Search the Community

I have dissembled, cleaned and reassembled my first movement—an ETA 980.163. With my lack of experience it took me about a month working off and on. It’s hard to appreciate just how small the parts are until one has to try to handle them and place them in the movement. Anyway, I assembled the watch and it runs (for now) I tried to be careful about keeping everything clean but I may have introduced more dirt than I cleaned out of the components/movement.I had a question about the order of reassembly. I used the ETA Technical Communication guide to assist me in remembering where the components went as well as the order of how to assemble them. When assembling the train wheels I followed the “order of assembly” and discovered that assembly of two of the train wheels seems to be out of the correct order. I have pictures and screen shots from the guide for reference (I used an ETA 980.153 because I found pictures of the movement online—it’s basically the same as the 980.163. Here is the link to the ETA 980.153 guide.The order of assembly calls for the second wheel (19) then the third wheel (20) followed by the intermediate wheel (21) in that order. If this order is followed 20 is placed between 21 and 19. This causes two problems: 1) the small gear on 21 will not engage wheel 19 because it’s too high, and 2) the pivot on 21 is too high when trying to place the train bridge. The image shows the correct assembly and is as follows: the rotor (12) drives 21 which drives 19 (via the small gear not visible--under 21) then 19 drives 20. The assembly drawing clearly shows the wrong order for these wheels to engage correctly. I struggled for weeks trying to assemble it according to the ETA guide. Once I stopped doing that and actually looked at how the wheels engage I saw that the correct order of assembly is 19 – then 21 and finally 20. If I’m an idiot, or my lack of experience was causing my problem please tell me. The bottom line is that the movement runs (all the hands are going round and round as expected). Watch has been running for about 2 months now. For Reference19 second wheel20 third wheel21 intermediate wheel12 rotor