Do you work on your watches

To me watches are like cars high tech and best left to the professionals

I have an old Accurist watch I bought in 1987. It hadn’t worked in over 20 years but it had sentimental value. Earlier this year I started to play around with it and got it working again.

A friend of mine started 'watchmaking' - read taking old crap and getting it going again - at the beginning of the year. He's spent quite a bit of time on it and he's getting good and his confidence is growing. Purely self taught and hours on YouTube.

The one warning I'd give is that he's now got about £4K of tools which he's bought so it's another tangential money pit to get involved in! 😂😂

I'm doing the same thing and I totally agree with you.

Have you found the Cousins website yet?

Trust me, don't even look LOL.

😂

If you don't want me to look, why did you put the link?😁 But yes, it's my go to whenever I need parts or tools.

The amount of spares that Cousins carries. 😱

I started messing with my cheapest Seiko 5 when I fell out of love with the dial and stopped wearing it. It was intimidating at first and there were some failures, with the hands mostly.

But once I got more comfortable I started modding my more expensive watches too. Hands, date wheel, bezel and insert, caseback... It's not super expensive watches nor parts and I'm glad I now have the confidence to swap parts myself, say, if I ding a bezel badly or break a ceramic insert, or even to replace the whole movement after a few years instead of paying for a service.

I grew up in a rural environment so we couldn’t always find or afford services from professionals. The moment I could pick and use tools I was learning how to fix things. While my Dads interest was always automotive my interest was every other mechanical item and a lot of non-mechanical items also. Mine would have been automotive as well but my Dad had a bad temper and thought everyone should be able to read his mind. He also had a belief that kids should act like little adults. If we didn’t well…… I won’t go into anymore details. What I am saying I had to work on and fix most things myself. Watches are no different than most other things. Like a lot of the others things I like, you need specialized tools, equipment and knowledge to service and work on them. If my autos aren’t running like I want I will open them up and adjust them. When they break or wear out a part I will fix it.

Holy shit...

Making the mistakes (blessings in disguise) that I have made, I sometimes have no choice, although working on my own things is only ever a last resort. My Camy Club-Star is going to need a service soon, and even though it's a time only movement that isn't much different from what I've serviced before, I am very nervous. I mostly work on watches and if they run, they become my stuff. If not, they become the drawer's stuff.