I awoke this morning to find that at some point during the night my automatic watch had stopped working -- well, actually at exactly 1:40:37AM according to the frozen hands. I was pretty upset about this because I had just spent $20 last week getting it repaired. The original problem was that the date pusher button had popped out, and simply would not stay in. It turns out this was caused by a missing c-clip, which does exactly what its name suggest: a c-shaped piece that clips onto the pusher's bar to make sure it doesn't pop out. As I left the repair shop, I was given a warning: they couldn't find a c-clip in the watch. Either it never had one, or it was floating around somewhere within the inner workings. If it was the latter, it would be extremely expensive to get out because it would require systematically taking the watch apart piece by piece to find the clip. But I wouldn't have to worry about that -- unless my watch stopped working.
My first reaction was to smash my watch against something to see if I could dislodge the clip, but after hammering it into a myriad of objects ranging from my hand to an armchair I gave up. I put the watch on my desk and stared at it. If it cost $20 to put in a clip the size of a large grain of sand, it would probably cost more than the watch itself to perform some sort of part extraction. So with nothing to lose, I decided to open it up myself.
I was ready for anything -- except for how to open the thing up. Luckily we live in the internet age and after five seconds of Googling, I managed to get the back off using a Dr. Grip pen as my unscrewing tool. You could say that thanks to the internet, it really took no time at all.
What the heck was I looking at? I saw the automatic winder, some gears, and tiny screws; they were... minute. I played with the crown and day pusher for a little while to see how they worked from the inside (gaining no knowledge whatsoever), and after killing some time with that I was ready to go with my tools.
Fortunetely for me, I was hit by a timely jolt of [what I'm not afraid to admit as] genius. A c-clip is a very small piece, and it supposedly loose and causing havoc probably meant that it was dislodgable. If not by physical blunt trauma, then perhaps with the power of wind! I assumed that with the cramped confines of the watch combined with the small size of the clip, it would probably be like Twister in there (the clip, of course, being the cow) with my friend, a can of compressed air. So I stuck the red tube into the only part that I thought could be a viable opening...
...and pulled the trigger. Nothing flew out, but the previously motionless gold wheel started to turn! I flipped the watch around in my hand and sure enough, the second hand was ticking away -- a heartbeat. I had successfully performed a watch repair. I looked around for someone to hand me a merit badge, but the only one I could celebrate with was my Blund bear -- and he doesn't give out merit badges for just anything. I had fixed my watch, but really it begs the question of its quality if it just randomly stops working. Only time will tell if it happen again, but if it does I'll be ready for it -- although I'll be pretty ticked tocked.
My first reaction was to smash my watch against something to see if I could dislodge the clip, but after hammering it into a myriad of objects ranging from my hand to an armchair I gave up. I put the watch on my desk and stared at it. If it cost $20 to put in a clip the size of a large grain of sand, it would probably cost more than the watch itself to perform some sort of part extraction. So with nothing to lose, I decided to open it up myself.
I was ready for anything -- except for how to open the thing up. Luckily we live in the internet age and after five seconds of Googling, I managed to get the back off using a Dr. Grip pen as my unscrewing tool. You could say that thanks to the internet, it really took no time at all.
What the heck was I looking at? I saw the automatic winder, some gears, and tiny screws; they were... minute. I played with the crown and day pusher for a little while to see how they worked from the inside (gaining no knowledge whatsoever), and after killing some time with that I was ready to go with my tools.
Fortunetely for me, I was hit by a timely jolt of [what I'm not afraid to admit as] genius. A c-clip is a very small piece, and it supposedly loose and causing havoc probably meant that it was dislodgable. If not by physical blunt trauma, then perhaps with the power of wind! I assumed that with the cramped confines of the watch combined with the small size of the clip, it would probably be like Twister in there (the clip, of course, being the cow) with my friend, a can of compressed air. So I stuck the red tube into the only part that I thought could be a viable opening...
...and pulled the trigger. Nothing flew out, but the previously motionless gold wheel started to turn! I flipped the watch around in my hand and sure enough, the second hand was ticking away -- a heartbeat. I had successfully performed a watch repair. I looked around for someone to hand me a merit badge, but the only one I could celebrate with was my Blund bear -- and he doesn't give out merit badges for just anything. I had fixed my watch, but really it begs the question of its quality if it just randomly stops working. Only time will tell if it happen again, but if it does I'll be ready for it -- although I'll be pretty ticked tocked.
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