...there are a few 1980s era quartz movements that they are out of or almost out of, which rely on integrated circuits that are so out of date that the facilities to produce them no longer exist.
... but in the 80s Omega should never have been selling mass market watches with zero water resistance anyway, especially in this market.
Interesting observations. (I am actually re-reading Nevil Shute's book "In the wet." but that is a digression.)
With my skills in micro-electronics I have considered taking a look at some of the old interesting quartz watches. I am sort of keeping an eye out for some Tag/Heuer ones. I asked my 'watchmaker' if they could service my old tissot, she was able to get it to work with a battery and some tricky presses of the button. I had to take the Jules Jurganson back as it stopped the next day. This time she blew it out and put some 'quartz' oil on it. It stopped again, so I blew it out with my duster. Been running since.
To do real justice however a proper service might require a clean room. The little injection molded gears are probably really sensitive to dust. 3D resin printers are probably not there yet. (FDM would not be a good choice.) My friend and mentor showed me in the La Chaux de fonds museum watches his company stamped parts for. Said there were 27 watch companies in 1970s silicon valley and most hardly lasted a year. His take was that the companies did not recognize that one could not put watches into calculator cases.
At one trade show I did get some chip on die samples from one of the smaller AVR processors (the arduino hobby system uses this family of chips.) I was able to connect tiney leads to one and read the device ID.
In some ways this would be full circle as I was one of the first electronics hobbyist in the 1990s to do home surface mount and reflow. This was for a blog to use some video camera viewfinders. Later I got interested in bare glass lcd screens and worked out how an AVR processor can drive them. This is also built into some of the larger AVR processors. So replacing the chip could be done if a processor is used. And something that most millennials could code as it is simply pulsing a stepper motor once a second. The rest is reading the setting switches and crown rotations.
There is a book called 21st century watchmaking that shows how to set up a lathe as a grinder to copy some of the stampings. I did build a simple EDM which I took to the local maker space, where someone seems to have thrown it out on one of the junk removal days. Which is interesting how so many of us do tend to dump 'projects' or stuff we want to get rid of for others to use.
The laser cutter though seems to be one of the more popular tools. The issue with using laser or wire edm or plasma to cut watch parts is that the resolution is only as good as the lead screw slides. The old shapers used precision cams, which were laid out with a drafting board and pantograph to reduce the scale. I remember seeing a lot of pantographs in the watch factories. Sometimes these were known as duplicarvers. With CNC routers, I suspect that most of this sort of tech has been regulated to the dust heap, and the skilled operators dead and burried, along with the knowlege of how such things were done.
As I have noted, such took making projects tend to bloat and become more of a chore. Such tools also take up a lot of space and are cemented and bolted to the floor. Some of the watches I did collect was with the intention I would get my CNC working where I can cut and grind out replacement parts. Like everything else such projects delve into another programming chore, as modern hardware, really is software.
-j
