Andy sent in this Titoni Airmaster. A day/date watch with an ETA 2836-2 movement that beats at 28,800. Well, this one only beats for short periods of time 😉
Even though it’s an ETA movement, Titoni put some engraving on the rotor to customize the movement.
Considering the age of the watch, the dial is in good shape.
The rotor has a lot of side shake, and you can see where it scraped across the auto winder bridge. I will have to fit a new ball race for the rotor.
The movement with the auto-winder assembly removed.
Some dirt is visible, and, very oddly, one of the screws of the pallet bridge is missing. As I can get hold of the original ETA screws, no problem, but an odd thing to see, as the screw is nowhere to be seen. That means someone put the movement together in the past just using one screw because he lost the other.
Strange looking day disc – is this Thai?
Nice and solid date/day changer and quick-set.
Reassembly starts with a new mainspring.
As usual, I put the top plate back together first.
The balance goes back in, and I have a nice amplitude straight away.
Now the bottom plate comes together.
I press out the old ball race from the rotor.
The rotor with the new ball race, old one on the side.
Dial and hands go back on.
The watch is back together, and it’s great to see the second hand sweep across the dial with an 8 ticks per second smooth movement.
I canot take off the movement of a Mido Multifort mod.005.430.11.061.80, outside the case. I`m need to fix the problem of the stem that was placed wrongly and don`t winding or change the date.
I tried to repair it from botton side but it was not possible.
You can help me.
Your site is very interesting.
I have a Titoni Airmaster my father gave me in 1962. Its a self winding watch.
The face is white with gold hands and the face is labelled 52 jewels rotomatic.
I have looked at many sites but nowhere can I see anything like my watch. It still works very well and keeps great time. I think about servicing it but not sure.
Its a long way from Australia to Switsland. Are you aware of any watches like mine?
The face is white with gold hands and gold 5minute
Those characters you see on the day-disc are Chinese characters (albeit written in some terrible archaic looking script). I’ve been following your work for sometime and I must say it has proven to be a great source of information and somewhat “info-taining” to see you take us through every step of every repair you make. Keep up the good work!
*I have an old Rolex ref. 1003 from my father which was modified way back then (before I was born), would maybe like you to do something about it in the future.
titoni is very popular in china’s 1950s-1980s
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its plain “simplified” mandarin chinese mate (aka ‘modern’ mandarin), it’s read left to right like english.
its definitely an asian kanji. the first character is strange to me but you’ll notice the last characters of each day on the wheel are the only one that changes.
from monday its -, tuesday its =, so it ascends as per the day of the week.
the middle 2 characters i assume mean something along the lines of “day of the week”. and since asian kanji are read right to left, it means ( strange character | day of the week | nth )
Thanks for pointing that out – I had no clue what I was looking at 😉
Its chinese. Almost thought it was hand written but its just a nasty looking font.