My backlog of broken watches is shrinking, and next in line is this charming little pocket watch. This is an Illinois 404, a 12-size pocket watch from around 1915, according to the invaluable Pocket Watch Database.

The old sticker residue on the back makes me think that this watch spent a long, long time in an outlet mall or antique shop before it ended up on eBay.

The glass crystal is scratched and chipped but not too bad—I’ll clean it and reinstall it. It has a chip at the 12 o’clock point. This is a “floppy bow” chip. A loose bow will flop against the crystal edge, eventually chipping it, so keep your bows tight!

The movement won’t tick.

The movement has a few rusty screws—never a welcome sign. The hairspring stud screw is a lost cause.

Removing that screw is always a delicate business. When the screw head is a solid mass of rust, the safest way to remove it is with a pin vise or balance screw holder.

Some of the pinions are tarnished. The escape wheel is spotted with rust, but it looks superficial and should clean off—fingers crossed.

The balance staff is very slightly bent. It isn’t a terrible bend, and while attempting to straighten a pivot rarely works, I’ll give it a shot. I have a spare balance staff handy just in case the straightening goes wayward.

The bent pivot means the watch got a jolt, and whenever you see pivot damage, jewel damage isn’t far behind. The balance hole jewel was cracked and chipped and will need to be replaced. The bent pivot and cracked jewel kept the watch from ticking.

The mainspring was an old blue-steel spring that had snapped.

I suspect the mainspring snapped while the watch was running because the safety pinion on the center wheel had popped. The safety pinion was a clever innovation designed to mitigate the damage caused by a snapped mainspring. Under sudden force, the pinion on the center wheel would unthread, absorbing the power of the snapped mainspring and preventing the gnashing of gear teeth throughout the train.

This watch was greasy enough to merit a soak in denatured alcohol before going through a regular ultrasonic cleaning cycle. Keep in mind that denatured alcohol will quickly dissolve shellac, so don’t put the pallet fork or balance wheel in it.

Adjusting the Movement

After cleaning, the watch assembled easily and started ticking away with the usual huge amplitude of a 12-size Illinois watch. Before adjusting, as usual, the watch was demagnetized and left to run for a day to let the lubricants and mainspring bed in.

Good omens:

• Illinois made excellent watches, and I usually get great results with their 12s movements
• The amplitude is excellent in all 6 positions

But we have more bad omens than usual:

• Consistent with the broken mainspring and popped safety pinion, there’s more wear on the gear train than I usually see
• There are a lot of tiny “flea bite” chips on the jewels
• And, of course, a balance staff pivot is very slightly bent

Overall, this watch seems like a rough example of a finely-made watch, so we’ll see how it goes.

As an aside, these movements have a “shipper bar” you can pull the set the movement in the winding position. It’s handy when adjusting because you can be sure the movement will behave on the bench just as it will when it’s back in its case, safe and sound.

Here are the initial rates, pre-adjustment, when the watch was fully wound.

It’s not bad. I’m amazed at how close the dial up (DU) and dial down (DD) positions are, given the slight bend in the staff. We can work with this.

Unfortunately, the rates are somewhat unstable, drifting up and down over the course of a few minutes. There’s no single fault to trace it to: there are many small flaws in the teeth, pinion leaves, and jewels that make the rates drift around their average. These are the kinds of flaws a watch collects when a mainspring snaps and a the watch gets dropped.

For some watches, the rates are so wavy that adjusting is futile. In this case, the rates probably vary around +/- 8 seconds around the average over a 5 minute span. It isn’t great, but it isn’t so bad that the watch is a lost cause.

In these situations, I aim for adjusting to 3 positions, which are dial-up, dial-down, and pendant-up for a pocket watch. The watch will keep good time in use and serve its owner well, and the watch will have left the workbench in better shape than it arrived.

As our series on dynamic poising explains, you can identify the heavy spot on a balance wheel by running it at low amplitude around 140-160 degrees. For this watch, this was the fastest position: the diagonal position between pendant up and pendant right (defined from the dial side).

This means that the heavy spot is directly below the balance wheel, shown in red. The light spot, in green, is opposite. Conveniently, there’s a screw right there.

Because the movement is running fast DU/DD, we’ll add weight to the light spot. Sounds like a job for the trusty stash of timing washers. I used the lightest 12-size washer (bottle 5 in the chart).

Without going into the weeds, it took a couple rounds of adjusting the find the right weight of washers—some were too light, others too heavy—but we ended up with a nice set of 3-position adjustments. Here are the final rates. DU, DD, and PU are all within 5 seconds of each other (keeping in mind the drifting of the rates around these averages), and the others aren’t too shabby.

This is a pretty good result for a movement that has had a rough life, and the watch will be a fine timekeeper in everyday use.

Cleaning the Dial and Case

This watch has a porcelain enamel dial in fantastic condition. These dials clean easily with denture cleaner or various solvents.

The sunken seconds dial has three kinds of markers: arrows on the 10s, large dashes on the 5s, and small dashes for the others. It’s a nice touch.

The case is nickel. These can look like the silveroid and base metal cases, but they’re much nicer. You can polish nickel to a glossy sheen so that the case is as shiny as, well, a nickel.

This case, though, is engraved or embossed with light patterns on the case back. We don’t want to knock down the decorative aspect of the back with heavy polishing.

For these old cases, the first step is a long soak in the ultrasonic cleaner. I run the ultrasonic heater at around 130 degrees, and after a cleaning the parts look much nicer. All the grime and gunk in the small crevices dissolved. There’s still a hazy quality to the case, though. Notice how you can still see the faint circular outline of the old sticker on the back.

A light polishing will even out the glossiness and bring out a shine. For light work that won’t remove metal, I use a loose cotton buffing wheel at a low speed using Menzerna’s yellow compound followed by their white compound for a final finish.

The case turned out nicely. It won’t blind you, but it looks cleaner and cared for.

And just when you think the watch is done, the case won’t close properly. This case wouldn’t thread all the way closed—notice that the pattern on the back is sideways instead of vertical.

There’s a fresh, shiny scrape on the inside of the case bask—an obvious sign of scraping.

It looks like the watch has the wrong case screws. These screws, although they fit the threads, stand too proud of the movement, preventing the case back from seating.

It’s easy to see the source of the scraping.

Fortunately I have some spare case screws in my big stash of Illinois parts. The correct screws sink lower into the movement and are domed to allow the case back to thread flush and tight.

Wrapping Up

And here we have it. This little pocket watch has had a few injuries, but it recovered well and is ready for another century of steady service.