Vintage ETA 2472 With 1TB of Storage

I love this watch. I made it myself from two vintage Swiss wristwatches, both with ETA 2472 movements. It has more non-volatile memory than any current smartwatch, is waterproof, always-on, and is charged by the movement of your body.

Insane technology. Beyond anything else made today in terms of storage capacity. And everything except the 1TB microSD card was made in the 1960s in Switzerland.

This watch and the work behind it are the subject of a 12 hour long video entitled, "Making a Dialless Vintage ETA 2742 - realtime uncut". My pleasure with the final result is presented in the video, "When the storytelling is more interesting that the watchmaking... The Swiss Watchmaker's Astrophysicist Son - A True Story". There's also a playlist on the channel dedicated to this watch.

In this video I present a narrative overview of the history and current state of the watch.

In summary, I purchased two 1960s watches with ETA 2472 automatic movements for 25 Chf each on the local Swiss auction website ricardo.ch and mixed and matched parts to make this one dial-less version.

Making a watch of this vintage with this movement function and keep time without a dial is a bit complicated because normally the dial on an ETA 2472 holds the hour hand gear down. This complication is in part why it took so long for me to make it work. It took me around five hours just to figure out why it wouldn't keep time without a dial.

I was lucky because of the two watches I purchased as donor watches for this one, one had a regular dial and one had a pie-pan dial. The watch with the pie-pan dial had higher hand positions and thus slightly higher thicknesses of the hour and minute hand gears. This allowed me to combine and resize the offset on the minute hand gear of the higher watch and add a washer made from a donor seconds hand to stack all three hands in such a way that the seconds hand holds down the minute hand, and the minute hand holds down the hour hand, and the stack doesn't lift off and lose the time as a result of the watch not having a dial.