IWC Cal 44 Disassembly - Realtime 4 hours

In this video I spend 4.6 hours disassembling and cleaning an IWC Cal 44 automatic (Albert) Pellaton movement from 1959.

This was the first time that I ever disassembled and reassembled a watch movement.

I recorded everything on video to aid in reassembly and so that I could study and perhaps learn from my own mistakes.

At the beginning I talk a bit about radium paint on watch dials and hands and about my other IWC watches, including a Cal 853 automatic, which is the subject of another video, and a solid gold 8531 (with date) that is not. I also show a Consul Alarm watch with radium that I will eventually clean and relume, and the Rolex Datejust 1601 that I inherited from my dad when I was 12.

I also talk a bit about the history of IWC and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose family owned IWC back when the watches in this video were made. I show a clip of Carl Jung talking about death in 1959, two years before he died.

If this video is too long for you there's a cutdown version entitled "IWC Cal 44 complete restoration - realtime cutdown" with a magenta border on the thumbnail. The cutdown video is "only" 2.3 hours long with long sections cut out.

The idea behind this series is that realtime videos allow viewers to see how time consuming and difficult watch restoration work is - particularly if one attempts it with no training or experience. These are not training videos, they are about the joy of discovery and of making mistakes and the pain and comedy resulting from those mistakes.