OK, so today I decided to start work.
Getting the movement out is pretty straightforward; remove the caseback and the stem and it levers gently out.
Set the hands to midnight and then use a hand remover to lift the hands off the spindles (I'm sure there's a proper word for them on a watch!).
The dial can be gently levered away from the movement, there are just two pins on the back of the dial to locate it.
Fitting the new hands is probably the trickiest part and where a minor disaster occurred.
The hour hand goes on first and a hand pressing tool located it perfectly, but the minute hand was less precise - most of the parts are Yobokies and excellent quality, but I bought a set of hands from eBay as (as I recall) Yobokies didn't have a red-tipped second hand available at the time.
Trying to get the minute hand to fit, I touched the hour hand with the plastic tweezers I was using and it went straight through the lume AND the hand, there was no metal behind the lume!So, my hour hand has a hole in it!
It looks terrible in the photos, but just looks like a mark on the hand to the naked eye. I'm not going to spend money buying another set of hands now, so it'll have to be less than perfect.
Getting the second hand in wasn't too bad, but it merely proved that the minute hand was poorly seated and it took a good half an hour of fiddling and pressing with two small screwdrivers to finally get it properly fitted and the second hand passing smoothly over it.
Finally the movement went back in the case and I left it running for a while to check the timekeeping was still OK.
The bezel adhesive strip hasn't arrived yet, so the final steps will have to wait until then.
The moral of today's story? Buy the best quality parts you can and be very, very, very careful!
M
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