As promised, the next step is cosmetic restoration, which basically means a lot of polishing. The process was the same for every piece: apply a little diamond lapping paste, smooth it around the part and then have at it with a scrap of leather I cut from a bag strap that was way too long. The grades of the lapping paste go from 5 micron, down to 0.25 micron, between each grade the part is wiped down with a cloth and polishing direction was reversed at every grade change. You could do a figure 8 for every grade, but I find alternating up down / left right works just as well.

On the left here we have just a micro-mesh polish, and on the right the finished diamond paste polish.

As you can see I still have a little room for improvement on the lap, but really, it’s good enough for the kind of inspection it’ll be getting day to day. One thing lapping paste is bad at is removing bulk material and defects. The watch band was coming up poorly, so I hit it with a dremel buffing wheel with some 5 micron paste and it came out looking like garbage. Nothing but highlighted scratch marks and a mirror finish that looks like aluminium foil. I did however manage to get a uniform finish along the clasp, take note of the differences around the embossed text and the long sides.

Next on the list was repainting the bezel text. I bought some black nail polish for the task and had a few methods I wanted to explore. First up a fine skewer turned out not to be fine enough, neither was my smallest modelling brush. Figuring it was all too much work I coated the text with polish and hit it with a hair dryer to force it down to the bottom. Then I hit it with some 1500 grit micromesh and cleaned up any missing spots using a very fine hooked needle. The M has a shallow spot from being too aggressive with previous polishing, and the top of the R is in alarm is a little thin, but it all came out nicely. While I was here I also scraped out the old perished gasket.

Next I wanted to try my hand at glass polishing. My method was to apply some lapping paste to the some glass then rub the crystal around in a figure 8. I didn’t make it worse, but I didn’t make it much better either. The after picture is a bit deceiving.

Finally to finish everything off I hit the clasp up with some 1500 grit micro-mesh. This really hid all the surface scratches and now it looks pretty great. I think I’ll be coming back to it tho.

I also had some mail come in. I was incredibly confused at first as I definitely didn’t order this. It was in its original packaging, but the wife and I share an e-bay account so I figured she must have ordered it.

She said she didn’t tho, so I opened the packaging and took a look inside to find…

The new crystal I ordered! Which was great timing as far as this post in concerned.

But, now we’re in the long wait. I need to track down a full gasket set and wait for the hand setter to arrive before I start the clean and reassembly. Thanks for sticking with me so far!