Omega Constellation – Perpetual Calendar – Cal. 1680

Hi there 🙂

Mario dropped off this watch several weeks ago and it needed a good cleaning. Also, the perpetual calendar function wasn’t working properly. I’m guessing at one point, some jeweller replaced the battery,
but didn’t follow a particular sequence. To be honest, I didn’t know that sequence either until I read the technical document for this particular movement. Pressing in the crown for 3 seconds or more, which is what you would do with this watch to find out the leap year cycle, month and date, showed that the watch was set for August 23rd, 2008.

Anyway, let’s get started on this gorgeous Omega.

With the case back off.

A couple pictures showing the nicely decorated dial.

I always like to take a picture of the back of the dial side.

Dial side of the movement without the dial.

Interesting finger on the back side of the hour wheel.

And now it’s time to flip the movement over and start disassembling everything.

The first part I remove is the circuit board. Right away, I can see that at one point a battery leaked. I sure hope the circuit is ok!

I flip the movement over again, and start removing all the motion and calendar works.

Again, turning the movement over, it’s time to start dismantling the top plate keyless works.

There we go, everything off and time to put in the cleaning machine.

See what I mean by the battery leak.

Time to start putting everything back together. I start off with installing the gear train. Now, for those who are reading this and are not watchmakers, working on quartz watches can be challenging. One part, called a rotor is essentially a magnet. And that magnet is a wheel with a top and bottom pivot. And, like all pivots, must be placed properly in it’s associated jewel. But, unlike all other wheels, rotors are placed in a stator, which is basically a piece of metal with a hole in it, and the rotor goes in that hole. The hole in the stator is always a wee bit larger. But, the tricky part is, is because the stator is metal and the rotor a magnet, you can imagine centring the rotor so that it’s pivot sits in the jewel hole and making sure you also don’t break the pivots can be really difficult and tricky at times. Just thought I’d share that with you 🙂

Now that I have finally installed all those wheels, and in this particular movement’s case, two rotors, it’s time to put the bridge on.

Followed by installing the stem and sliding pinion and the rest of the keyless works.

And then it’s time to turn the movement over and get started installing the calendar and motion works.

Unfortunately I missed a few pictures. But, the last few chores I had to do was install the battery isolators, circuit board and dial. Here, I’m installing the hands.

Next, I carefully close up the case with my press

And voila, a properly working Omega Constellation.

I hope you enjoyed my most recent post, and as usual, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to post them below.

Cheers

Chris