I’m continuing my march through the watch stash to fix and adjust the many watches I’ve collected over the years and swore I’d get to some day.

Today is the “some day” for this little Russian watch: a Poljot 2409 wristwatch in the kind of chrome-plated base metal case typical for vintage Russian watches. It ticks and runs but clearly needs a cleaning. The amplitude is low and the timing traces are ragged.

I suspect this watch is from the early 1960s based on the dial design and the movement. The 24XX series movement was a workhorse in Poljot hand-wound watches for decades. This model is the 2409 generation. The red-tipped arrow on the sweep seconds hand is a nice touch.

The dial appears to be original and is in good shape for its age. This is an export model based on the English dial text (“17 Jewels” and “Made in USSR”). There is some minor paint loss and flaking to give it some character.

Here’s the back of the dial, for the curious. It looks to be original.

The 2409 movement is easy to work on. It was clearly designed to minimize the number of parts and to simplify production and assembly. Take, for example, the keyless works for winding and setting. Notice the two HUGE screws securing the spring that pushes against the set lever. Those mega screws are the same as the screws that secure the bridges to the plate. Overall, this movement has only a few screw sizes, so it is easy to keep track of them. There’s no nonsense like making the balance bridge screw slightly different in diameter or depth from the others (ahem, ETA, ahem…).

Here’s the balance. It’s a vintage-style wheel with screws on the rim and an overcoil hairspring. The hairspring stud is fixed, and the regulator can be adjusted with the same runty, comically tiny regulator arm that we found on a Vostok 2209 we worked on recently. The shock-proof jewel setting has an elegant, angular jewel spring that I believe is unique to Poljot watches.

Here’s our first bad omen for precision timing. This watch has flat-faced balance screws, and the weight has been adjusted by dimpling—carving weight from the screw face, leaving a small hole. This was probably done at the factory and was a common poising method for budget watches at the time.

There are no mean-time screws either. It’s unlikely we can do much positional adjusting with this balance system.

The watch had an old, blue-steel mainspring that was “set” in shape after decades of sitting in that little barrel. I’m surprised the watch ran as well as it did with such a tired mainspring. You can still get mainsprings for Poljot watches. This is a Generale Ressorts (GR) mainspring #GR3281DB, which is 1.30 mm high and .11 mm thick, with the proper double-bridle end.

Here are all the parts, clean and shiny. This watch has relatively few parts for a sweep-second watch. As an aside, I remove the balance jewels and secure the balance between the bridge and plate during the ultrasonic cleaning cycle. It is safe way to avoid damage to the hairspring during cleaning and drying.

Before installing a new mainspring, it’s a good idea to assemble the barrel and “spin” it. These barrels are common sources of amplitude problems. The press-fit cover can easily warp, causing it to bind against the pinion. The empty barrel should spin smoothly.

Before assembling the movement, I installed the balance jewels and balance by itself. It’s much easier to inspect the regulator pins and hairspring without all the wheels and bridges in the way.

A Few Small Repairs

This watch had a couple problems. First, look at the hairspring—it is tilted at an angle. The left side angles up.

What’s happening is that the hairspring stud is too low. Notice how the stud is recessed beneath the level of the bridge. This causes the hairspring to press against the regulator boot, which acts as a pivot point for the whole spring. Raising the hairspring stud fixed the problem. Russian watches usually have hairspring studs designed to “ride high,” in my experience.

Speaking of the regulator pins, they were pressed tight against the spring and were out of parallel. They should be perpendicular to the regulator arm. Notice how they are bent inward toward the balance jewel. This is a common problem caused when someone tries to close the pins and ends up pinching them against the spring.

While I had the balance wheel out, I set the watch in beat. You can fix beat error for a disassembled watch by (1) noting where the fixed stud must be on the plate (e.g., with a marker dot you can clean off), then (2) visualizing a line between the roller jewel, lower pallet jewel, and lower escape jewel. Rotate the wheel to line them up, and then note the location of the hairspring stud relative to the dot. This shows you which direction to rotate the collet. The watchmaking fates were smiling on my efforts. With one change, the beat error went from around 5 to around .5.

With the balance assembly done, it’s time to put this sucker together. The movement came together easily but had a strange flaw for a relatively modern wristwatch: the escape wheel didn’t have enough endshake. When the bridge that secures three train wheels was screwed all the way down, the watch would stop. When the screw closest to it was loosened, the watch would run great with high amplitude.

Wheels binding against the plates is more of an old pocket watch problem than a newer wristwatch problem, although we have seen it before with a Hamilton “Dyson” wristwatch in an earlier post. I suspect it came from someone replacing the escape wheel at some point.

The endshake problem is fixed by modifying the watch’s friction jewels. By increasing the distance between the jewels, we can increase the endshake. The upper jewel is in the bridge, but I’m reluctant to manipulate it. The escape wheel is in a setting for an (infinitely frustrating…don’t get me started) harp-spring cap jewel setting, and I’m not sure it is friction fit. It’s much safer to press the jewel in the movement plate down slightly.

Whenever adjusting the depth of jewels for an escape wheel, pay close attention to how the escape wheel’s teeth strike the pallet jewels. You want to avoid setting the escape wheel too high or low to get a clean strike against the pallet. Only a tiny adjustment is needed.

I’m happy for a chance to use my Seitz friction jeweling set. Jeweling is unusually satisfying.

We will be pressing against the flat face of the friction jewel to push it deeper toward the dial side of the plate. We thus need a flat-faced pusher. The jewel is 1.00 mm wide, so it calls for a .95 mm pusher. The pushers are designed to be very slightly undersized.

The basic idea of friction jeweling is easy. If you’re looking to learn it, I recommend Fried’s book Bench Practices… as the best single source for learning the basics. First, we press the flat-faced pusher against the jewel to discern its depth. We then rotate the stop collar upward against the plunger. This means that the plunger holding the pusher is fixed to stop at the jewel’s current depth.

Then we rotate the stop collar very slightly—2 ticks, in this case. This allows the pusher to go slightly deeper—002/100 of a mm, in fact—but the stop collar prevents the pusher from mashing all the way through the plate.

And that’s all it took. The bridges could be tightened normally afterward, so I let the watch run overnight to let the oils and wheels bed in before adjusting it.

(Not) Adjusting the Movement

Before measuring the rates, we like to assess the good and bad omens for adjusting a watch to tight accuracy limits in all 6 positions. This watch had mostly bad omens:

• there are no mean time screws, no removable screws, and only a runty regulator arm. Without an easy way to precisely modify the screws or the watch’s overall rate, adjusting will be challenging.
• it’s an old Russian watch, people. I’ve never had great success with adjusting them, and some have been unadjustable.

And this one turned out to be one of the unadjustable ones. The watch had great amplitude in all 6 positions, but the timing traces were wavy. As we explained in a post about wavy traces, the lines should be stable and parallel. Here’s what these look like in the pendant down (PD) position.

Notice how the lines curve and swoop over the course of the 40 or so seconds of measurement shown on the screen. Wavy traces generally come from small flaws in the gear train, like slightly malformed or nicked teeth, rough pinion leaves, or out-of-flat wheels, but there are many causes. For this watch, there’s no single thing to point to and fix—it’s just a coarsely made Russian watch.

If the rates are wavy, they can’t be nailed down in any particular position. Such watches thus are not adjustable. For this watch, then, I’ll set it to run around +10 DU and leave it at that. The watch runs well—the amplitude is great, and all the rates are within around +/- 30 seconds of zero—so it would work well in everyday use despite not having a fine-tuned, precision movement. (I wore this watch for couple months, and it kept great time in use.)

Casing the Watch

The base metal case cleaned up nicely, and the hunt was on for a crystal. This watch, like many watches from that era, has unusually high hands. High hands give a sense of depth and dimension to a watch and create shadows on the dial, but they need a high crystal.

I also suspected that this watch was meant for a tension ring crystal, also known as an armored crystal. The dial curves downward and has a small gap between the dial and case. The watch was probably originally fitted with a tension ring crystal, which would fill the gap and reflect the small minute markers, adding a nice finishing touch to the dial.

For tension ring crystals, you can upside by no more than 1 mm. This case takes a 29.7 mm tension crystal. I wasn’t sure if I should so with silver or gilt. Crowns and tension rings usually match the bezel: silver, in this case. It turned out nicely.

Wrapping Up

One of the joys of watch adjusting is taking a humble timepiece and tuning it to be unusually accurate. It’s fun to get better results than you really ought to get. But sometimes a watch is an adjusting wash-out. As we have said many times, adjusting is something that you do to a watch in great working condition, so some watches don’t make the cut. Those watches are a let-down, but I like to post them on the blog to help people reason through why some watches can’t be adjusted.

Nevertheless, this is a nice little watch. It looks sharp and will provide good day in, day out service. I find myself wearing it more than my other watches—it’s a good size, fits flat on the wrist, and has an attractive, unassuming look.