With the introductions having been made in the preceding post, we can start this second entry with the customary mugshots showing the front and rear aspects of this, a King Seiko J14102 dating from January 1963. The photographs below illustrate quite nicely what one should aspire to when surfing auctions of honestly-presented old watches. Signs of use but not abuse, a reasonable abundance of patina and as little evidence as possible of titivation. You just want to be able to make a reasonable assessment of exactly what it is that you are buying.
The watch arrived with its crown detached from its stem (which is why it is absent from the left-hand photograph) but I was more concerned having removed the caseback, by the alarming position of the regulator arm relative to the stud-holder. You should be able to make out below how this maladjustment has impacted the alignment of the coils of the hairspring.
The first order of business, therefore, was to remove the balance and inspect the hairspring.
I’ve moved the regulator arm back into a sensible position, but you can see that the terminal curve (1) is not running parallel with the outer most coil and some adjustment will be necessary to centre the spring. You may also note the weight attached to the sixth coil (2). These are commonly seen on these early King Seiko movements and were fitted at the factory to improve accuracy.
Extracting the movement from the case in these old watches can be a bit of a juggling act. The first step, as always, is to remove the crown and stem (in this case, just the stem). This movement uses a setting lever screw rather than button and a 360 degree anticlockwise turn should be sufficient to lift the setting lever enough to allow the stem to be extracted. In these movements, this should be done with the stem in the winding position, not in the time-setting position.
Next, we remove the bezel and crystal complete. This part is just interference press-fitted and so can be removed easily by inserting a watchmaker’s knife into the cut at the base of the bezel.
With the case back and crystal removed, we are left with the movement suspended in the mid-case, held in place by two case screws (one of which missing – I wonder where it is?). With this clearer view of the dial and its dial code, we can see that this is a starburst AD dial which means that the hour markers are gold-plated rather than the solid gold of the SD dials. The fiddly part comes next: holding the case and dial in my left hand, I unscrew the one remaining case screw to the rear, let it fall out and ease the complete dial and movement into my hand and then into the embrace of a waiting movement holder.
While we have easy access to the jewelling on this side, it makes sense to remove the three Diafix cap jewels from the centre seconds, third wheel and escape wheel bearings as well as the Diashock cap jewel from this side of the balance.
When I received the watch, one obvious material fault was the absence of any indent when attempting to pull the crown to its setting position. The reason for this became clear when I turned the movement over and removed the dial and hands: the setting lever spring is broken.
Clearly the sprung arm, whose job it is to seat against the raised nub on the setting lever, is missing. I encountered this failure on the Cronos movement fitted to the Cronos Seahorse described here and the same part has also failed on the second of the two King Seikos discussed in the previous and next posts. I wondered whether this vulnerability is a consequence of a flaw in the manufacturing of the part or if the design of the setting parts carries with it a risk of regular subjection to unreasonable forces. In due course, I will come to believe it is the latter.
In taking a wider view of the dial side of the movement, we can see that rather than using Diafix settings to partner those on the train bridge, Seiko used the older technological approach of using flat cap jewels captured within small end-piece plates, one dealing with the pallet cock and escape wheel and the other the third wheel.Â
Dismantling the going train is a straightforward process, subject to the bridges being removed in the correct order. The sequencing is shown below, starting top left and then proceeding in a clockwise direction.
It is worth noting in the final photo, bottom left, the jeweling of the hole in the lid of the barrel. This jewel and its partner in the barrel base are mentioned in the September 1961 edition as one of the technical highlights of the King Seiko movement.
I had initially concluded that the failure of this watch to run was related to the poorly adjusted balance hairspring but I soon discovered a more compelling reason for its reluctant state.
The missing case screw had found its way into a space between the spokes of the centre wheel, jamming it against the barrel. The last order of business before cleaning the movement parts is to open the barrel and remove the mainspring. As is commonly the case, the interior of the barrel is replete with lashings of molybdenum grease, somewhat at odds with the trumpeted claims of a self-lubricating mainspring. Perhaps this grease was added at service? I should say though that I have never opened a vintage Seiko barrel to be greeted by an immaculate mainspring. They are always covered in moly grease.
While the mainspring has our attention, it is worth noting the impressive girth of the barrel arbor, something which can present difficulties when selecting a handle to wind the mainspring into the drum of a mainspring winder. We should also note that the mainspring winds clockwise which means we will need to use a left-handed mainspring winder or other strategies to refit the mainspring in its correct orientation in due course.
Having cleaned all of the parts, the first order of business is to attend to the refitting of the three Diafix cap jewels. In doing so, I was initially taken aback by the orientation of the jewel serving the seconds wheel. In every other Diafix setting that I have encountered up to this point, the dished side of the jewel faces away from the cap jewel, with the cap jewel serving both to capture the oil droplet once administered from the opposite side as well as protect the oil from contamination. However, the jewel serving the seconds wheel presents the dished well towards the cap jewel. As I am accustomed to oiling these settings after fitting the cap jewels, I was initially uncertain about how to proceed. In the end, I decided to deposit a drop of oil into the well before fitting the cap jewel and to deal with the other two with my usual approach.
Next, we tackle the mainspring. Anticipating that I would be dealing more frequently with left-hand wound mainsprings, I have recently invested in a Bergeon Number 6 left-handed arbor. This arbor is blessed with generous girth, just about sufficient to satisfy the needs of the innermost coil with which it was required to gain purchase.
Here is the evidence of a successful union.
This being a hand-wind movement with no calendar complications, reconstruction of the going train is straightforward.
The crown wheel and click spring are fitted next, not forgetting the crown wheel ring and that the crown wheel screw is left-threaded.
The ratchet wheel completes the winding mechanism. The finishing of the crown and ratchet wheels really lifts the overall sense of occasion with this movement and elevates it into another tier entirely from the bluer collar Cronos on which it is based.
The pallet fork and cock come next, with the exit pallet stone lubricated under a stereo microscope.
We are one step away from launching this vessel but that one step turns out not to be quite so straightforward. Although I had been able to fashion a sensible path for the terminal curve of the balance hairspring, it turned out also to have been out of flat. I decided, in the interests of getting the movement up and running, to try as a substitute a cleaned balance from a spare 4420A chronometer movement. This substitution worked extremely well, following a little adjustment to its hairspring, and with a full wind under its belt, the movement sprang into live with some considerable gusto. I’ll come back to the original balance at some point but for the moment, I am happy to leave it as it is.
Progress on the movement paused at this point while I waited for two settling lever springs to wend their way from Japan. I used that time to address the condition of the crown gasket which was rock hard and consequently no longer fit for purpose. Unfortunately, the gasket is captured within the crown by a sealing washer and consequently, such crowns are generally regarded as unserviceable. However, any service replacements will likely also house hardened gaskets and so if you want the crown to put up any resistance at all to water ingress, you need to find a way to extract and replace the gasket. Sometimes, the gap between the central threaded shaft and the inner edge of the gasket is large enough to provide reasonable access to the gasket to break it up and remove it but this approach risks (in fact almost guarantees) damage to the crown and so instead I decided to dismantle the crown entirely.Â
This rather brute force approach yielded the desired result and I was able to replace the gasket and refit the retaining washer, sealing it in place with Loctite retaining compound.
The only source I could find of replacement setting lever springs was Yahoo Japan, from where I purchased two. Taking into account fees, domestic and international shipping, each part ended up costing me around £20, plus the 16 day wait from clicking ‘buy it now’ to them landing on my door mat. Here’s the one destined for this watch.
And here it is fitted.
With that sorted, I can finally refit the cleaned dial and hands.
The other task that I completed while waiting for the setting lever springs to arrive was to clean the mid-case, case back and bezel. With that having been done and with the dial and hands in situ, I could start re-casing the movement. The first step is to set the movement into the mid-case, fit the stem and secure the movement with the two case screws to the rear.
One of the advances that was cited at the time the King Seiko was originally released was its use of a flat dial, rather than the convex shape of the older generations of dress watches. It is not entirely clear to me why this represented a technological advance but it must have been viewed as a virtue at the time because Seiko in large part eschewed the use of convex dials from this point (one notable exception being some of the lovely Seikomatic-R models). It is rather curious then, to see the downwards curve of the minute and seconds hand, something seen more commonly on convex-dialed watches where the curve of the hand tracks the curve of the dial. Perhaps the hands were shaped by a watchmaker at service to aid clearance when fitting a shallower generic domed rather than box crystal. With that thought, we can move on to the crystal.
The correct crystal for the J14012 is a box acrylic with a diameter of 31.88mm. The part number that seems to be the most useful identifier is KS31 and prices range from reasonable to ridiculous, depending on the source. I managed to find two at the reasonable end of the spectrum and ordered them a day or two after winning the auctions for the two King Seikos featured in this series of posts. The crystal is fitted to the bezel first before fitting the bezel to the case.
The crystal itself is a little over-sized and needs compressing before fitting into the bezel.
The tool here is the Seiko S-14 case opener which comes with a selection of different sized rings to pair with whatever crystal you are working with. The compressed crystal is positioned over the bezel and as the handle is released, the crystal relaxes into the bezel, held securely in place by the tension of its confinement.
With that done, we can use a crystal press to unite the combined crystal and bezel with the mid-case.
In getting to this point, I have a sense that this watch represents a transition state between old and new: the use of Diafix settings to the train side paired with old-fashioned cover plates to the dial side; the brave new world of the flat dial plays against the convex of the past; a moveable stud holder and fine regulation control for the balance counters the fixed stud holder of the Cronos movement on which the King Seiko is based. And finally, the case construction is certainly old school but curiously the watch employs rubber gaskets for the caseback and crown but no real protection against water ingress for the upper decks. The tension fit crystal will offer some resistance but the bezel itself is just an interference fit.
Now is a good time to regulate the movement. I did so in three positions, dial up, dial down and crown down. The dial up and dial down positions produced essentially the same result: ±3 s/day; 320 to 330º amplitude (at the default 52º lift angle) and between 0.0 and 0.2 ms beat error; for dial down, the amplitude drops a little to about 280º and the rate increases in line with that amplitude reduction. All in all a really excellent result.
With that done, and with the case back snapped back into place, we can survey the end product.
For some time, I have taken a view about the importance and credentials of this watch as a landmark luxury product for Seiko which aligns with their own positioning of King Seiko as a brand at the time of its release. In working on this watch and with the finished result in my hand, I am in no doubt that this was and is indeed a watch of substance.
There is nothing especially ground-breaking in its design, yet it oozes elegance and class. This King Seiko is indeed a grand Seiko, if not a Grand Seiko.
Acknowledgements: My research efforts have been greatly helped by the wealth of information on the history of King Seiko available at http://www.egalizer.hu/targyak/orak/king1.htm