The Watch Repairer's Manual

My wife has about 20 small quartz "style" watches that all cost less than $25 each and that she wears only with a certain outfit or a certain type of clothing. Several of the batteries had died and more than a few of the bands were broken. She asked if I could take her watches to the jewelry store and get them fixed, but they charge $30 just for a battery change. So, I decided to look into fixing them myself. I ordered a simple watch repair book and eventually was able to replace all of the dead batteries and replace the bands. That learning process motivated me to learn more about how watches work, particularly mechanical watches. I own two nice automatic (mechanical) watches, a Rolex Submariner and a Seiko MarineMaster 300m and have to spend several hundred dollars every 3 to 5 years to have them serviced. So part of my motivation was just to see if I could learn how to take apart their movements and then clean and oil them. I decided to order this book by Henry Fried so that I could learn more about mechanical watch movements and how they are repaired and oiled. The book arrived just fine about 3 days later and not only are basic repair and oiling of mechanical movements covered but the book goes into great detail about a wide array of detailed repair operations. The book also covers how to calibrate the time on a mechanical movement in detail. Some other reviewers complain that many of the pictures are from decades ago or that the book is not updated. However, mechanical movements have not really changed that much in the last fifty years and any modern reader will easily be able to learn all major (and most minor) repair processes from this book. Thanks to this book, I got started on a cheap $15 Chinese mechanical watch as my first victim. (Always practice the first month or so on something crappy) Once I had learned how to lube and calibrate it, I moved up to my trusty Seiko SKX007. After moving up the learning curve slowly, I was eventually able to take apart and remove the movement from one of my nicer watches. I cleaned and oiled the movement in my MarineMaster 300m and will soon do the same for my Sub. Not only do I find the work strangely rewarding but this book has already paid for itself several times over. I would easily recommend this work to others interested in working on their own watches. Five stars!

I think that this book has been copied from another rather than printed from plates. It is though well done and the diagrams easy to follow. The book was first published in 1949 but mechanical watches haven’t changed in centuries. There is more detail than I’ll ever need but it is fascinating to see how to repair parts that we would probably just replace.

Very knowledgeable book.

It is the Bible for watch repairers. Full of important information - get this if you are interested in the internals of a watch of the details of watchmaking.

if you are starting out or even if you know watches this is a very complete manual