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SMP Rebuild


Anakin14

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Several weeks ago I received a Sea Master Professional from TrustyTime. The watch was visually impressive and kept good time. However, there seemed to be something wrong with the movement; the rotor would spin and deplete all the energy from the mainspring if the watch was held in a horizontal position. To Andrew

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wow Anakin..a great and very informative post... thanks for the pictures also. I wish this came along sooner as it might have given me confidence to have done it on my own SMP. That being said i dont think i would be brave enough to carry out such a task (with or without the right tools!) hehe

Thanks for the tutorial again..

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I just ordered a new bezel insert with a correctly placed pearl (rep insert). I'm thinking of possibly replacing my crystal with a gen so I'll have the antireflective coating on the surface or replacing the HE valve with a gen valve, but we'll see.

The new movement is incredible. When winding it, it is as smooth as buttah! Plus, without any adjustment yet, it only looses 2 seconds a day! It feels so much tighter than the "ETA 2824 movement" that came with the watch.....it's like night and day. Additionally the lume on the dial and hands is incredible. You can see it glow when you are not even in a dark room. To give you an idea how bright it is, I held it up to a light bulb for maybe 30 seconds then I went into a pitch black room. I could actually read newsprint when I held the watch crystal an inch from the paper.

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My workplace was clean and I used canned air to blow off the parts. Regarding the watch case & crystal, I rinsed it in denatured alcohol and then wiped it down with lint free paper towels. Even still, when examining under a loupe, I still saw dust. Boy, it's tough to get everything dust free!

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Great work...its always enjoyable to work on one's own watch and to have something u can be proud of.

Concerning the caseback... did u install a gen caseback? No fitting problems? Is the thickness of the watch changed now? Rep SMP are always a bit thicker than the gens...causing the reps to wear differently once on the wrist.

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The gen case back makes the watch thinner. In fact, with the stock movement, the gen case back wouldn't fit...it hit the rotor. However, with real ETA 2824 movement in there, it closed right up.

I'm convince that the stock movement was not a gen 2824 (it was supposed to be). As stated above, the dimensions were wrong. It looked similar but didn't "feel" the same at all and it was thicker. The new movement is 2 seconds fast every 24 hours (without any adjustments) and it is soooo smooth when the rotor turns or when you turn the dial to either wind it or set the date/time.

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The gen case back makes the watch thinner. In fact, with the stock movement, the gen case back wouldn't fit...it hit the rotor. However, with real ETA 2824 movement in there, it closed right up.

I'm convince that the stock movement was not a gen 2824 (it was supposed to be). As stated above, the dimensions were wrong. It looked similar but didn't "feel" the same at all and it was thicker. The new movement is 2 seconds fast every 24 hours (without any adjustments) and it is soooo smooth when the rotor turns or when you turn the dial to either wind it or set the date/time.

Perhaps this gives me hope in working with my SMP reps again. Besides the He issue, I assumed that the thickness issue was too much to overcome.

1 issue with the bezel insert is that I suggest sanding it down no matter what (no glue is needed...just pop the insert in). The gen insert in slightly recessed in the bezel while most of the reps' inserts are flush with the bezel out of the box.

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