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Hello Watchbangers! Welcome back to my usual watch repair report! It feels like an eternity since I’ve also had a bunch of other side projects and the upload schedule has changed but its good being able to present another solid watch! Now todays watch was, as always, bought over the local German eBay. It caught my eye because it was a swatch watch, but not any crappy swatch! It was a swatch with a mechanical movement! Till then I always thought that swatch only produced those small junky mechanical watches but low and behold! A swatch with a solid movement! And for the solid price of 50 Euros, with included box, papers (definitely super important ) and shipping I just had to snag it. Now before we jump into the whole process, here is a link to the full 4k commented video version on YouTube for the lazy readers out there: Now let’s go! After receiving the watch, this was the starting state of the watch: As you can see the outer appearance was still very good! The acrylic case has some scratches that would be easy to polish out and through the back, a clean looking movement was to be seen. The only thing which stood out was that the watch did not run after being wound. The seconds hand ticked a bit but stopped after a quarter of a minute. I was not sure what the issue was there, but I assumed that a good old service would do the trick! Disassembly: We start by prying off the see through case back. We unlock the watch spacer ring and movement in a counterclockwise direction from the case and lift them both out. We remove the hands. As you can see their condition is pretty good and the lume is pristine! After that we can just lift the minimalistic “chapter” dial from the watch face as well! Now we can carefully unlick the movement spacer ring and separate the two. Careful not to use too much force and snap the poor piece of plastic in half. After we have achieved in isolating the movement, we can strap it into our trusty holder. Unscrew the nicely blued rotor screw and lift of the smoothly signed rotor. I must say that the font reminds me of Comic Sans haha. Then unscrew the two screws for the automatic module. Flip it over to disassemble the whole automatic gear train. Once that is done, we can come back to the pretty movement body. A closer look reveals the stamped ETA 2842 marking. The numbers next to the caliber are probably the quality grade I assume. Unscrew the balance bridge and lift out the whole balance wheel carefully. I was super surprised at how tight the balance wheel and spring was sticking the bridge when lifting out. Usually, the wheel just droops into infinity xD The movement was already empty on mechanical power so I took out the pallet fork system here. Don’t forget the unwind the watch when doing this! Moving on we can take out the winding wheel above the mainspring and the click spring for the winding. You can see that these is a good amount of lubrication residue under the click wheel! Probably some Molycote DX I would say. Then we can unscrew the barrel bridge and take that away. Disassembling the train wheel bridge, we can see the whole power transmission journey laid out in front of us. I take out the whole gear train including the complete mainspring barrel to finish taking apart the whole back side of the movement. We can now flip the movement around. On the front side we can take of the minute wheel and hour wheel which is the canon pinion and the transmission wheel to the setting system. Now we can take away the small transmission wheel which engages and disengages when the setting system is used. Moving on to unscrewing and removing the smooth golden system cover. I was super careful here not to slip and scratch the cover since everything would be seen when looking down at the dial-less watch. Lastly, we can just simply take away the three parts of the setting system. Oh and the two part-clutch fell out while turning the movement so keep an eye on those too! With this last step, the disassembly of this Swatch ETA 2842 has been completed. Cleaning Process So this cleaning process has also been done the manual way. However! I did buy a cleaning machine now which I’m setting up and testing slowly. It should be in use in a few more weeks and then I can introduce it to you all! And clean my watches with it of course. Now the usual way of cleaning the watch parts is using lighter fluid and isopropanol alcohol for the rinse. And that’s exactly what I did! Now usually I also obviously service the mainspring and lubricate the balance jewels but this time I used the practical development of globalization and bought myself replacements for the complete barrel and balance of AliExpress to save some time and build into the Watch. Lubrication Here is a list of the used lubrication for the watch and their used areas. Moebius 9010 – Oil for jewel bearings with high rotation parts Moebius HP 1300 – Oil for slower moving parts and bearing. Molycote DX – Grease for high friction points on lever, wheels and contact points. Moebius 9415 – Grease for pallet jewels and escapement Crystal Polishing As mentioned at the beginning, the see through plastic case and case back had a number of tiny scratches from the years of use so I just polished them out with a rotary tool and some Polywatch. You can see a video of the method on my channel I think, but here was the result: Reassembly For the reassembly, we can just reverse the disassembly steps which I wrote down. I must however share a super smooth picture of the reassembled aftermarket balance. It just looks so good! Timegrapher Test And after everything was recased again I slapped the watch on to the timegrapher to see how well my work was done. Here are the the results without regulation: Looks like the aftermarket balance and mainspring barrel really do work out nicely! I did however regulate the watch a little to this: Just lowered the rate and beat error a little and bumped the amplitude up a few degrees aswell Final Results: I am very happy with the final results! The service went super smooth and I am glad that i tried out aftermarket parts for the first time. Now we just have to see how long these will actually last. Otherwise it was exciting working on my first swiss calibre! They definetly have a different style of design and function. A sort of different personality of a watch I would say Anyways I hope you all enjoyed going through the walkthrough and hope that this will help anyone looking for some sort of guide! If there are questions or comments, please comment! And critism is also always welcome! Till next time !

I game across this very interesting read; You have to sit down for it, but IMHO it's worth your time. http://www.ccrs.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:5b99146b-e64c-4ae3-b324-d9cc5c17f8e6/2016.06. When corporatism leads to corporate governance failure.pdf