Hello to everyone

[VFA]

Hello, there. I have been into watches since childhood when my grandfather gave me his Soviet "Победа" watch (I grew up in Soviet Union). I was probably 8 or 9 years old. Watches were extremely cool devices then to everyone. This was in the 70's. I've loved and owned many watches since. I now live in USA and am enjoying a small collection of inexpensive, but dear to me Seiko watches. I have always been a Seiko fan as they seem to be some of the best affordable watches out there. I have also taken apart, but not put back together many watches. As YouTube became popular I have discovered Mark's watch repair channel and was absolutely blown away by this amazing watch master. I found myself watching his videos as meditation. Absolutely amazing!

As I do not have a lot of money to spend on watches I tend to try and find good deals on the used market and I really enjoy even a simple mechanical watch with no crazy expensive stuff. As such I have purchased a brand new Seiko 5 Automatic Field watch a few years ago. It was really inexpensive, had an exhibition back and a very dear to me clear light dial with contrasting hands. It works very well to this day and is still one of my favorite watches. I have since replaced its flat mineral crystal with a domed sapphire one, which really improved the watch a lot. I have also successfully regulated it to run at only a few seconds fast a day. But to feed my addiction I discovered that Seiko kinetic watches are sold very cheaply because of the fact that most of them need a new capacitor. I myself had owned a Kinetic at one time. It too was very inexpensive and worked well until the capacitor gave out. I learned to replace it and the watch worked well after that save to the fact that the case was very cheap and got really ugly. So I have found a used Kinetic market to be very satisfying. I have acquired a number of these Seiko Kinetics and replaced capacitors and/or crystals in many of them. They are amazing timepieces. They run absolutely flawlessly and accurately and have a huge power reserve with the new updated capacitors (about 6 months max reserve). My latest acquisition was a beautiful almost perfect condition Seiko AGS Spirit Titanium. This is the same as Kinetic, but an older, perhaps JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) name for it. I traced this one to February 1995 production. The watch looked almost perfect. But it needed a capacitor, of course. The matter was complicated by the fact that the case on this one is a one piece affair. The way to get the movement out is through the front. The crystal bezel pops off its friction gasket fit. I had successfully replaced the capacitor in this watch, but the gasket is a one time use deal. So now I am looking high and low for the gasket. I searched and could not find anything. So I started looking for fora and found this! I had not idea Mark had a forum. I was going to try and contact him via YouTube, but did not want to bother him. Now that I found this place I am really hoping to get some help with sourcing this gasket shart term. Long term I am just beside myself at finding a place where Mark is present and learning.

[Nucejoe]

Welcome to the forum.

 

[oldhippy]

Thank you for your introduction and welcome to this friendly forum.