Water Damaged Tag Heuer

superlav

So I went for a swim on holidays recently and a few minutes later I heard my watch alarm beeping at me, and to my horror I realised that the crown was open.
A while later the hands of the alarm face started spinning and generally it started acting very unwell, and eventually it died :-(

The watch is a Tag Heuer Grande Date Alarm and as far as I can tell it uses the Ronda 4120.B movement.

The watch was purchased in Fields about 4 years ago as a wedding day present from my wife, so I could go back there but I expect they would have to send it off for repair. I would rather go to a watch specialist who would repair it in house.

The movement is readily available online and not too expensive, 50 for Swiss parts and about 100 for Swiss made

If I were to get the movement myself, where would I go to have the replacement done?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

blue5000

If you want to swim with it again it will have to be pressure tested, perhaps someone here knows if Emily is back at work yet? What part of the country are you in?

superlav

I'm in Dublin mostly, and occasionally Cork.
I rang Dawson Jewellers and they would do the replacement, but I'm not sure if they do pressure testing.

Gavin1

My sister did this a few years back with a Tag.

I sent it back to Tag it got a new dial, hands and movement. Cost was about £500 at the time.

Can you see if the dial or hands are damaged?

superlav

Face and hands look OK, I ordered the replacement movement from a Canadian site today for €76 delivered, and probably import duty on top of that.

I'll shop around for a jeweller to do the replacement. .

superlav

I had completely forgotten that I had posted about my water damaged watch woes here.
This ended up turning into a bit of a personal saga, but ultimately a rewarding one.

By way of an update, as stated above the watch had died, and a new movement was duly ordered. I had left the watch sitting with the back removed on a window sill in work while I awaited the new movement.


When the movement arrived it was exactly as described, now with the replacement in hand I got brave and started to have a poke at the old one. However, much to my amazement when I put it back together it started working. So I parked the replacement movement in a drawer and got back to enjoying my watch.
Fast forward 1 year, and all of a sudden the watch stopped again, I tried a new battery but no good. When I took the back off I could see there was extensive corrosion of the stem, and also some rust residue around the inside of the case. So obviously the salt water had done it's damage and slowly eaten away at the inside.

I decided, after much internet searching, to try the movement replacement myself. I enjoy tinkering and had a cheap watch repair tool kit which I had purchased a while back. What could possibly go wrong.... To say there was a little more to it than I expected, is an understatement.


First of all, due to the corrosion on the stem when I tried to remove it from the movement it snapped off, leaving about 1mm protruding from the crown. Nightmare!!! But again the internet rescued me, and as described here, after a day in a jar of alum dissolved in water, the stem had dissolved away and the crown was perfect. I did remove the crown every few hours to clean out any dissolved stem from the threads which helped speed things along. Also I applied a little heat to the jar with a night light, which also helped quicken the reaction.

Then it was onto removing the old hands and face from the old movement. There were 5 in total, the hour and minute on the main dial, h and m on a smaller alarm dial and a second had on it's own dial. This was a daunting step as i really didn't fancy damaging the delicate hands. I had a hand puller in my watch repair toolkit, but I procrastinated long and hard over purchasing a decent more expensive one. In the end I got fed up with myself and went for it. I shouldn't have been so apprehensive, I took a deep breath set the hands to 12:00 and used the cheap tool I had. To my relief it did the job and the hands popped off without issue and also without marking the face.

Now it was time to swap the date rings, as they were black text on white background on my replacement movement, as opposed to white text on a black background on my original. Once again it was a case of Google to the rescue, and I found a few videos of guys fiddling with similar date setups and these proved invaluable, as I was able to remove and replace a vital spring, which I would have definitely lost had a just tried to remove the rings.

Almost there, I thought, just a matter of reassembling. So I put it all back together and popped the stem back in which I was now able to screw into my Crown. TO my dismay I now realised that the stem that comes on a replacement needs to be cut to size. So after another bout of 'research', and much contemplating over whether or not to buy more expensive tools, I again decided to trim a bit off the end of the stem using standard pliers. This went ok, I didn't ruin the threads and was still able to screw the crown onto the stem. So I repeated the process a few times, obviously afraid of removing too much stem and finally ended up with the correct length, where the screwed in crown sits just flush with the case.


I hadn't intended this to be such a long post, but equally I hadn't intended the 'simple' task of swapping a watch movement to take so long either.  I'm so happy that I decided to take on the repair myself. 
Had I known all that was involved before I started I definitely would have backed off and given it to a professional, but then I never would have missed out on a great learning experience. Also, my watch is worth so much more to me now than if I had just given it to a shop to do.

893bet

Great stuff! Braver man than me!

Any in process pictures?

Gavin1

Wow! Looks easy on the YouTube clips. But it takes balls to do that.