Maintaining my Growing Vintage Watch Collection

In this video I work for three and a half hours on a beautiful vintage Valgine stainless steel ETA-based day date. I originally purchased this watch, which dates back to the 1970s, in October 2023 for 103 Chf on Ricardo. I discovered upon receiving it that it was struggling to run and that its movement was completely drenched in oil. In this video I swap out its ETA 2789 movement for a 2789-1 that I recently purchased for 20 Chf.

This type of maintenance is a highlight of watchmaking for me. Moreover, in my effort to learn watchmaking by watching YouTube videos, I have enjoyed watching live streams by @natecharleswatches, @ChronoglideWatchmaking and others as a way to go beyond the highly edited videos that are commonplace on YouTube to get a better sense of the time, effort, and tools involved in actually doing it. This video is made in that spirit. It's made to show you everything. As you watch it please try to think of it as a livestream rather than an edited video. It is edited, but only in the sense that I cut between six live cameras and my computer screen.

If you don't have three hours to watch it feel free to jump forward or use YouTube's built-in playback speed setting (gear icon) to speed up playback to 1.5x or 2x.

Thanks for watching! I hope you find this video and the other videos on the channel informative!

Before opening any vintage watch or clock for the first time I recommend checking it for radium paint. I didn't do that in this video because it wasn't the first time that I opened these watches and I knew that there was no radium on their dials or hands.

Links to starter watchmaking tools, including the microscope I use in this video, are on my website: https://www.imakewatches.com

My videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Critical / corrective comments are welcome.

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