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On ‎7‎/‎11‎/‎2019 at 6:45 PM, AndyHull said:

A quick departure from the pile of HMTs. Today we have a late mechanical era Ingersol Sealion.

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This was suffering from a minor case of hairspring salad, and a major case of exceeding its service interval. I suspect the last person to look in side this worked at the Ingersol factory.

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The slightly ancient band it came on is almost unused, but rock hard, so needs a little leather restoration work. Furthermore it is black leather, which I think didn't look nearly as good as the light tan calfskin with red stitching I selected. Another quick restoration for the 404 club.

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The winder stem really should be replaced. I cleaned the rust you can see in this picture off it, but the damp has taken its toll. I'll have a rummage later and see if I can find a match in my pile of random NOS stems. 

Can anyone identify the caliber, to save me a trip to ranfft.de ?

Sorry, I thought I'd posted this earlier. It's a BFG 844.

Regards.

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9 hours ago, balaton said:

Sorry, I thought I'd posted this earlier. It's a BFG 844.

Regards.

Thanks, much useful info there, for example the exact designation is 844(CLD): manual wind, date, and the shock protector is 2 Jewels - Kif-Trior.  That saved me a lot of trawling to find it on ranfft - and puts the watch sometime around or after 1975, and probably before 1981.

I'm still wearing it. The thing is a good solid timekeeper, with a well designed dial. Like a lot of pin levers, you can hear it from the other end of the house :P but hey, nobodies perfect.

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6 hours ago, AndyHull said:

Thanks, much useful info there, for example the exact designation is 844(CLD): manual wind, date, and the shock protector is 2 Jewels - Kif-Trior.  That saved me a lot of trawling to find it on ranfft - and puts the watch sometime around or after 1975, and probably before 1981.

I'm still wearing it. The thing is a good solid timekeeper, with a well designed dial. Like a lot of pin levers, you can hear it from the other end of the house :P but hey, nobodies perfect.

You're most welcome. I've got a few Ingersolls myself, no two with the same movements which range through Cattin, BFG, Smiths and an AS made by EB (or vice versa!). And yes, they're all loud buggers.

Regards.

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12 hours ago, ro63rto said:
13 hours ago, m1ks said:
Big n chunky on the wrist today.
'Parniserai' homage with seagull movement.
 
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*Panerai

Haha noooooooo, most assuredly a Parniserai 

A beautifully built homage and I might have taken slight liberties making a portmanteau of the respective mfrs names. :D

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Today, we have a big chunk of 1973 in the form of a Timex Viscount automatic day/date.

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This repair fought me every step of the way.

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It arrived with the winder connected to fresh air, and needed a complete strip down to get everything back in order. The day detent spring was misaligned, the date wheel was misaligned, the winder weight was loose, the thing was filthy both inside and out, and even getting the back off initially was problematic. I probably spent a good half hour simply trying to figure out why the day wheel refused to co-operate before I noticed the spring wasn't actually doing anything when the disk was re-fitted, due to the spring being in the wrong orientation. I suspect it got a good hard knock at some stage, which dislodged a bunch of stuff, possibly due to the frustration of the previous owner, as a result of the day wheel not turning.

Everything is now all back in order, the hands are correctly aligned, the day and date kick over correctly at midnight. It is ticking away with that characteristic Timex chonk-chonk-chonk and winding nicely.

I'm not sure it is going to stay on the hair puller band, I may swap it to something a little more comfortable, as I don't particularly enjoy the bald arm patches look, and my Nordic neanderthal genes mean that my arms are particularly furry. :D

This is what it looked like when it arrived.

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I'll keep it on for today, and regulate it tomorrow once everything has settled down from the surgery, but it is keeping pretty good time so far. The crystal polished up well, but I still need to give the case back a quick whizz with the polishing pad to get rid of some apprentice marks, probably due to some previous owner's attempts to open the thing.

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Allya need is love... and perhaps a little lubrication... and maybe another 15 or so jewels. 

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This late '70s wonder joined my current favorite in the 404 club on my wrist this evening. As well as a good clean and some light lubrication it required a little gentle hairspring massage to flatten out a rather obviously bit of conical contortion.
Despite having more fingerprints in it when it arrived than jewels (at least three of the former and only two of the latter), its Hong Kong heart is now ticking along quite nicely.  

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1 hour ago, m1ks said:

A nice little HMT Rajat automatic today.

 

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Very nice. I have a Kohinoor of a similar design on its way to me.

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I've got a fair few HMTs now, so I will need to do a quick feature on them when I get a chance. As some of you might have noticed I have a little bit of a soft spot for them.

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A bit of a departure from the recent Timexes.

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This arrived with a display problem on the digital block. Lots of the segments didn't work, and I assumed when I bought the watch, that this was going to be corrosion or dirt on the PCB, but it was actually slightly odder than that. The disaplay problem meant that I was the only bidder and picked the thing up for pennies. 

It arrived in over all excellent condition apart from the display fault, although I am now going to give it the usual complet deep clean before it joins the others in the 404 club. 

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The glass of the display in these watches, as many of you will know, is connected to the circuit board with what is known as a zebra strip, which comprises a bunch of conductive rubber strips sandwiched between non conductive ones.

Normally these just work, but this particular zebra connector had become a little kinky shall we say, and had bulged out of the slot it was meant to be contained in. I presume the material used in this particular batch, must be mildly hydroscopic and had therefore expanded.

I tried various methods of flattening the thing, but when refitted it was always fractionally too long, and would bulge, so I carefully cut about 1/10mm from the length and it fitted fine, and as you can see, works perfectly. Owing to the way they work, the exact orientation of the connectors is not critical, since the spacing of the rubber conductive strips is less than half the PCB conductor spacing. This means there are usually two or more conductive paths per PCB pad, so shaving a whisker off one end or the other of the entire strip will most likely not affect performance. 

Edited by AndyHull
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4 hours ago, m1ks said:

Nice Andy, you've got a few? I never noticed. :lol:

I still have a couple in the "to do" pile, I'll no doubt post pictures when I get a chance to look at them.

They are great fun to work with, and with quite a number of suitable franken-dialed potential parts donors regularly turning up on ebay, they generally fix up quite easily.

I would say they are probably one of the best value mechanical watches out there. Well designed, owing to their Citizen heritage, well built with Indian flair and Citizen quality control, easy to service and most importantly perhaps, almost indestructible.

Edited by AndyHull
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