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I have received this piece of sorry. It is bad green gunk on the movement and on the outside of the dial looks like it had seawater or something in it at some point in it's life. However the good part is I shook it and it ran for half an hour or so.

Holiday present to myself. I ordered an ETA 2824-2 elabore movement, PVD coated stainless case with sapphire crystals, dial and hands from a watch materials supplier in Switzerland. None of this stuff was cheap, but the seller guarantees that all the parts are Swiss made and I don't have any reason to believe the items are not genuine. The strap is made in China, but I don't believe in spending big money on 'designer' leather straps. So what do you folks think?

No. It's the Sacred Hearth of Jesus, an important mainly Catholic cult, with a lot of attached symbology. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sacred-Heart-Roman-Catholicism

Testing using Adsense at the moment. the forum is currently costing me IRO £250/mth to run now and the last payment from eBay ads was £77 so as you can see it’s making a significant dent in my back pocket you might ask why £250 when you can get cheap hosting accounts anywhere. Tried that last month. Disaster (you may have noticed performance issues and outages for a day or two). Moved back to a cloud system. Currently we are at 50gig of user uploaded data (images and such), this is backed up on Amazon cloud and Digital Ocean Cloud for failover and I have to pay for an 80 GB NVME SSD storage plan to get the performance we need. and as well as that the system sends almost 50,000 email notifications per month - for this I have to use a separate transactional email service. Bandwidth is not too bad as I use a lot of caching. but it all adds up unfortunately. I can’t afford to keep paying this every month. adsense has been a little encouraging. The past two days it made £4.50. So if that and eBay ads pan out then I will be able to comfortably continue with the project. I am also looking at making a theme for moderators and paying members where ads will not be served. Hopefully have this done in the next couple of days

Well, this was quite a project!! Must have been many years since it was serviced. I noticed when taking it apart, several wheels were stuck--3rd wheel in particular. After cleaning the usual way (L&R ammonia base fine watch cleaner), I noticed that the jewels had a lot of crud on them. I had to clean them under a microscope using peg wood. It was terrible. Then I noticed some junk on the third wheel bottom pivot. Frankly I wanted to just move on (the owner will were this once in a while at parties--does not have to be a time keeper). But my Dad was whispering in my ear and everyone on this forum was screaming at me!! DO IT RIGHT! So, at great risk (due to my inexperience), I chucked the wheel up in the lathe and burnished the pivot with a pivot polisher (that came with my Jacot set). I cleaned it up and nothing bad happened. Repeated on another wheel with success. No shortcuts on the balance either. I removed the hairspring, cap jewel and regulator. Cleaned and oiled and back together. Assembly was tricky with this tiny watch. The pallet fork plate fought hard. I had earlier noticed little nick marks all over the pallet plate. Now I know why! Got the dial on, set the hands and DAMN!! Cannon pinion was loose. Yet another opportunity to fail. I had bought the cannon pinion punch and stake for my Seitz jeweling tool so now was the time to use it. Two tries before it was tight. Lastly, I regulated the watch and noticed that the hairspring was never leaving the regulator pin, so I had to give it a slight nudge. That seemed to improve the beat considerably--have not tried to think that trough as to whether it makes sense. The watch is together and I am heading for the liquor cabinet!!!

I'd go for the thicker tips, the fine ones are too fine even for working on a LeCoultre 101. And I wholeheartedly recommend Dumostar, the difference in quality is so huge compared to other alloys and other brands I'm surprised they aren't more expensive than they are. Hands down the best.

Thank you for the sage advice. I think I'll go in the direction that you suggest and make a wristwatch out of the movement.

The reason there are more old movements available than old cases is because many of those old cases were made of gold or silver. When bullion prices were high a gold or silver cased watch was worth more for the scrap value of the metal in the case that its value as a functioning time piece. That's especially true of pocket watches and the main reason you can purchase old pocket watches movements on eBay for next to nothing.

Because Gübelin was (and still is) a "casing company", oriented to jewelry, that never made mov.ts. That wanted and paid their supplier to stamped their name on them. Very common in the watch industry, back then and now. Browsing Ranfft by brute force is frustrating. First, fill all the possible fields in "advanced" , starting with the size (in lignes) in the "search string" field". In this case that returns the variations of say 10 base movement. The one that should be it it's the Eterna 616. The customer may have requested a better, higher execution with modified bridges (that is to make it appear proprietary) which is not the database. The other way is to look at the dial side, setting lever and use a Bestfit book, available on this forum. That is what at professionals did back then, and still do now.

There's not too much to fret over if you've done a regular 7750 before. There are two wire click springs on the calendar plate that can jump, and 4 jumpers. Two use springs mounted on the plate, and two the wire springs shared with the moonphase advance lever and corrector. The jumpers for the date and year look identical, and they are, in spite of the manual showing different part numbers, so don't worry about mixing them up. If you've done a 7750 then you are already familiar with the spring for the hour counter hammer and zero lever, that one is always fun to put in place. There is a flat wire spring for the day corrector here, which is easy to overlook or think that it's secured in the plate, but it comes right out. The manual makes it clear how to orient it when reinstalling. The date advance wheel doesn't need to be oriented like the pair of wheels in a regular 7750 day-date, it advances everything in order without any fuss. Pay attention to the minute wheel- it has a little cap on the pinion which needs to go over the hour wheel teeth. This is easy to miss and will lock things up if not installed correctly. Normal 7750 doesn't have this. Otherwise just follow the (very good) manual for lubrication and assembly. They say not to service the barrel but of course you can and should if not replacing it. On a watch this old it might be a good idea to replace it along with the cannon pinion and reverser for the automatic and possibly the rotor bearing. Do the adjustments for the moonphase corrector (again well explained in the manual), the difference between locking up and not working at all is a very small adjustment.

That is OK for cleaning watch cases and bracelets but not for cleaning watch parts. These cheap ultrasonic cleaner's are too harsh and can damage parts.

Actually the fact that Switzerland it's not in the EU (yet it adopts many important treaties and regulations like Schengen agreement, free mobile phone roaming) doesn't matter, because when you sell products into other countries, you must follow laws ands regulations of the latter, not your own. Not even the EU has not forced Apple to supply parts, because at this time smartphones are not included in the "right to repair" new legislation. Rather, Apple did that "spontaneously", starting with the US: Today, Apple announced that some parts, tools, and manuals — starting with iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 — will be made available to individual consumers in the United States from early 2022. The Right to Repair campaign welcomes this announcement but remains cautious about the implementation, which is not expected to be applicable to Europe until later in 2022. https://repair.eu/news/too-good-to-be-true-apple-announces-giving-access-to-some-spare-parts-and-repair-information-to-consumers/ The products covered by "right of repair" in the EU, and the UK that has adopted aligned legislation are: Dishwashers; Washing machines and dryers; Fridges and freezers; Televisions and other electronic displays for home use. For appliances used by businesses, the rules also apply to electric motors, vending machines, retail fridges and freezers, power transformers and welding equipment. The rules notably exclude laptops, tablets and smartphones. However, further products may be added in the future; the EU has shown support for extending the rules to consumer electronics and the UK may well follow suit. https://www.globalcompliancenews.com/2021/08/05/eu-and-united-kingdom-uk-implements-new-right-to-repair-rules-for-household-products-to-align-with-eu-ecodesign-requirements210721/ My personal opinion is that it's unlikely that this legislation will be expanded to watches, because these are to all effects non-household and non-necessary items, rather fashion, apparel and/or luxury purchases.

That's a strawberry methinks.

I find that after the watch is clean if you organize the screws in basically put all the screws That look the same together. Then as things get complicated is best to keep things separate. Like all the dial side screws: one cleaning container depends on how you to McLean the watch. You have an automatic call the automatic parts go together. Then the most important of all is photograph everything. Sometimes for the screws the parts list will have reasonably decent pictures of what the screw looks like to allow you to figure out what a mystery screw is.

You might find this interesting about the dials and hands, hopefully you can read it.

You could. But, when a gentler way can be used, that should be preferred as it avoids all stress. Beside, then you have the issue of refitting the stem, pressing the two halves often breaks it and should never done, so better to either to align the joint, otherwise remove the inner portion from the movement.t, join the two parts outside the case, then refit.

They accepted a surprisingly low offer, soooo..

I bought myself a little Christmas present.. Well?! What? Don't judge me... its got a blue dial. I couldn't resist.

This is my ref 16223. Sent it in for service/repair. It's gonna be a month or more but it'll be coming back. Hopefully looking and working great. Fingers (and eyes) crossed.

This little curiosity is heading to the ranks of the 404 club. It apparently uses a Miyota 6M17 24hr quartz movement, and has a somewhat interesting dial layout. Although this is an Esprit "fashion" watch, it does have a certain quirky aesthetic to it that is quite attractive, and of course it also has that other irresistible quality, namely a blue dial.