Au contraire! I've purchased several vintage watches lately and none were serviced. It didn't stop me from buying them.
😉
Just to resurrect this thread, Mr. gostang9 had brought a couple of his "unserviced" purchases to me for service, so I thought I would share a few of the problems found, just to give some real life examples of what you can get with a purchase like this.
One was a vintage Tissot manual wind with a Cal. 27-1T:
Of course balance amplitudes were low, Delta over 6 positions was in excess of 100 seconds, so from a timekeeping standpoint not great. Looks like it's in good shape, but a closer look revealed all the oils had dried up long ago:
Some wear at the spot where the winding pinion rides:
The only real issue that required some intervention was wear to the barrel drum and cover holes that allowed too much side shake, and under load the barrel would tip in the movement, causing drag. Overall not a lot of extra work on this one. Final timing results were good - nearly equaling what Omega requires for their modern COSC watches.
The next was an Omega with a Cal. 265:
Again the movement looks to be in fine condition, but it's also completely dry:
Some wear found on this third wheel pivot:
Since the damage isn't big and this wheel is discontinued (and fairly expensive on the open market) I burnished it using the Jacot tool:
One of the bigger issues for timekeeping and general performance was the fact that the dial up and dial down balance amplitudes were 30 degrees different - these should be pretty much the same and trying to properly time the watch with this kind of problem is essentially chasing your tail. Looking at the cap jewels for the balance, you can see what running a watch when dry does to the jewels:
The balance staff acts like a drill bit spinning on the jewel, and despite the hardness of the corundum
it will wear. But the end of the pivot itself can also wear, and get flattened, so despite the fact that I replaced both cap jewels, the amplitude problems persisted - here is the balance end that has the lower amplitude, and the end of the pivot is flat:
Now you may see other watchmakers replace the entire balance for this sort of thing, but if you have the skills that's really not necessary. I remove the balance:
And I use a hand held tool to try rounding over the pivot - here is the result:
You can see that there is rounding on the pivot end now, but a large flat surface still remains as this tool is somewhat limited in what it can do. To get a better photo of this I pulled out my second microscope, so this is the pivot under 100X magnification, plus some zoom on the camera I held to the eyepiece to take this photo:
You can more clearly see the slight radius and the fact there is a large flat still present. So I remove the balance again, and then remove the balance spring and the roller, so it's just the balance and staff left now:
And once again set-up the Jacot tool, this time with the lantern disk that is designed for this specific purpose:
In this cropped photo you can see that the very tip of the balance pivot is sticking through a hole in the tool and it's this portion that I will round using a burnishing tool - note that this pivot is 7/100ths of a mm in diameter:
Here is what the pivot looked like after I rounded it again, and you can see it's quite different:
This of course completely resolved the amplitude issues, and I was able to follow through and properly time the watch.
So the fact is sometimes you get lucky and there's not much extra work needed, but other times be prepared for a much bigger job.
Cheers, Al
