Becoming an Amatuer Watchmaker: Servicing a Vintage Elgin Linen Watch

Last year I dramatically fell into the world of watchmaking. I’ve often been mildly interested in watches and how they work but just assumed it was something too hard to do. I don’t remember where it started exactly this time, somewhere between Nat and I just deciding to try a DIY watchmaking kit or getting lost in the Wristwatch Revival YouTube videos, but when I say dramatically fell into the world, it’s not an exaggeration. I’ve fully set up a watchmaking desk, acquired a lot of strange and specific tools, and have now completed my second service. Between November and February I disassembled, cleaned, lubricated, and assembled a vintage Elgin watch I found on eBay—I learned a lot, did dumb things, acquired new tools, and finished the process with a new watch in my watch box.

Desk with watchmaking tools

The first watch I serviced was a learning experience. I actually did it 3 times because each time I had done something wrong and decided to just start from scratch. It also was a simple watch—no date, not automatic, etc—but also a very difficult watch in that it was hard to get it to perform well as it was a old and cheap 1-jeweled watch movement. I got through it and the watch is now in Nat’s watch collection, but I definitely plowed through it making a lot of mistakes.

Sheffield Acrylic Watch, my first service

My next watch would be the real test of what I learned. So I started looking for things to repair on eBay. I knew that a watch really needing restoration would probably be too hard, so I looked for things that were older but claimed to at least still work in some form. This may not surprise you but there are a lot of options for old watches on eBay. After browsing I landed on this vintage Elgin with a Linen Dial. I just loved the style of the linen and the way the numbers look—this Z-shaped 2 gets me every time. Even though I had gone through a service already this would be my first with some experience so I wanted to also expand a little—this one had a calendar wheel too, which the previous watch and learning movements (a Seagull ST36) didn’t have. So I bought it and excitedly waited for it to arrive.

About a week later in early November it showed up. I was pretty lucky. This watch was a bit of a risk, while the eBay seller said it was running—they couldn’t figure out how to open the case to inspect the movement or share photos of it. My naïvety shined here and I just thought, I’m sure it’s fine. I can definitely figure out how to open it. It was nice and the dial was better than I imagined. So I took a few photos and tested it on the timegrapher. It was running but a bit poorly, losing about 1.5 minutes a day.

The watch straight from eBay, performing at -89 seconds per day

So here we go, let’s get this thing open and start cleaning it. Oh wait. But. It’s not a normal watch. How do I open this thing? I studied it for a while, longer than I’d like to admit, and just couldn’t figure it out. The back was pretty scratched up so it looked like others had tried to open this too in the watch’s history. Then I remembered one of the many many episodes of Wristwatch Revival I watched where he had to remove the movement from the crystal side. It turns out this watch is a monocoque shell watch—meaning it was one piece. I had to remove the crystal first, but how? A new tool!

A crystal lift tool, so metal

This—the most metal tool ever 🤘—is a crystal lift tool that squeezes the crystal just enough to be removed from the edges of the metal watch case. After you remove the crystal from the front of the watch, the movement can be removed easily. Also this type of case needs to use a split stem since you can’t easily remove the crown and stem—which was a scary process of pulling the crown until it detaches. And now I can pull the movement out and start inspecting it.

on the left, the Elgin 315 movement, on the right the dial side with calendar wheel

The movement is an Elgin 315, which looking deeper is based on an A. Schild 1802/1803 caliber. And it was dirty! Whoever serviced this thing last time really enjoyed using lubrication and often things were just stuck to each other or there were pooled areas of lubrication. It was kind of gross. Also it introduced my second big problem. I took macro photos of each step of the disassembly so if I needed to refer to something I could. Taking off the calendar wheel unfortunately was too easy, it all was under tension and so over-lubricated that once I loosened the screws of the cover plate it all kind of just popped out. Thankfully I didn’t lose any of the tiny parts, but I don’t know exactly how they all go back on since this was my first project with calendar works. This is a forshadowing moment for later. Anyway, I got everything disassembled and cleaned through my ultrasonic and thouroughly dried.

the movement, completely disassembled

Time to reassemble! First part of this I recorded a video so you can follow along. Most of the reassembly went well, I had ordered a new mainspring because I don’t yet have a mainspring winder and it’s a pretty expensive tool—new mainsprings are cheap if you can find them. Getting the main part of the watch back together has become a bit more routine now that I’ve done the process a few times. Also at this point all the parts were still in good shape after I inspected them, so didn’t need to order anything new yet.

Then comes the calendar works. Remember earlier when everything stuck and I wasn’t able to see how it all goes back together? Well this is when it bit me. Thankfully it’s not too hard to reason about what goes where and some deep studying of the photos I did get helped a lot. Bad news is some parts do need to go in the right way and not upside down. Now listen, when it comes to watchmaking, one thing I’ve learnd pretty well is to not force things. These parts are small and delicate. Forcing is a bad idea. So, of course, after getting the calendar works back together but with an upside down lever holding the calendar wheel in place, it was not turning. This is when I forced it and… well tore the teeth off this hour wheel. Sometimes I guess you have to relearn lessons the hard way.

an hour wheel, with broken teeth on the top

So… I went looking for another hour wheel and found a new old stock one and an old one on eBay, both about $5-10. So I bought the eBay one first but later thought I’d rather have the newer one. So I waited for a week and they both arrived on about the same day. The new one however didn’t fit. It was the right size but it was not as deep and the teeth didn’t line up, so the old one it is and now I have an extra part. I’m starting a collection of extra parts now I guess. But now it works and look at that calendar moving nicely but without needing to force it.

On the home stretch now! Just need to get it back in the case and wrap it up. It’s never that easy of course. I pulled the crown stem out to get it back in it’s case and accidentally popped the yoke off it’s place—the yoke a small part that helps hold tension around the stem when changing between winding and time setting. That gave me one more practice run on assembling the calendar works so… hey practice! Wrapping this up I got the dial and hands back on, reapplied the crystal and put on a new strap. I chose this blue leather one because I thought it went really well with the dial. I was able to get the performance improved a lot from losing a minute plus a day to hovering around +/- 3 seconds per day. Also I was able to improve the amplitude a lot even getting over 300º in some measurements.

the completed watch on blue strap, with -1 seconds/day timing

Really happy with how this turned out. I’m still so new to this hobby and still make all the mistakes you’d expect. It’s really interesting as some times I feel like I’m using similar skills to engineering. I’m reasoning about how things fit together, I’m building up a stack in my head of what connects to what, I’m testing and measuring improvements, and when things go bad I’m in full debugger mode. Watchmaking has become that thing that exercises my love for programming but gets me away from a computer all the time. It’s been so fun to learn and I’m looking forward to what’s next. I’ve been busy on eBay and have given myself quite the backlog.

Do you want to nerd out about watches with me? I have been posting a lot of these photos and videos to Instagram so feel free to reach out there or on Mastodon. I’m still quite new in this but I’m definitely deep in that “I can talk about this for hours” level.