Restoring an Extremely Dirty Zodiac Chronograph I Got Off of eBay for $160

Hello there and welcome back to another video here on Wrist Watch Revival. My name is Marshall. Thank you so much for coming along. This time on the bench, we have this, well, I was going to say beautiful, but maybe not beautiful yet, uh, Zodiac chronograph from probably somewhere in the late 1950s is what I would guess. As you can see, uh, it's got some damage to it here. The, um, the chronograph seconds hand in the middle there looks like it's broken off. It's supposed to be longer than that. So, that's not right. And the case is in kind of rough shape. And the crystal and or dial are yellowed. As you can see, it's got a very simple snap-on case back here as well. These are some of my absolute favorite vintage watches and the ones I kind of really dreamed about working on when I first got into it, cuz I love me an a manual wind chronograph. That is kind of the the sweet spot for me. manual wind, of course, meaning it's not an automatic. It's just that pure you have to wind it up every day and you get that cool sound as well. And then chronograph is the stopwatch feature that some watches have where you can, you know, time smaller increments of time. Usually used in autoracing or some type of racing thing, but you know, you can use them to make your spaghetti if you want. As you can see, it is actually functioning here as well. Uh both the watch is running and the chronograph is running as well, but uh I don't know if you saw, but it's not resetting properly. Yeah, see it's resetting back over to I don't know 53 seconds instead of 60 or zero, however you want to look at it. Well, let's put it on the time graer and let's see how it's running. I bought this watch off of eBay and it was listed as for repair. Uh, you know, that could be a lot worse. The rate is horrendously off, but the amplitude is actually not that low at 238. And the beat error looks good, too. So, there's definitely hope for this thing, though. It does seem to be in need of a service at the very least. Let's take a look at the movement. This is my favorite part.