The tale of two and a half watches....

[JohnD]

The story starts with the first watch, a Sheffield electronic, from 1968 that I bought on line as a bare working watch, just needed a clean up, polished crystal and a nice new croc strap....

I knew nothing about the watch at the time other than it was a 'hybrid' electronic watch with a balance wheel.

A bit of research told me it was a watch, marketed in the USA under the 'Sheffield' banner, but what was inside it was a Junghans 600.10 cal. movement from Germany which dates the watch to 1968 and found this 1968 advert for it......

They are also marketed with the dial text 'Matthey-Doret' and some, like this date version, also have the sub text 'by Sheffield'...

A few weeks ago I picked up the 'second' watch, this Matthey-Doret version, as a non runner, very cheaply.

My hope that it would be an easy fix was however unfounded, battery corrosion had affected the circuit board, badly damaging the coil windings which left them stuck to the underside of the balance stopping it moving.

I stripped it down, removing the circuit and freed up the balance. The mechanical part of the movement looked undamaged and the balance moved freely with the seconds hand moving as expected.

This left me with the need to source a replacement circuit, something I wasn't expecting to be able to do easily, or more to the point cheaply.

Surprisingly, a week or two later, while searching 'job lot' watches on eBay I came across this collection:-

with this description............

"Old pin lever movements with good balances plus the Elgin

electronic movement with a Matthey Dorrett face, which works 

but struggles when upside down.

Westclox has a US movement from La Salle, Illinois.

All for bits or spares and repair so No Returns."

The fact that the balance shows as a blur confirmed that the electronic part of the watch appeared to be OK.

Well I won the auction, making the total outlay for the original watch and the donor one still less than £30, result!

So this brings us to the 'half a watch'......

On receipt I checked it with a battery and the balance started to spin.

I quickly stripped it down to remove the electronic module, not very straight forward on these as they have an inner anti magnetic sub case that stops the module just sliding out. This has to be removed first and as it sits under the dial this means stripping the hands and dial off first, which is what I had to do on the original watch...

I found that the case and hands on the donor 'half' watch were better than the ones on my original Matthey-Doret watch so I  rebuilt the watch using the original dial and movement (which is marked 600-30 and as such makes it the last of these non date movements, putting it somewhere between 1974 and 1976), the case and hands from the donor and the case back and stem/crown from the original watch....

Now all running nicely, shown here with the original 'Sheffield' watch and the 'half a watch' left over....

As an extra bit of information I did a bit of research on the 'Elgin 250' movement and found that t would originally been in a watch looking like this, not sure how it found it's way into a Matthey-Doret case, with the Matthey-Doret dial and hands though?......

Bugger, yet another variation to look out for! (along with a Matthey-Doret Junghans 600-12 cal. version with the date ).

 

[AdrianNOGUES]

Very interesting read !

[JohnD]

The resurrected Matthey-Doret getting some wrist time yesterday.....

 

[AdrianNOGUES]

Stunning !