Speedy water damage repair/restoration

Speedy with water damage


Whenever you receive a watch with water damage, you have to expect the worse. While the outside may look not so bad, the inside is where the real damage is done. Water typically enters through the stem or in this case the pushers as well.

The stem goes to the dial side and it will carry the water right to the hands and hour wheel and cannon pinion. It can also migrate through the crown wheel to the top of the movement and various other parts.

As I took the watch apart, the extent of the damage became apparent, lots of it...

View of the mainplate, dial side



View of mainplate, top side



Barrel bridge



The movement in pieces in the tray, waiting for a cleaning




Many parts were damaged beyond repair, most ferrous parts had some type of rust damage, and I inspected them all and as long as the acting surfaces were not rusted, I re-used the parts, after a good clean and rust removal.

Overall I needed a number of parts, including a new balance staff, the bottom pivot on the old staff had rusted away.

Price for a new staff (only the staff, no balance, hairspring or roller table): $125.00 !!! ouch

So the understanding from the customer was, I will do the work at the best of my ability, if for some reason when I have completed the work the movement doesn't run well, then it may be beyond repair. Happily the customer was on-side and said that if it all went south, he would accept the risk and flog the watch to try and recoup his costs...that attitude goes a long way to build up trust and confidence in each other.

Here's what I was able to do regarding restoration...









Part of the problem may have been related to the pusher seals, check out what I found when I took them apart, two different types of seals, the standard o'ring and another white coloured type of o'ring/grommet, which doesn't look very waterproof, I have no idea why they were different, if one was replaced, or if someone replaced the seals only. The customer wanted new pushers and they were installed. The pushers were replaced not due to the water ingress concern (I stock and can replace the o'rings, restoring intregrity) but because one of them had a big gouge in it, looks like someone got a bit too close to a grinding wheel...



Amazingly, after all the work (and there was a lot of it taking much time) the watch ran really well on the analyzer, and the customer was very happy with the results, so was I...


Rob

Thank you Rob for sharing your work !
That white piece of rubber looks quite odd indeed, and the Oring pretty tired.

Thanks for the positive feedback.


I believe that it was immersed in water, humidity doesn't typically cause that much damage and permiate the whole movement. Humidity typically stains the dial and hands and maybe surface corrosion on ferrous parts.

Great post indeed and mind blowing skill. I bet you never know what you may find!

What a skill. I can never imagine how much patience, precision and steady hand you need to work on watches.

I am not sure what type of damage you would get.

Typically I see water ingress damage, but I can't remember seeing "moisture" damage. By water ingress I can see the water path along the crown/stem for example by following the rust trail.

Regarding moisture, I don't ever remember seeing for example a slight rust coating all over on the ferrous parts from moisture inside the case, but I do see dials with damage which I believe is from moisture and probably due to the coating being shellac based and water soluable? Not sure on that point.

Remember that pocket watches are not sealed that well, along with most vintage wrist watches, so moisture is certainly getting into these, but other than immersion damage from water, they look fine...

Rob

Is it a vintage Speedy? It doesn't seem to have the asymmetric case protecting the crown and pushers. Would the age have had an influence on the level of water ingress? I panicked the other day when I forgot to take my new Speedy off in the shower, whereas my 30m waterproof Swatch used to go in the shower, swimming, windsurfing, waterskiing until one of the hands fell off.

Correct, a Mark II model.

Rob

Well rescued Rob and interesting to read, thanks. The price of that staff really is ridiculous but at least you have the skills to replace it and not end up spending $1000 on a complete balance. That is just astonishing when you think that an ETA one would be, typically about a tenth of that....

Out of interest, do you have a particular source for those pusher seals? It does seem daft to replace a complete pusher because the seal has degraded.

When you say it ran well on the analyser, how well in comparison to a well maintained movement? I'd be very interested to see how this one turned out if you have pictures as, I suppose, you had to set your sights a bit lower than normal?

Regards, Chris

Hello Chris,

It is unaceptable to price a staff at this amount. At one time I could simply measure the old staff and pick out a replacement in my Best Fit watchmaterial catalogue, but that doesn't seem to apply much these days... As I have said a few times regarding the parts embargo, set up a shop with a CNC machines and pump out the non-copyrighted parts that we need.


I have a few kits, they go by the name "Micro O'ring kit" and there are two boxes with I think 24 various sizes. There is also a flat o'ring kit and a "D" and "E" one for Japanese cases.


I didn't take a photo of the printout, but it ran as good as any fresh serviced movement, in all positions also, and with the chrono on or off, so yes, my sights were very low given the damage, but I was rewarded at the end of it all. A worthwhile effort for sure.

All the best,
Rob

Thanks Rob.

The parts embargo could turn into a bit of a nightmare and I suspect the prices will only go up, unfortunately. We might see someone stepping in.

Useful info on the seals, I'll look them up.

Really pleased that it ran so well afterwards from such a dismal starting position. Certainly a worthwhile effort. 👍

Cheers, Chris

What are you missing?

M O N O P O L Y and Restricted Parts by the Swiss

All along I have said (to anyone that would listen) that the solution to the restricted parts policy is not to continue to fight and take the Swiss to court, but for the material houses to get together, compare stock usage, then compile a list of parts and get them manufactured. Imagine how many balance staff's a CNC machine can pump out in a few hours... Want to fix the problem? then take control and fill the need... At one time you could buy BESTFIT parts for pennies, but they don't seem to exist anymore...although I still have their material catalogues.

I don't think this is limited to Omega, all the manufacturers are following suit and parts for all movements etc, are increasing at an alarming rate. Worse still wait till the stock runs out...then what?

It's an awful situation we are in, and only going to get worse.

Rob

I think we want to be careful about making this remanufacture of parts sound easy. Many people are saying this so, it might be worth pointing out some of the pitfalls.

It's never too bad to make a one off part for anything, whether watches or not. Rob, Al etc can clearly make parts to repair watches and that's true Watchmaking.

Making a run of parts and guaranteeing they'll fit, without access to the original drawings is not easy. In my day job, I deal a lot with tolerances of components, material selection and surface finish. You have to think of all of these to be able to manufacture parts that will be guaranteed to fit. I don't deal with stuff this small but, the principal is the same.

Just taking a bush, for example, let's say a barrel arbor bush mounted in the bridge plate. Only considering the tolerance issue.

The bush is an interference fit in the plate, likely a H7 hole in the plate and an s6 outer diameter of the bush. These are ISO286 specifications. If I knew the original designed plate hole, it's easy to make a bush to fit. Let's say it's a nominal 3 mm hole:

Plate hole must be 3.000-3.012
Bush outer diameter must be 3.014-3.020

So, even when the hole is at its biggest (3.012) and the outer diameter of the bush is at it's smallest (3.014), the bush is still bigger than the hole by 0.002 and you have to press it in. It will stay there because of that interference. When they're the other way, the interference is now 0.020 and you can still press it in. Significantly, there is not such a huge amount of interference that means you can't install it and if you've designed your bush correctly, then the inner bush diameter after installation is still good for the outer diameter of the barrel arbor. It will tend to shrink the more interference you have in the plate and not much point in fitting a bush to find that the hole is now too small for the arbor.

The problem here is that we don't know the nominal diameter of these things and people don't design in fairly round numbers so, the nominal diameter may have been 3.005 mm and not 3.000 mm.

I could measure an Omega supplied bush and it measures 3.020 mm which just tells me that the nominal is somewhere in this range:
Nominal 3.000 so fits in s6 tol of 3.014 to 3.020
Nominal 3.006 so fits in s6 tol of 3.020 to 3.026

I know these all seem trivial differences but, what do you ask the machine shop to make? If I choose the second and it should have been the first, then I'll possibly make bushes of 3.026 that will be installable but the inner diameter might be too small for the arbor. My reputation will soon be the same as some people who make parts for classic cars - that is, not good. Choose the first when it should have been the second means my bushes could just fall through the hole.

In the first example above, Rob would just ream/broach the inner bush diameter after installation but most people would not be interested in that. By the way, that's what you have to do with the rotor bushes on a 565 and this is possibly why people don't replace them and end up with the rotor hitting the inside case back. Am not sure what happened here but it looks like an Omega design fault to me - they got the tolerance wrong.

On the other hand, if I have a large selection of Omega bushes from various manufacturing batches, I could measure them all, plot on a curve and using a normal distribution (bell curve, for example), work out a nominal with pretty good accuracy. This is proper reverse engineering but takes a lot of time and means I need lots of samples of each part.

The bush was the simplest I could think of but, when it comes to making wheels, the tolerance stack (all the tolerances affecting a dimension) starts getting out of hand if you want the depthing (the amount of meshing between the wheels) to be correct.

Anyway, just typed this quickly so I hope there are no errors in my numbers and perhaps it shows something of why this is not as easy as we'd like to think.

Edit: Just read this back and I have gone on a bit..... Sorry.

Cheers, Chris

Hi Chris,
I read with interest your post.
You are perfectly right: it is not easy making a run of parts and guaranteeing they'll fit without access to the original drawings.
Moreover, this can be in the possibility of large watch companies, such as Seagull, but certainly not of small factories.
On the other hand a watchmaker can make parts in his workshop (I do), but as you can easily imagine this is generally done for high end watches because the process is very time consuming and, consequently, costly.
Last month I made an operating lever for an old Patek chronograph. I am not ashamed to say that it took me several attempts to achieve the correct tolerance and even more to achieve the correct finish. It goes without saying that the whole work amount would not have been justified for a common vintage Omega. In such a case the availability of parts is vital.
In this respect Maurice is perfectly right: the times when parts were readily available are long gone and, I fear, forever. And the correct term is monopoly.
Regards,
Maurice