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Friday, June 25, 2010

A poor abused Orient

Originally posted in the Seiko Citizen watch forum (the old Network 54 site)

see the original post here

Resurrection of a poor abused Orient..lots of pics

May 3 2008 at 8:53 AM
Got this beaten up Orient for free and thought I'd fix it up.

I took some pictures and figured I'd do a photo-essay for those of you who like such things..

Can't even tell its an Orient actually, the crest has long gone..but it ticks for several seconds when shaken so hopefully all it needs is a COA (clean, oil and adjust).



The crystal is badly scored...crystals are the easy part!


This watch has seen some serious use... the strap is toast


Movement looks suprisingly clean though, doesn't look like any major water damage... hopefully there are no suprises.


..another look at the movement...this is the first Orient I've taken apart but its starting to look awfully familiar...

Where is the stem release button? I don't see any screw either...


Well what do you know.. pull the crown out and this little tongue appears...some other watches uses this too ...

The date advance pusher is well and truly stuck !


Have you seen a dial in worse shape? Looks like it spent the last few years at the bottom of the ocean.


And look at what I found once I popped the bezel off! Look atall that rust. See the caseback?..last serviced in 94? Who would have guessed!


Yep...at least five years in the ocean.


Probably went down in the last war?


Maybe even on the RMS Titanic


All that rust must have created a good seal between the bezel and case because under the dial all was looking pretty fine actually.


Having taken the rotor off, it looks in reasonable shape. But wait, I see an old friend...


Its the magic-lever!! Well you may call yourself Orient but I have to tell you you're probably adopted.




Removing the train bridge reveals nothing spectacular...tried and true design. A bit of discoloration on the intermediate plate, that's all.



Balance wheel in good shape... these older watches have nicer balance-springs than the modern ones.


The pallet-fork bridge is a bit discoloured and is missing one screw.. well this is a workhorse movement anyway.

Dismantling almost done on this side!


Date-wheel plate removed. Near the '2' you will see the date advancing wheel which works off the button on the side. This is different from the Seiko calibres.


Took me about an hour to get the date-pusher out.. it's held in by a C-clip and has a spring beneath it. I had to use a replacement for the spring which I got from another Ricoh watch.

Since the dial was too bad to be re-used, I decided to experiment. First I removed the markers and the Orient logo, then cleaned off the old paint and sanded flat. I used rattle-can sprays, initially giving a bright silver base coat followed by a layer of gold. Finally a light dusting of black to give the speckled effect. Then cleaned the markers with Autosol and wooden toothpicks and reinstalled them (easier said than done!). I'm quite happy with the result. It matches the hands....


....and has a nice matt finish when viewed at an angle.


Movement cleaned and oiled... no adjustment was necessary, I didn't time it but after using it for about a week it didn't need any adjustment, good enough for me!



Movement installed in its home with new roof (crystal), fitted with a strap I had lying around and I even managed to find a signed Orient clasp.

Nice Orient case back....



From the above, we can see that this Orient owes a lot to Seiko, the only difference is the push-button date-jumper.

hope you enjoyed the ride.

The End...

Thursday, June 24, 2010

My first 'old' watch

The first old watch that I bought was a hand-winding Titoni Airmaster. The original was given to a friend after I discovered that the movement said 'Pagol' instead of Titoni as it should have. The one pictured below is a similar one I got recently. Works fine and the movement looks in good condition but the dial could be better and the date-wheel is trash. These movements are fairly common and I'm sure I will come across an organ donor one of these days.

The elegant lugs are a hallmark of Titoni watches of the period and its suprising that you don't see them more often as they look really good IMHO. However this is only if they are fitted with a strap as generic metal bracelets look really awful as they can't fill the gaps especially at the edges of the lugs. The original metal strap covers this area well but these are quite rare. The dial is pretty much traditional in design except Titoni usually have an insert just above the 6 o'clock marker. I've heard that this is a Swarovski Crystal.... any thoughts?



This is a simple gents watch from the sixties, powered by an ETA2409 movement. This is a simple movement but the fact it has 21jewels (in a hand-wind) shows that it was probably slightly up-market as a lot of watches during this time were only 17Jewels. You can see three of the additional one the train bridge(the three jewels in an oblong plate held by a screw, there will be one more on the dial side. There is no real quickset on this watch but you can wind it back to around 8(pm) and it will roll over. Previous watches without quickset required you to wind the watch forward until you get the date you required..Not so much a problem when you only owned one watch, then you only needed to wind it forwards 24hrs for the months with only 30days (more for February) but its a pain nowadays as I usually wear a particular watch for only a few days at a time.


The case-back style is also peculiar to Titoni. Instead of the usual six slots, you find a 12-sided 'nut' which can easily be opened with an adjustable spanner. Note, if you want to open one of these watches with an adjustable spanner, use a new one or at least one in good condition where the jaws have nice flat edges. The 'lands' on the caseback are quite shallow and a worn spanner will slip and scratch the case-back. The original Titoni tool looks like an oversize bottle opener with the end in the form of a ring-spanner but is almost impossible to find now.


Overall, a nice honest watch, it wears well on the wrist too..


This is another similar model, but this time from the late 70s or early eighties. Similar styled dial but it now has minute markers. A nice touch is the red-arrow tipped secondhand. Here you can see the gap when you use an incorrect steel bracelet. The bracelet in this case is an original Titoni, just not for this watch.



It has an ETA2763, in this example it looks good..no water damage, bodges by previous owners etc. Movement holding screws are present and correct. This movement is slightly newer and has a proper quickset. You can pull the crown out halfway and advance the date....aaaah progress.


Original crown too...


Caseback doesn't look too bad





Bye for now,......

Friday, June 18, 2010

Where it all began.

I've always had a fascination with mechanical things... I can remember cutting myself on various clockwork clocks and toys when the spring got let out of its cage, it was remarkable how so much metal could be confined in such a small place.

My toys in those days were made in China and were of typically made of pressed steel metal with a clockwork 'engine' These were usually made in 2 pieces and held together with little bent tabs, it was simple work to bend these tabs and get to the bits inside. My toys usually didn't last long.... I've seen these tin-toys on sale for good money now..!

My early watch history starts with a boys 'Cadet' handwind, I must have been about 11 or 12, its sadly long gone. My sister got a Mickey Mouse with a red strap. This would have been around 1980...

I had a few digital watches but I can remember lusting for a chunky mechanical winding watch on display at the Johor Baru Emporium (KOMTAR), this was a Campus and looking back I believe it was a pin-lever type as the mechanism was quite uninspiring to look at. I remember getting the case off and unscrewing something and............bzzzzzzit, something flew off and the watch wouldn't wind. It must have been the 'click'!!

When I was in the Sixth form in English College, I had a classmate by the name of Azmi Salleh (where are you now?) who had a nice Swiss watch...either a Titus or Titoni, can't really remember. He bought this watch from Sungei Road in Singapore for around MYR50 I think..Good deal, I knew I had to get there. Another friend had a square Titus, also from Sungei Road.

Singapore is just across the Straits of Tebrau from Johor Baru, where I grew up, and Sungei Road was conveniently a short walk from the terminus of the Singapore Bus Services Johor Baru - Singapore route (service 170). Sungei Road would be called a 'flea-market' today but in the mid-eighties we called it a thieves market. There would be a lot of junk, mostly tools but a lot of guys would have watches spread out on the road. Later on when I was working in Singapore, I used to frequent Sungei Road often. I could usually pick up a hand-winding Swiss watch for around MYR50 and autos were around the MYR100 mark. Looking back should have bought more..!

My first purchase there was a Titoni Airmaster. This was an elegant hand-winding watch with a Swiss ETA 2409. Titonis were good for the beginner (or not, as the case may be) as the back could be removed with an adjustable spanner. Much later on, I figured out how to remove the stem on this watch by releasing the stem release screw. This watch, I later realised, was a bodge of sorts, the main bridge was from a Pagol (I didn't knew then about ETA and how watch companies operated).. I ended up giving this watch to a friend of mine.

I had a few other sources of watches...there were watchmakers who worked in the five-foot ways of the shop-houses around town, they usually had watches for sale. There was also the possibility of finding some good stuff around the Meldrum area. I remember buying my Omega Seamaster here around 1995 for MYR350 (with original 'Beads of rice' bracelet!). The big building on Jalan Meldrum (MerlinTower if I remember correctly) also had a sidewalk watch-repair guy with old watches, there was a big black Favre-Leuba that I wanted but it was way too expensive. By the way, my fascination with Favre-Leuba stemmed from the Singapore channel News where the time display before the news proper was sponsored by Favre-Leuba.

Anyway, twenty years on, my fascination with mechanical watches is still healthy and with the infinite resources of the Internet my knowledge has grown. In the beginning, there were no resources to speak of. No magazines, no clubs (that I knew of)., no support groups. As a result of this, my collecting only consisted of buying watches and wearing them occasionally,.When they broke...it was off to the watch-repair guy. Now I can take apart a watch and be reasonably confident that I can put it back together again in even better condition. This would not have been possible without the Internet.

Here I have to say I had some support from my friend who runs a watch shop in Port Dickson (where I live now). I got my first tools from him and he pointed me in the right direction, but the way businesses 'repair' watches and how it should be done is not the same. A typical watch repair business will do only what is necessary to get the watch running properly. It rarely extends to dismantling the watch completely, typically the balance and pallet-fork will be removed, the train pivots cleaned with lighter-fluid and oiled in-situ, and they whole thing re-assembled. Rarely is the main-spring barrel opened and the keyless works just get a bit of oil. There are definitely some good ones around but what I described above is typical. I can't really blame them as the supply of parts is very bad. You may be able to get some common parts but apart from that you'll be very lucky to get what you need. For example I've been trying to get a main-spring barrel for an AS1700 but no luck so far.

Thats all for today.. bye for now.