Ten Frugal Fixes You've Never Thought About
Back in the days before the internet, we had many ingenious ways of fixing our watches which still hold up today.
Here are 10 of mine.
Scratched mineral glass? Fill the scratch with clear nail polish. It'll flatten down with gravity and be literally as hard as nails.
Broken rubber keeper? Cut off a piece of hosepipe or tubing and flatten it out. No hosepipe? Use a plastic straw.
Scratched acrylic crystal? Brasso and cigarette ash mixed together rubbed in circles with a duster.
Lost a springbar or a pin from the bracelet? Paperclip.
Leather strap unglued? Superglue.
Indices fall off? Glue them back on with a drop of clear varnish on the end of a cocktail stick.
Wrong size battery? Pad a smaller one out with Blu Tack or a shim of cardboard from a cigarette packet.
Tool needed to make micro adjustments on clasp? Cocktail stick.
Plating lost from case? Model kit metallic paint and a tiny brush.
Broken resin strap emergency fix? Staples covered by electrical tape.
We had no need for fancy things like Polywatch (which I've never got to work on any acrylic crystal ever), and new-fangled microfibre cloths (which only smear everything and never absorb) were the last things we'd ever look at to give our watches a quick polish.
The best one though will always be:
Watch not working at all? Bin it and buy a new one!
What frugal fixes do you have?
I'm pretty much done with collecting now, but I've certainly got a good variety of affordable watches. As an occasional YouTuber, I'm a comedian not an influencer. Skmei is the new Casio!
I don't have any frugal fixes, but you have inspired me to create my own watch. This is 2023. We can't be bothered with any of that delayed gratification stuff. What if instead of waiting for parts to fall off and then needing a frugal fix, you could buy a watch Right Out Of The Box where that stuff has already happened and it's already gotten a frugal fix?
All it needs is a name. It could be called the Paper Clip Superglue Blue Tack Ash Varnish Clear Nail Polish Brasso Hosepipe Model One. I admit that's a lot of text. Good thing large dials are in vogue right now.
I am delighted to add a Frugal Fix. My $18 Mondaine style Berny watch is somewhat spectacular, but its strap split after less than a month. It was difficult to get off - the spring bar didn't have shoulders. I had a medium brown strap that would replace the split half, but the buckle half of the strap was very dark brown, almost black. So I left the buckle half on the watch, put the light brown strap with holes on the watch, and blackened it up with some old school Kiwi shoe polish.