in the lathe and cut the tube off with a graver... Close up of the ETA wheel in place. The tube has been cut off... I change collets and place the cut off hour wheel in the collet so that I can true up the cut off end. Here is my new tube next to the hour wheel for the pocket watch movement. Test fitting and measuring shows that I have to enlarge the new tube I cut off and reduce the diameter of the pocket watch hour wheel slightly, so that I can mate the two tubes together. I put the new tube into the collet, and run a reamer through it to enlarge the hole. I also slightly cut down the outside of the pocket watch hour wheel tube. Test fitting shows that I have removed enough material and the new tube slips over the pocket watch hour wheel, step one is a success...only a dozen more steps to go Cannon pin modification Next up, I need to cut the top off of a H3 ETA Cannon pin, so that I can install it onto my pocket watch cannon pin. Step 1, cut off the top of the ETA cannon pin. After it's cut off, I true it up in the lathe as I did with the hour tube. Here is the new modified Hour wheel installed on pocket watch movement. You can see the reason I need a new cannon pinion to accept my Fiddy hands, the existing one is much too small and too short... The new ETA Cannon pinion tip is removed from the lathe so you can see what I am working with... Measurements show me that I need to cut out the center of the Cannon pin tip so that it will fit over the pocket watch cannon pinion. The hole I need to cut into the bottom of the new cannon pinion tip measures out at 0.90mm... Now that I have the new Cannon pin modified, I test fit it onto the pocket watch movement. Success! perfect fit, so I epoxy the cannon pinion tip in place. Fitting the movement into the case. I didn't document these steps with photo's. The movement was slightly too large to fit into the Fiddy case. I machined the inside of the case and enlarged it enough to fit the movement. Once this was done, I test fitted the movement and as I hoped would happen, everything lined up perfectly, the stem hole lines up exactly with the case tube. Only problem is that my pocket watch stem is much too big... Modifying the stem to fit my Fiddy crown... Next challenge. Fitting my 1.20mm crown onto a pocket watch stem that measures a whopping 1.55mm... Since the stem is hardened metal, I use a carboloy graver to turn it down to 1.20mm. Tempered metal will ruin my 1.20mm die, so I anneal the stem by heating it up with my butane torch. Annealing removes the temper and allows me to run my die over the stem and create new threads... Big test, will the crown fit...yes, one more step out of the way... I then installed the movement into the case, test fitted and trimmed the stem, and then discovered that the caseback was a bit too tight when screwed down. I removed the caseback crystal, and machined the inner diameter of the caseback so that it would thread down without touching the new movement. Hour and minute hands fit perfectly, what didn't fit was the seconds hand. I had to remove and replace the seconds hand tube with a longer one that measured 0.17mm to fit onto my pocket watch movement. Once that was done, all the hands were installed and tested for alignment. I lumed the dial and hands to match the Genuine Fiddy. This was done with pure Super Luminova C3 which is the same colour used on the Genuine PAM's (I have confirmed the colour against a genuine Fiddy and other genuine PAM dials I have had in the shop for repair and relume - ALL PAM's are lumed in pure C3, not a C3/C1 mix as some claim). So what did I end up with... Overall view And the real reason for the mods...who can resist something so beautiful... The movement was fully serviced before installation. The top pivot on the balance wheel staff was bent, I managed to straighten it out so it's almost perfect, but there is a slight wobble to the pivot (visible through the top cap jewel). This is causing a positional error of 4 seconds per day, so I will replace the balance staff with a new one and correct that issue. Conclusion... Reps have flaws, no matter how many mods we do to them. With that in mind, and given the history of the "Fiddy", and my love of old pocket watch movements - not only for their timekeeping accuracy - but the fit, finish, and beauty, I thought it "Fitting to Fit my Fiddy" with something that I would enjoy looking at for a long time. Knowing I have a 60+ year old movement on my wrist, with 21 Jewels and a Breguet overcoil hairspring, adjusted to temperature and 5 positions and that keeps time to within 30 seconds per week, is something I am proud to wear. As well, I got to use and have fun practicing some of my watchmaiking skills. Hope you like the results, and thanks for reading.

Well just when you think you have seen it all, along comes another bunch of surprises... Nice Daytona but as soon as I take the bracelet off and spy these bent like banana's spring bars, I am a bit unsure of what was to come, certainly not a good start. I decide to give the watch a wind and see how it's working and to test the chrono's...it doesn't wind... as a matter of fact, the Crown falls off in my hand... Ok, so why don't I test out the pushers to make sure the chrono turns on and off, so I unscrew the pusher... and it falls out, yikes... well lets unscrew the other one, and it TOO falls out...(I am not making this up) Alright, not the end of the world, but not a great start either...so open the caseback, it's barely finger tight, what's the first thing I see: what happened to the Rotor, it's MISSING. A closer look at the crown reveals the problem, there are no threads left for the stem to screw into, no wonder it fell off...as for the pushers they were not secured in the case... Well it can't get any worse can it? lets uncase the movement and have a look. Not looking great in the side shot, the center seconds hand is not seated where it should be, and is loose, a close look shows the hand tube is filled with glue... Alright, time for a closer inspection of the hands, they don't look so good either, all full of finger prints and stains, remember that this is a BRAND NEW fresh from a Dealer watch, what you see is the condition as delivered, talk about a bad day on the assembly line. Next up, off comes the hands and the dial and lets start to take the movement apart and see why it's not running... First up, it looks like there is going to be a problem with the 30 minute counter drive, unless there is some sort of invisible force field between the gears it's not going to work, the gears aren't even meshed with each other. Lets remove this plate and see what the rest of the movement looks like, what do we have here? Is that a grinding mark on the mainplate? Why would someone grind out a piece of the bottom plate and the bottom of the mainspring arbour??? Flipping the movement over and take apart a few more bridges, and what happens, one of the screw inserts falls out and some other piece of metal from somewhere falls out as well... If you look closely at the balance wheel hairspring, note that at the 10 o'clock position the spacing of the hairspring, now compare this to the spacing at the 4 o'clock position, the hairspring is not concentric and out of round. Lets remove the balance and pallet, and test out the going train to see why it's not running, I give the mainspring barrel a wind and nothing, it's frozen solid and the gears are not moving...so off comes the bridge and what do we have here??? The great wheel teeth are all distorted and there seems to be something wrong with the second wheel below it...the circled section appears flat, not rounded as it should be... Here is a better view of the great wheel gear, note the teeth all pushed in one direction and distorted. And here is a view of the great wheel and the second wheel, note the bend in the top edge, it looks like it was hit with a screwdriver. So what do you do with this? You put it back together, document your findings, and send it back to the dealer for a refund or replacement. Never have I seen such terrible workmanship and so much damage on a brand new fresh from the dealer watch. Not sure what happened but someone was really asleep when this one was put together, or maybe it was late on a Friday and TGIF at the bar... Lesson learned, when it starts out bad, it can sometimes get much worse.

Ok understood. I must be missing something, guessing there is a ring somewhere of lume, around the dial? I'll wait for the follow up pics, thanks for the feedback.

Right on, you win the prize (an extra drop of oil in your next servicing) well done! I was sure it would stand out like a sore thumb, goes to show how good the reps are.