Project: 1975 Seiko Actus 7019-7350

I decided that I wanted a blue watch and found this 1975 Seiko Actus 7019-7350. I thought it was a unique looking watch but the glass was in bad shape. With that being a major feature I decided to source a replacement before buying the watch. Luckily, I was able to find someone with an genuine replacement so I decided to make this my next project.

Here is an after photo. This ended up costing a lot more in parts than I was really hoping for. Although, I think it turned out well. It is a unique looking vintage watch and should look and run great for years to come. I ended up tracking down a similar looking green one from the same seller so stay tuned for that project.

Here are some detailed photos of the original condition. The watch and bracelet looked absolutely filthy so it was difficult to tell the condition of the cases finish but I suspected it looked worse than it really was.

After a lot of effort everything cleaned up nicely. The case only needed a good brush down with soapy water and proved to be pretty easy to clean. This was pretty lucky because cases this dirty tend to have rust hiding under the grime. The bracelet however, took a ton of effort to clean up but also turned out to be rust free and my size!

The balance spring had a pretty big problem. The red arrow points out a small bit of excess hairspring which is normal. However, the outer couple of coils appeared to be hooked on it. You can easily see that the coils are no longer even but are instead compressed in the red zone arc marked in the photo. My guess is it must have been dropped for this to happen.

I unhooked the coils and bent that little tail neatly out of the way but the spring no longer looked flat when observed straight on. I decided to remove the hairspring to get a better look and then immediately ordered a replacement balance complete.

Here is the new balance complete being checked for a proper fit before installation. Notice how nice the coils look compared to the original.

The jewels were extremely dirty and I hoped that a good cleaning would do the job.

It turned out that underneath all this filth was a broken center jewel which turned out to be a difficult to find size, AKA expensive. I believe this was the primary cause of stoppage in this watch and confirms that it was indeed dropped at some point.

The left shows the broken jewel and the right shows the replacement installed.

The mainspring was both dirty and kinked at the red arrow. For fun, I tried loading this spring into a spare barrel and it broke at the kink like I expected; a reminder of why you should just replace a spring if you can find a new one.

Here are some miscellaneous progress photos that I just felt like leaving in this post for the fun of it.

All in all, I think this project turned out nicely. Although it cost a lot more than I was anticipating it was a good learning experience getting this watch to look and run great again.

Thanks for watching!

-WatchDog