One of my recurring New Year’s Resolutions is to stop buying crusty and broken watches to work on until I clear out the backlog of watches I already have. I suspect that this is a common doomed resolution among people who work on watches as a hobby. But I’m making good progress this year and working through some fun watches I picked up a few years ago.

Here’s one from the watch stash: a vintage Russian watch.

This is made by Vostok, often spelled Wostok. This company is best known these days for their military and tool watches, especially the amphibian watch with the “scuba dude” on the dial. This is a dress watch that probably dates to the early 1960s, based on the dial style and movement.

Inside is a 2209 movement, the ubiquitous workhorse of Vostok’s hand wound movements. It has 18 jewels, an overcoil alloy hairspring, and incabloc shock protection.

Here’s a look at the balance wheel. Notice the comically small regulator arm. It is so runty to be almost worthless.

We worked on a newer model of the 2209 a while back. Here’s what the newer version looks like. Notice the flat hairspring with a movable stud carrier on the newer model.

Anyhow, this watch has a cool dial—very classy in a 1960s way, with a champagne starburst pattern. The four cardinal numbers are painted, and the off hours are engraved. Vostok made a lot of watches, some for export and some for the domestic market. This is a domestic model based on the dial text.

Domestic models should have marking like this.

If you look closely, you’ll see some dust and lint. These are embedded in the dial. These old dials were covered with a coat of lacquer, which over time can become tacky and gummy.

If you’re curious, the back of the dial is in nice shape and shows no refinishing marks, so it’s original.

The case is chrome-plated base metal. Vostok, as a communist-era watch company, mostly made budget-friendly watches. It’s uncommon to find vintage Russian watches with stainless steel cases, let along precious metal cases.

Nevertheless, this case is in nice shape. The chrome is intact and shiny, and the case is clean compared to what I usually get.

Base metal cases, over time, will show flaking and pitting. This case has some pitting in the usual spots—the lugs and bottom of the case, which are the the parts most exposed to skin oils, sweat, and surfaces. But this case is much better than most Russian watches I’ve handled.

The case back is stainless steel and marked with the movement number. Russian watches have a bonkers case back system. A flat plate is pressed against the case and secured with a thin ring. The case opener grips divots in the ring and twists it against the flat case back. These rings are usually made of plated brass, so they’re relatively soft, and they are so thin and shallow that they don’t have the kind of thread depth needed for a really snug fit. Ranting aside, these case backs are one of the charming quirks of old Russian watches.

But what these watches lack in case design they make up in movement rings. This watch has one of the most solid, dense retaining rings I’ve seen in a wristwatch: a chunk of milled steel. Much of the weight of the watch comes from this ring. When you open up modern Swiss watches like Tissot and find a cheap plastic retaining ring, you can respect Vostok taking the trouble to make nice parts.

Cleaning and Adjusting the Movement

The watch ticked and needed only a good cleaning. After a trip to the ultrasonic spa, new lubricants, demagnetizing, and a day or two to run, the movement was ticking away merrily with good amplitude. (If you’re curious, the lift angle for this movement is only 42 degrees, so you’ll need to adjust the timing machine’s defaults.)

Before adjusting, it helps to think through the watch’s good and bad omens to set realistic accuracy goals.

This watch has some good omens: it is in good condition, and it has an overcoil alloy hairspring.

But the bad omens are many:

• The balance wheel has flat-faced screws. These are not easily removed and re-inserted. You can do it by grabbing them with a balance screw holder, but this is delicate because it places a sideways force against the balance staff. You can snap a balance staff pivot this way. (And as I found out, many of these screws are stiff and resist removal.)
• There are no mean-time screws, so changing the overall rate isn’t as easy
• And the regulator arm is so runty that you almost have to laugh. One wonders if they used up all the steel making their beefy retaining rings. It’s hard to manipulate the regulator arm with any precision.

Another bad omen are these dimples. These are probably from the original factory poising, yet some of the screws have timing washers, so someone has tried to adjust this watch before.

We’ll see what we can do. This watch won’t be able to attain the accuracy of a high-grade pocket watch, but we can at least exceed the factory standards at the time.

The first step in watch adjusting is adjusting the two horizontal (or lying) positions: dial up (DU) and dial down (DD). Those two should be reasonably close (within 10 seconds for this grade of watch) before trying to align any of the vertical positions.

This watch showed a notable DU/DD difference. DU, it was -66 with an amplitude of 270 degrees.

But DD, the watch was much faster (-37) and running with greater amplitude (307 degrees).

As we explained in an earlier post, there are many possible reasons for a DU/DD difference, from the common to the obscure. As the statisticians remind us, rare things happen rarely, and we can rule out most of the obscure possibilities by looking at the timing charts. The traces are parallel and clean in both positions, so it’s unlikely that a wheel or hairspring is rubbing in one position. Instead, it’s probably the common stuff: uneven oiling, or a crusty pivot.

In his book, Kleinlein points out that the position with the lowest amplitude is the unhealthy position, which is the DU position in our case. I removed the balance jewels for cleaning and re-oiling, and I polished the pivot that rests on the jewels in that position.

And that did the trick: the new rates were pretty close (-74 DU, -77 DD), so it’s on to the next step.

Here are the rates in all 6 positions. Recall that L and R are switched because we’re viewing the watch from the movement side.

The watch is slow overall and shows some big positional differences. The largest gap is over a minute (65 seconds between PR and PL). For wrist watches, you’d want the PD position to be much closer to DU, too.

Dynamic poising works by identifying the heavy spot on the balance wheel by running it at low amplitude. Our how-to series gives all the dirty details. To cut to the chase, the heavy spot is directly below the balance wheel when the watch is in this position.

Curiously enough, the heavy spot is exactly opposite the two dimpled areas on the balance wheel. Someone probably removed too much weight when dimpling the wheel. In fact, the heavy spot is a screw with two timing washers on it—interesting.

Using a balance screw holder, I carefully grabbed and unthreaded the screw. Here you see the timing washers: one is still on the screw. These suckers are really tiny.

Removing the washer improved the poise of the balance wheel, and it also showed me how stiff and seized some of the screws were. When screws don’t thread in and out easily, you run the risk of distorting the wheel, stripping a screw, or snapping the balance staff pivots with the twisting force of the screwdriver.

This is a sign from the watchmaking fates that this watch is not capable of truly fine tuning, so we’ll have to settle for “pretty good” instead of “great.” I’ll replace this screw and not mess with it further.

Here’s where we ended up after removing a single timing washer. The rates are all much closer together, and the biggest single difference is now 33 seconds instead of 65. The three main positions for a wrist watch (DU, DD, PD) are now reasonably close, especially DU and PD, the two main ones.

I’ll nudge the comically small regulator arm to set this to run around +3 seconds fast dial up and call it a day.

All told, this is an example of knowing when to quit. In one of our first posts, we discussed different kinds of accuracy standards, and one of them is the factory standards at the time the watch was made. I’m not sure what Voktok’s standards were, but the three main wrist watch positions of this watch almost surely exceed them.

Tackling the Case

Time to clean up the case and wrap up the watch. Earlier we mentioned that the dial had lint and dust embedded in it. Here’s another look.

While it can be tempting to try to clean a dial, I usually resist the urge. It’s a watchmaking specialty of its own. Old lacquer finishes might clean up, but they will often do so unevenly, creating a splotchy appearance. Many dials printed the lettering on top of the lacquer coat, which sounds weird—you’d think the protective lacquer coating would cover the printing—but probably had a good production reason at the time. If you try to wash the dial, you’ll strip the paint.

So I left this one alone. I actually looks great when viewed normally—not everything should be scrutinized obsessively with a 5x loupe.

All the case parts got a warm bath in the ultrasonic cleaner, and then it was time for a new crystal. The watch had a battered 30.5 mm crystal in it. For crystals with flat side walls (vs “wedge ledge” crystals), I prefer to fit a slightly oversized crystal instead of securing the crystal with glue. When a watch gets a jolt or the adhesive ages, the crystal can fall out. Then the watch ends up in a drawer, collecting dust and lint on the dial lacquer.

A 30.6 mm crystal could still be rotated in the case, so I fitted a 30.8 mm crystal instead. Compressing oversized crystals is easy if you have dies for tension-ring crystals.

These dies have a tapered side wall, so they’ll compress the crystal inward as you press.

Wrapping Up

This is a sharp watch—the starburst dial catches the light, and I like the 1960s vintage vibe. It’s surprisingly stylish for a 1960s, Iron Curtain era dress watch.