My grandfather's Mido

[anilv]

Hi guys,

My cousin learned of my interest in watches and passed me our grandfathers wristwatch.

Its a nice hand-wind Mido, probably from the late 50s or early 60s...oddly a hand-wind. I say oddly as Mido made their name with their automatic watches..starting with the bumper 917 movement.

It was probably in the middle range watch at the time going by the fact it has a stainless-steel case, with a  Gold Bezel (not too clear in the pic above). It also has a dust cover which is always nice to have. It has a pretty large case tube as well. Back in the day there were many methods to achieve a good crown seal and a large crown tube allowed a large o-ring to be fitted inside the crown. The fact that the crown was missing is not really a problem.. many a watch has had the crown or crown/stem come off and been put away and forgotten in a drawer but the brownish stains around the center of the dial is not good.

 

With the movement out of the case..you can see the brownish stains clearly. It comes away easily so it could be just some oil-residue (heres hoping!) so I proceed to remove the hands. If rust is present, removing the second hand may result in breaking the tip of the seconds pinion.. here I use my Bergeon hand-puller, make sure I keep the tool straight and press (to pull). That went well but.......

...In the picture below you can see the tip of the seconds pinion..and a lot of rust coloured 'stuff'. I'm starting to get a bad feeling about this.

off with the dial and.....

This is one of the worst case of rust I have seen..I pretty certain the screws will be pretty stuck but then again it may be so bad that I'll be able to break them while they're still in the screw holes..! Anyway this is as far as I'll go for now. I'll keep and eye out for a replacement movement.. this one is marked as a Mido 1020 which is basically a Peseux 170, not too rare so I'll be shopping for one at the right price. I may try to save the balance cock and barrel and train bridges to retain some of this watches identity but we'll see how that developes... the click screw seems pretty screwed too. One thing I just noticed is the cock for the centre-pinion is missing and someone substituted a spring. .. ah well, in for a penny...

 

The only thing making this watch a viable project is that it has a stainless case, the dial and hands are usable, the movement is a fairly common one and lastly...the personal link to my grandfather (who passed on 30something years ago.

 

Anil

 

 

 

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[Geo]

I can't wait to see how you get on with this one.  Wishing you the best of luck with it Anil.

[ramrod]

yikes! that one has seen better days. it looks like someone wore it and put it away wet - literally.

i have a lot of mido parts, but they're all automatic. i do have some peseux parts (although i don;t know exactly what parts they are), so contact me for your needs.

[anilv]

Thanks Ramrod, 

Looks like I'll need a whole movement!

In cases like these , usually the pivots are also unusable so we are talking about the whole train.

Anil

[ramrod]

you're probably right, anilv. i think that movement is trashed. you might get one or two useable gears out of it. not too much else.

 

[RyMoeller]

Yowza.  That's some pretty bad water damage.  I'm happy that you're invested in the repair job though.  There's nothing quite like a hand-me-down, especially in this line of work.  My father gave me his Accutron 218 when he discovered I was interested in watch repair.  It was a wedding gift from his parents.  It does run but the hour and minute hands are frozen in place.  I've worked on more expensive and complicated movements but I'm waiting until until I've reached a certain level of experience before tackling the Accutron project because it means so much to me; it's the one I really don't want to screw up.

I really cannot wait to see how this turns out.  

[anilv]

Ry,

You have the 2 most important qualities required of a watchmaker.. patience and knowing your limits.

Anil