IWC Cal 853 Re-lume - Realtime Cutdown

Watch restoration often doesn't need to involve restoring the movement. If the movement is fine but the watch looks terrible and the lume is no longer luminous, a restoration of only the cosmetic aspects of the watch may be enough to restore it to wearable condition.

In this video I record myself re-luming a vintage IWC Cal 853 automatic watch with an (Albert) Pellaton movement from the early 1960s. The restoration process includes disassembling the case, removing the movement and dial, cleaning the hands and case, applying new lume to the hands and dial, fixing a new crystal (in this case a used crystal because I didn't have the correct new crystal on hand), and then reassembling everything back inside the case.

I've done a few re-lumes at this point, but seldom without glitches. This watch was only different in that I had more failures than I normally do, including 1) exploding the crystal, 2) scratching the dial, 3) bending the seconds hand, 4) doing a poor job on the lume itself (particularly on the minute hand), 5) failing to replace the crystal with a proper water-tight crystal, and 6) not fixing the crown properly.

This video is a 58 minute cutdown of the 3.6 hour realtime uncut video of the re-lume of this watch.

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.

My videos are not professional watchmaking videos.