I’ve been had by a targeted advert - I bought a dress watch making kit (involving a butane blowtorch!). I managed the project within a few hours, and thought I’d do a write up so you can decide if it’s for you.

Packaging

The experience starts with unpacking the kit. There are plenty of unboxing videos online so I won’t bother going into too much detail, but here are a few photos. The main toolset came in a padded faux leather box, with the tools and watch components sitting in multi-level insert trays. The supplemental flame bluing kit was equally well packed.

Flame bluing

I’ve seen other watch building kits before and never bit, but getting to flame blue your own watch hands seemed like a fun thing to do. Fire! Blow torch! Brass shavings! Here’s DIYWatchClub’s video with an in depth explanation on the flame bluing process.

I was pleasantly surprised at my first attempt on the minute hand. It took me a half hour of careful heating and cooling, but the subsequent hour hands only took minutes each. I took them to different temperatures (and colours) and ultimately decided to go with the blue purple gradients. Looks rather brilliant in these shots, but the effect is nowhere near as dramatic once the hands are fit on the watch - kind of like looking at jewelry under display lighting! I suppose it makes it that much more special when the light hits the watch face at the perfect angle!

Assembly

Here are two major subassemblies of a wrist watch: its case and its movement.

This is a simple Miyota movement, which you can find new on eBay for around $40 - amazing really, when considering how intricate the parts are. Miyota is owned by Citizen, and supplies its movements to many watch manufactureres, including Casio, Timex, and Bulova; it’s kind of like Bosch with car parts. This movement has a 60-hour power reserve, and a simple date complication. I don’t even like date wheels. Maybe one day I’ll have a watch that can play the Westminster Quarters. The English have a sort of homefield advantage when it comes to time keeping after all.

Next, we press the dial onto the movement and get ready to set the hands. Each hand is pressed onto the center shaft with their respective tool; the red tool for the hour hand has a slightly larger diameter than the blue tool for the minute and seconds hands.

One… complication that arises with the date complication is movement must first be adjusted to when the date wheel is about to advance, then the hands are set as close to midnight as possible. Once the hands are set, we can use the supplied bulb duster and Rodico (fancy watch cleaning putty) to get rid of any dust and oils from the surface of the dial.

We then replace the movement’s placeholder crown and encase the watch!

Here’s the back movement side of the watch, which we can appreciate through the exhibitionist case back. I’m pointing at the regulator here with a piece of pegwood. This is how the watch can be adjusted when it does not keep time properly: moving the lever adjusts the length of the rotating mass. The more weight and the longer each rotation takes, the slower the watch runs. This is a standard 21600 beat per hour movement, which means it beats 6 times a second. I double checked the timing of this watch and it was pretty close - you can hold up your watch to a microphone and take a recording. From there it’s simple math in marking the time and dividing by the number of tics and tocs.

Last thing to do is to put on the wrist straps, which was exceptionally easy because of the quick release mechanism. Then it’s done!

This was a short and sweet project. If it weren’t for flaming the hands I would have likely finished within a couple hours. If I were to build another now, I could probably finish within the hour. I recommend giving it a go if you’re a fan of mechanical watches. Hope you enjoyed this read.