rvltn123

Absolutely stunning. Well done, and thanks for sharing.

 

I had a couple of days off of work and decided to play with my AP diver a bit.

 

As most of you know, the gen AP diver has a 21,600bph movement. Our reps come with an ETA 2824 (or clone) movement which beats at 28,800bph. If it had a 2836 movement, it would be simple to swap in a 2846, which is the exact same movement except with a 21.6 beat rate. However, swapping a 2846 for a 2824 is more difficult. It's typically doable (although the stem height is sometimes an issue), but the date wheel will not swap and with these AP divers have a custom date font, so using the stock ETA wheel is no good.

 

Vac posted a thread in his section that seems to indicate that he's modified some 2846s to work with the 2824 datewheel, so I tried that for a bit. I swapped every single part on the front of the 2824 to a 2846, and it still would not work correctly with the 2824 datewheel. The teeth are not in the right plane. Some people report success so there apparently is a way to do it, but I couldn't figure it out and no one will share with me how it's done.

 

So I decided to do it from the other side of the movement. In a lot of ways this is actually more desirable, since it gives you a movement with the correct stem height, you don't have to modify the date mechanism, etc. It is more delicate, fussier work though, and some of the parts are very easy to break.

 

What I ended up with was a movement with all of the 2824 parts except the balance wheel, pallet fork, and escape wheel. The gear train is the same on all of the 28xx movements so nothing else had to be swapped. Now the movement beats at 21,600bph and nothing on the front side of the movement had to be changed. I didn't even remove the stem or uncase the movement.

 

These are the parts that were swapped:

 

I've transplanted these parts to the clone A2824 (you can see that the balance **** arm doesn't have the same perlage finish as the rest of the movement--this pic is through the loupe, that's why it's so weird looking)

 

Better pic:

 

Watch is now running at 21,600 bph. I didn't even have to touch the dial and hands or uncase the movement! The watch itself actually makes a pretty good movement holder for this project.

 

Excited by how this turned out. Watch has been running within about 3 sec/day for the last day and a half, we'll see what it settles in at--the lower beat movements usually aren't quite this accurate over the longer term. Waiting on a new strap, I bought a Donerix leather, we'll see how it looks all together.

 

I know, old thread, but I was curious: How did the accuracy turn out after it settled?

Thanks much for sharing your photos! Can you (or anyone else) tell me if the inner bezel actually works?

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