1978's Seiko Blue Lady Quartz N.O.S under pressure

[nico]

Sorry for not posting so often, I began a year ago, worked on some Seiko 2220 chariot, hi-beat 5740C, more using my little time to practice than to try to write on a foreign language since I'm not so fluent in english.

Also my apologies for my cumbersome english

As computer scientist, I worked on tools to document and follow my work (a kind of personal and private blog). I plan to publish a simple tool to calculate some data from timegrapher measurements.

 

That said, here is my latest project I finished today.

Since I planned to gift a watch to a lady in my family, I searched for a long time a nice Seiko (I'm mainly focused on 1970's Seiko) and finally found a beautiful 2623-0080, with a wonderful blue dial, unworn, from 1978 !

I trained myself on one of this kind of movement, a diver, and knew the challenges. For me, the difficulties resides mainly in the magnetized rotor and the tiny gear train with its bridge. I assumed that the lubrication requires some common sense and I had a look on a quartz ETA oiling chart. So I started doing the service, almost confident.

It was an uneventful clean-up. Everything was very clean, the screws were untouched, only some old grease and oil in contained spaces. I could imagine that the oil was just in god proportions, never touched, right from the Seiko's Daini factory.

(the gear train on a 2€ coin, the magnetized malicious rotor a bit appart, on the "E" of Euro. It took time to set the scene of this picture)

No noticeable problems, until reassembly...

 

When I finished on the back side (côté ponts), I put in a battery... And nothing moved... Not the slightest sign of life... And we're only a few weeks away from the deadline

Hopefully I had other movements on this kind, and that's how I started debugging. Quickly I found the issue :

Do you see it ?

Great ! Yes, just here !

I don't know how I made that, but I'm sure it's my mistake. I (should) always do a thorough diagnostic and (should) take notes on everything I can notice. As I've the continuous improvement mindset, I have to find out how this happened. Not sure, but maybe I screwed the movement holder on the fragile part, or, less tangible, I slipped with my screwdriver on one time or another.

This is how I replaced a brand new electromagnet with an old one

I encountered some concerns on the other side, since I didn't worked a lot on date/day modules, which I overcame with a bit of observation and patience.

 

Then... Finally, I'm ready to face Christmas holidays ! 

This is how I finished my (around) 10th project, my second and most important quartz movement... At leas until now !

Edited December 8, 2024 by nico