I finally got around to diving into a gilt dial 166.003 Seamaster I won in an auction, at first sight it functioned well, yet the 4 am date change was traumatising - while working on it I learned that 561 stems had wider zones for the setting lever to lock onto, spent so much time thinking there was another problem. Had no idea stems differed on 550 series. Maybe margins were tighter originally, they relaxed it later on and stems produced later didn't fit the originals?

The stem challenge wore me down quite a bit, and while I was about to screw the pallet fork bridge, I had a screw propel from my plastic tweezer. Listened for the ping and it was on the other side of the room. Magnet sweeped the room as much as I can but after one point I gave up and took a screw from a donor.



The dial on this thing is also unlike anything I've seen. I have a hands puller just for patinated dials but with this dial that has the spacers integrated to the dial itself, I couldn't think of a safe way of locking the movement while outside the case. Best idea I had was to remove the crystal and use the case as a holder, to be able to pull the hands without touching the dial

Anyway when the time came to re-lock the dial, it was another challenge inserting the dial screws, and again, one slipped and fell, this time slowly and it fell near me.

I started sweeping again and to my surprise I found the pallet fork bridge screw, yet the dial screw was long gone, decided to let go and used one from another donor

Luckily on my pack of random parts, I found a bunch of dial screws!



I don't have an idea yet how these differ and why there are multiple dial screw numbers for 550 series, but at least I can forget about that little screw

The watch ended up pretty satisfactory for my low performance standards, ordered a light grey strap I've been eyeing from Nomos and excitedly waiting for its arrival! (They have free Fedex shipping!)