I was on a kick for a while of watching restoration videos. These days, I know a lot of them are faked, but I was still inspired to do something myself. This watch was put together largely with stuff from my junk parts.
When I was getting started in watch modding, I ordered some frankenwatches from India off eBay. They were super cheap, usually like $7 or $8. And they never worked. They were a hodge podge of different movements, different cases. Crystals that were ground to fit with no gaskets. Just all-around junk. And so they just littered the bottom of my watch tool box. But I always liked the size and shape of some of those old Seiko 5's, and wanted to fix one up after watching some resto vids. Here's our candidate.
It's an old busted 6309, with petrified gaskets, no crown tube, and a cheap, flat plastic crystal. Look at the state of this case.
This was pretty bad. It's actually lucky the crown tube was missing already, it made sanding and polishing easier. Not shown was me taking a spare 7S26 movement, and sanding the movement spacer down to fit in this case. There was a lot of sanding and polishing involved in this build.
The next issue I ran into was that the old Seiko 5's had actual 4 o'clock crowns. This 7S26 is for what is commonly called the 3:18 crown. The difference is that you need different date wheels between 3:00 and 4:00. But 3:00 and 3:18 can use the same. The 6309 date wheel doesn't fit the 7S26. I tried. So, no date window for us.
This particular flavor of the 5 has 19mm lugs. Which makes finding straps and bracelets challenging. This is the best, least expensive one I could find. I had to grind the end links to fit the curvature of the case.
Esslinger had the crown tube, crown gasket, caseback gasket, and crystal gasket I needed. Miraculously, I had a flat mineral crystal for it. I think it came from an SNK809.
And, here's the finished watch. The caseback is completely wrong for this case, but it still fit. I didn't have to grind the 7S26 rotor or anything. I polished the beveled portion, and put a brushed finish on the flat. The dial and hands are from Ajuicet, his stuff is great. I did have to snip off the dial legs and just adhere the dial to the movement spacer due to the 4:00 crown.
