ID Timex movement & remove crystal

[RichJensen]

I've got an early quartz Timex here (BTW: holy crap are those movements ever quiet! I had to watch the minute hand in order to verify the movement worked after putting a battery in it).

The only problem with the watch is a dislodged second hand.

However, the crystal is so thin there's not enough vertical material for my crystal lift to bite into. I've filed the teeth on the lift down to reasonably sharp edges, but it still slips off the vertical surface before I have a good enough grip to even spin the crystal in the bezel.

When I've come across this issue in the past, I've been able to push both the face and the crystal out from the back. When I've done that on other watches I haven't had an issue getting the crystal back in, as they tend to snap in without needing a lift.

But I need to remove the movement first, and in order to do that, I have to remove the stem. And in order to do that, I need to know what movement I'm looking at.

Any help??

Thanks!!!

[AndyHull]

Well if you want to save the crystal, you might like to try this.

Grab a large lump of bluetack or similar, and mash it about till its good and sticky.

Bodge it firmly on to the crystal so it covers the entire surface, so that it will get a good grip, and let it sit for a bit till it is back to being slightly less squishy.

Grab the case firmly with one hand. Grab the big blob of bluetack firmly with the other and pull them apart sharply.

It needs to ba a sharp tug, otherwise the bluetack will simply stretch rather than gripping.

Be aware that the watch will tend to fly out of your hand, and the second hand will almost certainly fly out of the case,  so do this with a good soft landing zone, where you can see the second hand when it exits stage left from the case.

It might take a couple of attempts.

If you have a replacement crystal (unlikely in this case), then you can of course destroy the original by supergluing or epoxying a large steel nut or something similar to it, and tugging it out with that.

I've heard you can perform a similar trick to the blue tack trick, using Duck tape, but I've never had any luck with that, however my duck tape is a cheap knock off, so perhaps the real McCoy would actually work.

Edited September 2, 2021 by AndyHull

[KOwatch]

One of the tricks to decrease the volume of a timex movement is to remove the second hand, looks like this has already been done for you.  The really loud ones are the m905 (1990s/2000s indlglo) and variants from that family,anything else will be quiet only by comparison

Doesn't appear to be a lot of information available on these old-modern timexes. The vintage timex people stop caring after the quartz-controlled balance wheel movements (m63,m66,m73) which came after the electromechanically controlled balance wheels.  Your movement here looks like for awhile they kept the same steel plate platform with the folding-tab dials from the earlier decades but no balance wheel, just quartz, before switching at some time to the plastic movements, later adding indiglo (like m905).

Might be a time-only version of the m183 (circa 1981) unfortunately there's no manuals around for those that I've seen. Since it it based on the older timex movement style, it's not a stretch to think the stem release is similar, there was essentially two tabs that grip the stem from each side, but I don't see the characteristic holes of this style in your movement.

There doesn't seem to be any movement/date number on the dial, if there's no movement number on the plates, check the caseback for a date code, they started these in 1985.

[JerseyMo]

have you figured out how to remove the stem yet?