Zodiac service & repair story (with pictures)

[Darren Cal.11/12]

 
 
I bought this Valjoux.723 powered triple calender Zodiac some time ago.
It was an ebay auction and it was, for the most part, the panda colour scheme that motivated me. I saw the obvious faults of the watch - it was missing a crown and stem, one pusher was completely broken off and there was no day displayed in its frame on the dial. 



There was a VERY deeply scratched up crystal and the seller had made no attempt to clean the years of gunge out of the bracelet , watch case creases & particularly around the pushers. But the basic elements were in place , the seller listed in his auction that he was the original owner , the watch had been serviced a number of times and was running fine up until a year earlier when he tried to re-set the time and accidently broke the stem holding the crown. His ebay photo's were not great quality but the story rang true so i took the leap of faith and pulled the trigger.
Well the big day came the package arrived and - WHAT , its smaller than i'd expected !!!!
I cant say why but after a steady diet of automatic vintage Heuer's ( mainly Carrera's, Autavia's & Monaco's ) which seemed to range from 38-41 mm wide , this pettite 36 mm watch caught me off guard & i dont think i was really prepared to try a smaller wrist watch. 
Result , i placed the watch in the safety box & forgot about it for a year.
I took it out recently and admired its style & decided its unfair to hold such a beautiful watch and not use it, i should sell it for someone else to enjoy. I knew i wanted to see the project through so i sent it off to my watchmaker to lavish some love upon it.
His first project was to disassemble and clean the watch and bracelet. You can see the results of the bracelet cleaning in this photo ( the liquid started life clear so its fair to say there was a lot of "history" released in the cleaning solution)
 


Next he removed the movement & separated the dial & low & behold the Day indication wheel had self destructed and the script had come away from the wheel stopping the advance of the Day wheel.  Note how some of the script is stuck to the back of the dial. 



After the movement was seen to my watchmaker carefully cleaned the dial with a soft brush , sourced a new Crown/stem & pushers to complete the job. Here the dial after



And the completed watch here 






Hope you enjoyed the watchmakers photo's , i will make some more photo's with the bracelet on when it returns to me. 
Cheers - Darren 

[Scorpio55]

  Really enjoyed the thread.  Nice watch and look forward to seeing w/the band on.  Thanks for sharing this.

[jon p]

         nice work!