Rumor that I started tinkering inside watches has been spreading in the family so last time I was back my aunt says “so you can repair grandma’s watch!” She went to her room and came back with a watch I had no memory of. The dial is a little scratched, the plating is wearing down, it’s missing the seconds hand, and the hour hand was bent because some lint got caught and I guess she might have tried to move the hands to remove it.

I didn’t know much about it but I remembered someone had mentioned the Buren Starlite here in the forum so I did a bit of research.



The movement inside is a cal 1006 with a micro rotor, which is interesting as I had also recently got my first micro rotor movement: a Universal cal 215 (here is a gratuitous picture of my Polerouter). These are the first two micro rotor movements introduced to the market, and the back story seems to have some controversy similar to what happened to the first automatic chronographs. From the information I found Universal filed their patent application in 1955, Buren released their cal 1000, predecessor of my cal 1006, in 1956, but sued Universal for patent infringement. I can’t find more info about the patent but Buren won the lawsuit in the end so I assume they had good reasons. Universal patent application was approved in 1958 but they also had to pay Buren.

I like that I ended up having both movements and looking at them the build quality is really impressive. I’m not sure where the Starlite stood at the time but the movement finish is very close to UG, which is well regarded. Micro rotors are not common even today so having two with such an interesting story is a great bonus for me.

I have not taken apart any of these two yet but I’m going to have to, and it will be interesting to see the different approaches. The Buren has a curious reversing pinion that floats between two giant jewels, you can see it peeking out under the rotor in the movement picture.

I managed to very carefully straighten the hour hand, it’s not perfect but you can’t tell when it’s mounted and I’m just happy to have saved the original hands. In the extremely unlikely event that someone has a spare seconds hand please let me know

The plating has started to wear off on the edges and there’s a significant piece just missing on the bottom but the watch still looks good when worn.

The date mechanism is pretty good, the date change is much quicker than on the Omega 564 I have: it switches over in just 15 minutes, and it has a semi quick set by going back to 11:45 and forward again (this might make the rebuild more complicated so I’m gonna have to take some time with it).

I really like the dial, brushed finish, nicely done date window, nice fonts –especially the warped “slender” text–, and of course the very cool “spaceship” logo.

Hope you enjoy the little story and the pictures, please let me know if you have any other interesting history bit about it!