My First Watch Restoration Video, Tiny IWC Cal 44 Restored With No Prior Experience!

In this video I've documented my first ever complete restoration of a vintage wristwatch including disassembly and cleaning of its movement: a tiny 1959 Albert Pellaton designed IWC Cal 44 automatic.

But this is only a 20 minute cutdown of the actual 16 hours it took me to do it! And to that cutdown I added a voice-over that makes it sound like I knew what I was doing -- and it was easy!

But I didn't -- and it wasn't!

Lucky for you I also assembled the full 16 hours it actually took me to do it in a single continuous uncut realtime video shot with eight cameras (see the two links below - two links to two videos because YouTube's maximum video length is 12 hours).

That 16 hour version was my first project for this channel. The reason that I made it was to demonstrate that a person with absolutely no experience, ability, or training (me, in March of 2022) can make YouTube videos in which it appears that they have skills and experience simply through editing.

I did this to answer a question that I had about many of the videos that I was watching at the time in which "watchmakers" showed themselves removing and replacing the tiny screws and gears on various watch movements while jauntily telling stories in voiceovers about the owners of the watches and the history of the watch brands concatenated from watch wikis, often punctuated by references to their own skills, tools, love, and knowledge of watchmaking.

Were they real?

Doubting that they were real, and understanding that all of that can be faked, I set out to fake it myself before I embarked on actually learning watchmaking. It took me several weeks of editing to cut between the different angles of the eight cameras in my desktop video set-up, but I did not edit out even a single second. The "editing" only involved changing the multi-camera point-of-view to the best angle on whatever was happening at each moment of those 16 hours.

My knowledge of watchmaking has improved considerably over the past few months, largely as a result of changing my diet of YouTube videos from watch entertainers to watchmakers. I have also made an effort to link to and discuss videos and resources for professional watchmaking and professional watch repair throughout the videos on this channel, and I will continue to do so, to help you find those same resources: i.e. real watchmakers taking the time to actually teach watchmaking.

Eventually I will attempt to do a "proper" rebuild of the same Cal 44 movement in this video, also in realtime, as I continue to document my own progress on my journey of learning watchmaking.

While I don't expect anyone to watch all 16 hours of the realtime source videos below, please click around on their timelines just to see for yourself that I literally had no idea what I was doing. And, importantly, keep the following quote from the edited version above in mind as you do that:

"I find this really relaxing and easy. Working on watches is something I do in my quiet time and as you can see it's very quick and just requires a little bit of concentration and
a kind of zen attitude about it. It's not as difficult as it looks. Everything just goes back where it came from."

I think that you'll agree that the edited version above has nothing to do with the 16 hours of reality below. And hopefully that will result in your questioning a lot of the other watch restoration videos on YouTube. Are they all fake? No. But almost all of them are edited. And discovering for myself what might be hidden between those edits is what interested me in actually learning watchmaking myself and sharing my real experiences with you.

Disassembly *4.5 hours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J4-gJEWTSU

Reassembly *11.5 hours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx0zomDcJlI

My videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Critical / corrective comments and links to resources including other watchmaking channels are welcome.

#watch #comedy #vintage #restoration