Patek Philippe Sigma Dial First Look - Plus Seven Other Vintage Watchmaking Project Updates

Intro laughs he goes um I'm just getting over a little bout with covid um so I didn't make any new videos for the past week I did upload re-upload the one about the Blindfolded uh working on the tiny movement blindfolded um but um I always have this question about eBay and other used watches which is um so I'm going to go through about seven different projects now but I'm gonna start with this one um Can watch movements be cleaned without disassembly? I always had this question about used watches which was are they are people um getting a used watch that doesn't work and then doing something to it something simple like dipping it in lighter fluid or something and then making it work temporarily and selling it and then when you get it it's something that has been done to it to make it work so they can say it's working but after a month or two it's not going to work anymore and I don't know the answer to that question if a lot of people do that or not but the question I started having in my mind was if one was going to do that how would they do it what would you be looking for so I think we've all read about watches that have a lot of oil inside them because amateur has tried to oil it from the outside hoping to get it going again so that's one one way that that might happen but the other thought that I had was what if people are using uh WD-40 and I bought this WD-40 from cousins in the UK which is watch repair specialist or watch parts company and this is just cleaner it's not it doesn't have any lubricant in it it's just contact spray cleaner so what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to spray some on this movement and we're going to see if it if it does anything to the movement or not and it's not the definitive test by any means but I'm just curious about that so what I've learned about watchmaking uh so far that was enough for me to feel like this is an interesting test is that if you remove the balance wheel as I have from this pocket watch movement this pocket watch movement was part of a kit of like thousands of watch parts that I bought for eighty dollars on the Swiss auction website Ricardo I did a separate video about this was one of the things I got I'm not that interested in pocket watch movements or or fixing it but I but but what I do know is that if you remove the balance wheel and it has power which it does the mainspring is is powered up you should get um Power transmission through the gear train to the pallet Fork right here and when you flip the pallet Fork back and forth the uh this gear should snap back and forth because it should have power in it and there should also if you also tweak this gear it should it should put push power through the gear train to that um the first pallet gear so that's not happening so that means that somewhere in the gear train I think there's something that's very sticky so I think it's imperf this is perfect uh watch to see if I can unstick that by hitting it with this residue free WD-40 which in theory wouldn't leave any Trace behind but it might break it might break up whatever is is uh sticking it first WD40 test with pocket watch movement and we don't need this for that experiment but we need the so what we're going to be looking for is after I do this does that free up the powertrain and do we get this snap back and forth action on the on the pallet Fork which we don't get now I don't know if you shake this stuff or not foreign so this is just going to evaporate away there's no lubricant in it it's still it's still wet though so it's going to take a while to evaporate away so I still don't see any there's still no power going through this okay so that hmm that's a fail but that makes me think about this other project okay we might come back to that okay so anyway we'll start talking about these other projects Question: can IWC Cal 44 movement be revived with WD40 (answer: no) this is a cal 44 IWC Cal 44 ladies watch uh Peloton automatic movement inside and this I did one of my first videos was about rebuilding this movement um I rebuilt this movement on the left which is the exact same movement that's in here and so I stripped it completely down cleaned it re-lubricated it poorly and then put it back together again and um it worked but I used Too Much lubrication so I went back to a spare movement I put a spare movement in this in the watch itself and the watch itself is working perfectly now with the movement that I didn't work on um but the movement that I did work on it kind of it it kind of wants to work but not quite so that gives us another opportunity to hit it hit this movement because we know this is just kind of over oiled so I'm going to hit this with some of this spray and see if that loosens it up some now in theory this should just start ticking if that was going to work so I don't see it happening but it's also going to have to evaporate it right now it's it's not gonna work because there's too much liquid in there that may be true of this thing too but my theory is this is stuck for a different reason um so we're gonna I don't know if I wanna get into that or not okay so if anything the WD-40 made this movement even less it didn't help with either of those so uh that's uh good to know so just out of curiosity removing the sticky train wheel bridge on the pocket watch movement I don't want to take too much time doing this but I just want to take this apart take this main Bridge off of it and this this watch I'm I'm basically it's trash I'm gonna trash it I don't care about doing anything correctly with this I wonder if so I think one thing I'm doing wrong right now is taking this off with power in it because there's a possibility this screw feels like it's already jamming on something like it could be that the the wound spring is is that there is a lot of um well you know I should yeah I just don't want to I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this so I'm going to try to pop this off and perhaps it's gonna see this this screw doesn't want to come out not sure why that is it could be this not you doesn't even need to come out oh there you go so that's what you you probably heard that unwind it shot out this little gear um that's what I was expecting but the question is why was that power not transmitting to the pallet Fork um so I'm gonna set that aside because I don't really care what the answer to that is but the um the real experiment there was like something was jammed in there would WD-40 unjam it and the answer is it didn't in this case but I did confirm that there was plenty of power and that for some other reason the movement was not transmitting power foreign multiple project overview okay so now I'm just going to pull out these other projects like this and kind of let's take one more look at this RWC so this is because it's had some time to for the cleaning solution to evaporate anyway that's not um still not starting up so one of my projects is to come back to this and rebuild this movement again but it doesn't matter because I have a beautiful all right I already have a beautiful re-loomed version of this watch that's working perfectly so this movement that I have that I rebuilt is just a just a practice movement just like a pocket watch practice movement um okay so let's just quickly go through these other things um this is a this is a radium dial console watch that I'm going to I'm gonna do a video about removing the radium so if you're working if you're new to watchmaking with vintage watches it's a good idea to be careful with radium you'll see this is a geiger counter that I got on eBay and when the radium which is in the hands on this watch the dial looks like it's been stripped clean already the dots the ndcs are missing they don't seem to have any Loom on them anymore but the but the hour and the minute hand I believe still have a lot of radium what's going on now so when this man now my geiger counter is not working it could be the battery anyway it went just enough I'm gonna let that go for right now um okay I think it's I think it's going again let's see oh this is the wrong watch it is working again okay see that it just stopped again no it's still counting it's just not making a noise there it goes oh this is so annoying because I don't have the camera set right either okay you can see here geiger counter clicking flashing that means there's radium in that dial this one almost certainly used to have radium it's got the radium burn at 9 20. you see those kind of marks that's from this these hands were probably a radium this was a 19 watch from 1940 it's been removed so there's nothing more than background now with this watch but they probably like I say it used to be radium this one still has the radium so anyway I'll do I'm gonna do a piece about removing the radium safely from that and if you're doing anything with vintage watches and you haven't don't have any experience get a geiger counter cheap gogger counter make sure you're not exposing yourself to radium when you open it up because it just handling it in the case like that's not that dangerous but uh opening up and exposing yourself to the dust is so this I'm going to re-loom with a safe luminous paint super luminova and I've done relums on the channel already but this watch is uh I think it'll look particularly cool it's got some challenges like those hands have bigger Loom windows in them than any hands I've ever done before so it'll be interesting to see if I can do a good job with that [Music] um Patek Philippe Ellipse Case and then the other thing or another project is this Patek Philippe I um I bought the movement there's some videos about that I paid 400 for the movement but the person who had flipped it to me had paid only a hundred or so for it um but the um it's a really cool movement and I looked for a case for this case kind of fits in there but not quite and the real problem with and also it looks terrible in that case but the um the problem is the the the stacking of everything is not correct for this um stem hole like ends up being because the dial of this is too thick um there would need to be some modification either to the dial or to the inside of the case to get the movement to sit um deep enough that and this is a typical thing if you're if you're trying to like make your own um make things work out like this you've got this whole stacking problem so there's all these adapters and eventually once you know what you really want to do you can make an adapter but this can't be adapted because the dot the the dial is simply too thick so didn't want to do that um but I also noticed in doing this um so this I'm not going to use this case this was like 10 dollars not going to use this for the Patek Philippe but um I have another plan for it um but before I get into that I just wanted to talk about this for a second because Patek Philippe Ellipse Sigma Dial this this watch has a sigma dial and the sigma is that little Greek cygnus symbol there there was one on the other side but it's worn off so that little it's like a circle with a looks like a click spring actually like a upside down Q or a circle with a little point Greek Sigma um so the sigma dial means it's solid gold and I took the dial off of this when I took the hands off I put them away safely and I took the dial off to make sure that the dial was in good condition and I saw that the whole dial is solid gold not just the Indie sues but the dial itself so thought that was kind of cool so first of all this movement is really cool and um the movement is a Patek Philippe 16 250 um and there's some super close-ups on that shot with a hundred thousand dollar microscope on my channel uh if you look for them you can see how fine the detail is on that and then it has this spacer which was necessary for whatever watch it was in and then has this solid gold dial and you can see it says 750 and that means it's uh 18 karat gold and then you can see something which indicates how these um indices are affixed by crimping or some kind of some kind of power from behind that dented it in the back when the indices were attached to the front oh and then the thing I wanted to show you about that is that this is one gram of pure gold and um this I think is 1.7 grams of 18 karat gold so the reason I'm doing this this uh is to is to talk about how much gold that actually is and what the value of it is so first we can check our one gram there's our one gram of 18 karat gold scale seems correct and then this is 1.7 grams of 75 percent gold so that's uh 1.4 grams of gold or something like that so the value of that is probably I'm not sure what gold is right now but it's probably around 75 US Dollars just for the gold value in that Sigma dial which again shows you what a good deal the guy that that bought this originally got when he paid he paid a hundred and something 130 or maybe less for the movement this movement and dial and hands plus uh an Eterna pocket watch movement plus a tiso watch movement um and then he flipped this Patek to me I paid 400 without realizing I was buying a flipped thing but I figured that out afterwards but again this movement is is from a ten thousand dollar watch and it's also still used in Patek Philippe that sell new for thirty or forty thousand dollars so and I think even a hundred thousand dollars it's it's a it's a very nice movement and I think it's dated 1979 or something and it's in good condition at least until I do additional damage to it but um uh yeah I just thought people might be interested in the gold content aspect of that oh and then I'm going to talk for a second about my my plan with this um so my plan with that Patek the lead plan to put Patek Philippe 16-250 movement in Bermi transparent case movement is to I bought on uh this ramp Roland ramps website in Germany uh I bought a case from tachino a company in tucino in Switzerland called Burmy um and this this case is transparent in the front and the back so you can see right through it like you can see the person's finger through it and then it has a small movement which is a burmi movement in the center and I want and then because it's transparent all the way through there's a possibility that either the back of it is transparent or I can make the back transparent I'm not sure from this picture if the back is missing or if it's transparent I have a feeling it's missing but because it's a transparent um acrylic back that's on the watch already um I'm going to be able to modify that uh so that the back is uh transparent so so this is my plan I don't know if I'll follow through with it or not but the um because I haven't received this yet but the um the idea is to put the pet Tech movement in this and have it be visible from the front and the back because the tiny tiny watch is not that interesting anymore I think if it's if it's oh the other thing it I may do is um rhodium played this so that it looks like white gold um put the Patek movement in it the problem is going to be dressing the movement which is uh ellipse shaped and and getting it to fit in the um round space so how to do that in a way that doesn't look like uh a hack is going to be not that easy but then in the back you'll be I'll make this back transparent if it if there's no TR back there already so that you can see the Patek Philippe movement through the back and then try to make it all beautiful and shiny rhodium so it matches the the the Patek dial which has uh white gold uh indices and hands and if you don't know about ramp um this website it's r a n f f t dot d e and there's auction on here uh regular auctions for really inexpensive old watches 29 Euros for the Burmy um so that's it that's the ongoing Patek project so another project is this uh this one's getting close I I this is Be-Be Precision ETA 2472 hands / dial / Frankenwatch project this was um I bought the dial in the kit of 80 watch parts that's actually why I bought that kit or that lot of watch Parts it was like a dial that I had that I had destroyed um so I bought it and then I want to put these hands on it and um and get the the depth correct and the spring in the back right now it's kind of loose in the case so I need to figure out if I have a spring for it a case spring that will hold it steady the stem this particular stem is too long for that case um but it is it's kind of working it's the second hand is getting caught up on the hour hand but these are not the hands I'm going to use I'm going to switch to these hands so I'm not too worried about that right now so that project is just a kind of finishing up project ETA 2472 World Time case project and then this is another ongoing thing so I bought this cool case which is a world timer case but it doesn't it doesn't require a GMT movement it just is a calculator so you see up here it says zero plus minus and then it has one through twelve this way and one through twelve negative one through twelve this way so you set this where you are and then you can just it's just a calculator really for the time zones like New York is uh if you're in Paris time zone where I am uh New York is six hours earlier and Bangkok is six hours later and if if you're in some other place you set it to where you are at zero and then it'll tell you what the number of hours to add since it's not GMT and the movement doesn't have a 24-hour hand you're not looking at the at any hand to do this math you're just looking at the the bezel the numbers on the bezel inside which don't move and how they align with these points on the rotating bezel okay so anyway I bought this case on eBay but I wanted to put a movement in it and the case interested me because it was it's it said it was a 2472 case that could be just a coincidence but 2472 is the movement that I've learned a lot about from the watch I just showed you so I thought oh I'll get that because I know 2472 movement and I'll find another 2472 movement and put it inside here now what I've decided is that that doesn't really matter any movement that will work should be fine but what I found is that because the bezel of this is fairly constrained um you can't put just any size dial inside here so this lanco dial is cool it's it's the right size to go inside there but it's got It's it doesn't have the proper pin positions on the back of the dial for an ETA movement because it's a lanco movement um and it also has some issues with the size of the holes for the second hand or specifically the size of the hole for the second hand by issue I mean the this uses a very tiny second hole pinion second hand opinion and it's not common so I would need to find the correct lanco movement for this to make it work which I'm on the lookout for this dial and hands and everything and the and then a different case for it came again with that vintage lot of 20 80 lot of watch Parts but there was no movement in the case it was like a demo model so it'd be fun to put that in something it would fit in this but it needs a special movement so um I I was also thinking I could put a 2483 movement I think that's what this is I decided um 27 83 Maybe 27 38 anyway um I have a couple of movements these are slightly more modern than the 2472 um they're also 25 jewel movements these two are missing there's some parts I could switch around get those working with this dial but this style is way too big so I would have to grind it down it's kind of a cool dial it was also part of that kit of um a lot of watches but I would have to carefully grind it down and carefully grinding it down with the enamel and everything on there could easily lead to cracking or chipping of the enamel and I'm not sure I want to do that I don't have a tool to do that it would just be a lot of hand hand filing and to try to do that with perfect circles not very fun either so finally I found this movement um or this watch on Ricardo which was 29 Lanco Pistol Shooters movement and dial recase idea Swiss Francs and this has kind of good size um dial already and this style has a feature which I like which is this has no date ring on it so I'm gonna see if I can just fit this in there it's not an eta2472 it's actually a lanco movement which might be compatible with this dial but because it doesn't have a date it wouldn't be right anyway but the um I'm gonna see if I can get this working in inside this movement um and uh I mean inside this case in which case I would consider this project done but still to be determined if that succeeds or not Frankenwatch discussion um okay so those are the kind of projects that interest me um people typically call those types of projects Franken watches and a lot of people frown on Franken watches which are watches just made of different parts but the fact is Franken watches or watches made of different parts and dials and cases it's a huge part of the Swiss Watch industry too there's not like there's certain brands like lanco well Rolex Patek of course um Omega uh [Music] um and a car uh lanco there are certain certain brands Eterna that made their own movements so the you can you can have a a watch that has an Eterna case they turn a movement Eternal dial and that can be not Frank and watch obviously but things that were watches there were thousands of watch companies in the 1950s and 60s in Switzerland that just stamped a dial put an ETA movement in it bought a case from some a case vendor and those essentially Are all uh Franken watches anyway um the they don't have in-house movements in them so they're just some assemblage of parts so if you're interested in the the Aesthetics of that period but you want to mix those parts I I I I don't see any problem with that that's kind of what I'm trying to do um and I'm not sure why that is so interesting to me but it's more interesting than just repairing something or being obsessed about originality now on the other hand with valuable watches like a Rolex or whatever I would never do Frank and watch type work or IWC for that matter like um that's another IWC is another company that for the most part have their own in-house movements in the in the uh 50s and 60s in any case um so uh I'm not saying just do frankenwatch with whatever uh just that some some watches are more susceptible to that and in the case of the Patek Philippe movement that I have that's just by necessity I'm never going to find a case for that so I'm going to have to put it in some kind of case that's that's fun and uh enjoyable and waterproof and all those other requirements all right that's it and uh less than an hour so I guess that's all right um so until next time when I actually will actually do a project uh thanks for WAIT! WD40 did unlock the train on the pocket watch! watching uh so just a little epilogue here um while the video was downloading I started tinkering with this and um I've removed this plate and then I just put it back made sure that the gears were aligned and that the power was flowing through it and then I I stuck the balance wheel back on there and now it's working so the um I want to see if it works at an angle now so this movement was part of that 80 dollars of parts and it came with this this box and interestingly this box has a bunch of spare parts for this very movement so I'm not sure why if this was part of a learning kit or if this person had a bunch of these [Music] but that was kind of fun but actually you know I also rebuilt uh the tiny Cal 44 ladies movement and I could see how it's much easier doing a pocket watch but it creates the same anxiety in terms of um this this the any watch when you're when it's not working it makes you feel like you don't know like it's your fault um so in some ways working with the tiny ladies movement [Music] um made me feel like I was a Superhero by by attempting such a difficult thing and that helped me get over the insecurity because the whole time I was like if I can do this I can do anything and the pocket watch has the opposite kind of effect which is like it feels like you're cheating because it's so big and you're still having problems so I I don't think that there's any particular advantage to working with a pocket watch um but that's up to you I I also understand why I think if you have a lot of time just might as well start with pocket watch but just um it translates very well in scale down to the to the tiny ladies movement trying to fit the Lanco movement to the ETA 2472 world time case fail um the other thing I want to do was just do another project as long as um so this thing so this lenko this is kind of cool it's it's actually um langdorf is is where lanco is from that's why the brand lanco is called lanco and it's got this [Music] um on the dial it has like a little Insignia of owl oh and it also it's also called um shooting Shaft or something like that which means the shooting club langdorf shooting cup club which is kind of funny since this is called my channel is called I shoot watches so I presume they're talking about shooting with guns um but the um we're gonna pull that movement out and see if we can put it in this other case and um this is the case it's going in now I'm gonna see if it fits and then if it fits I'll go back and polish that Crystal uh with it not in there to get that nice and clean but because I just wanna I don't want to wear finger Cuts I'll just uh clean it afterwards so the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to loosen that screw right there ugh I always say half turn but it's more like a full turn or maybe more you can already see that this is really gunky underneath the crown okay but I got that so my blade is the right width for these screws but it's I mean the right thickness but it's not as wide as it could be yeah so there's a there's a danger that that blade will harm that screw head but this one is going to be this is wider but it's going to be too thick so I'm just gonna try my own advice and see if I can quickly flatten this without any tools foreign so that worked it's fun like this is a watch I've never opened before uh it's a movement I've never seen before oh so I'm gonna just look at this see this is this is angled up so this little guy the tab is up like this I'm just going to look is the other one the same you would think it would be but it's not it's down so that one is angled down is that a mistake or is that the way it's supposed to be I'm guessing that that's a mistake but that's that's why I like I always wonder if I'm doing it wrong and now I also wonder if the last person did it wrong a lot of people always take the rotor off first I think I should just do that to be consistent with what other people do on this I think this is a good screwdriver that screw is blued kind of funny oops now I'm also just looking at this for as I do this this case hasn't been opened in a long time so like just from opening it there's a danger because I don't intend to clean this movement but it's a good idea to just try to pick up any loose dirt as you go you know what I forgot to do is the or did I don't think I checked this with the geiger counter before I started it okay good non-radioactive Loom I should have done that before opening that though so the next thing I want to look at is if that movement will fit in this case everything I'm doing right now I do not want to be doing okay so the question would be foreign coming out of that so that stem probably needs extending because this is a let's see and then the question is how are we going to keep that um so this is the wrong stem for the movement but I just wanted to see How It lines up maybe use it to hold that in place for a moment okay so the thing is the that dial is actually a little bit too small and then somehow I need to keep the movement flat inside with some movement rings okay so that project has to go on hold again so that's a that's the interesting thing also about this the kind of thing I'm interested in is doesn't exactly conform to um just sit down and do it and be done with it um of course there's editing but uh anyway step by step thanks for watching foreign