How to clean a vintage watch

Rediscovering old beauty under layers of dirt

Aug. 23, 2020 - Willem L. Middelkoop

This week I was cleaning my closet when I found an old watch. It came from my grandfather’s house. It looked like it had an adventurous live, full of wear and tear. I recognised that it had an automatic mechanical movement. Upon picking it up it almost instantly started running again. I wondered how cool it would be if I would gently clean it.

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Citizen Automatic, 21 jewels, 6000, 4-601084-Y

The cleaned watch head, from the top

The rear of the watch, showing various numbers and markings

Opening the watch can be done using a special tool

You can rotate the case back and remove it from the watch head to reveal the movement

Especially the parts facing the human skin can pick up interesting collections of dirt over time, giving rise to microbial ecosystems

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