6218 Pet Rescue

[Miina Hunker]

Youcan perhaps see why it appealed. There is something rather fetching in the combination of angularly sculpted lugs and the very low profile, flat bezel framing a dial exhibiting the distinctive Weekdater calendar layout with the date at 3 and the day appearing in a window above the 6 marker. Whatever you might make of it at this point, I really like it and that, after all, is what counts if you are me.

You may just be able to make out from the photo above, a hint of yellow around the outer edge of the crystal between the 11 and 12 markers. I missed this at the time but with the watch in hand, the yellow turns out to be Bostik overflow from an enterprising sort who thought lashings of glue the best bet to secure a loose crystal:

sitting atop an otherwise decent-looking 6218B, with teardrop fine-adjustment on the balance cock. The outer part of the weight must have come loose at some point and the solution has been to solder the two parts together.

This unrestricted view of the dial reveals the folly of gluing the crystal to the case: the glue, or more likely, vapour from the drying glue has deposited itself over the outer third of the dial surface, discolouring it visibly, with the worst discolouration between the 12 and 5 markers. A close up of the case shows why the right-hand side looks to have been the worst affected.

The two Diafix settings servicing the escape and third wheels in particular mark this 35 jewel 62 series movement out from the common and garden 17 jewel variety used in the prosaic 62MAS divers watch.

However, the train side looks rather modestly endowed when compared to the abundance of jeweling on the calendar side, the matching pair of two Diafix settings complemented by a further 11 flat jewels serving the rather doubtful role of easing the passage of the day and date wheels:

Fortunately, the suggestion of a traumatic service history hinted at by the glue and solder finds no corroboration in the internal condition of the movement, the only points of note being a broken screw head in the date dial guard

The choice of main spring winder on this occasion is determined by the smaller size of the barrel in these 62 series movements compared with the larger barrels used in the later 61 series. I cannot get my Bergeon winder to work with these smaller main springs and barrels and so have to resort to my vintage Watch Craft set. The latter works fine but requires a bit more finger power as the winder lacks a crank, relying instead on a knurled knob.

The next step is to fit the train wheel bridge, being careful to locate the train wheel pivots into the jewel holes before tightening down the bridge. Gentle rotation of the barrel should set all three wheels spinning freely, taking a little time to spin down and come to a halt on their own. If their rotation dampens as soon as you release the turning force from the barrel then there may be some impediment to the running of the movement that will cause problems later.

before thinking about tackling the yellow-stained dial. In the absence of a better idea, I opted for lighter fluid soaked into kitchen roll, wrapped around a pair of tweezers and set to work, initially on a small test area to the side of the dial. My enthusiasm for the task saw me throw caution to the wind and on I pressed. At first I thought I may have made an error of judgment as the yellow staining turned to a matt slurry but persistence saw the underlying colour of the dial emerging as a small lake of creamy white against the nicotine yellow of the glue residue.

Encouraged by this success, I worked my way around the periphery and as far in board as necessary to eliminate as much of the staining as I could without endangering any of the printing on the dial. The only casualty in that department was the movement and case code between the 5 and 7 markers but I felt that a price worth paying to restore the colour (more or less) to its former glory.

The crystal part number for this watch is 330T06ANS but Cousins report it as obsolete. However, the Seiko casing guide lists the all but identical 6218-8970 as accepting the 330T07ANS, a crystal still in fairly free supply. A little bit of detective work (thanks to the brilliant Seikomatic site here) reveals that the 8970 was the earlier watch produced for a year or so from April 1964, with the 8971 taking over from late 1964 and surviving through to April 1966. Other than the years of production, the main difference between the two is that the former used no alignment indexing of the chapter ring to the dial with the crystal tension ring playing the role of chapter ring. The problem with this design is that the correct indexing of the chapter ring to the hour markers then relied on the meticulous alignment of the crystal when fitting it to the case.

In the case of my watch, the solution to the lack of a 330T06ANS was to source the earlier crystal, and to replace the chapter ring mounted in the crystal with the tension ring rescued from a tatty original crystal fitted to another watch in my spares box and then to press it into position over the waiting notched chapter ring in the case.

The proof of the pudding in any completed project is how long it subsequently stays on the wrist. This one has been a fixture for the past 10 days and counting. This is a masculine but very elegant watch, superbly comfortable and providing an amusing variety of personalities depending on the angle from which you view it. I like it greatly.

Hello Thad,

Thanks very much for your kind words. These are very under-appreciated and, I think, under-valued watches given their quality and very considerable charisma. I am asked quite frequently if I would consider taking on work for other folk, but I simply do not have the time. I am able typically to work on a watch a month, all of which are my own, and I enjoy the methodical pace that this allows. I have the freedom to learn from mistakes that inevitably follow as my growing confidence allows me to venture outside my comfort zone on the technical side.

Great work you have here. I have my eye on a 6218 which quickset date does not work. From your previous experience, does the 6218 quickset share design / material frailties as the 5605/6 quickset date?

The 6218 does exhibit frailties associated with its setting wheel lever but not for the same reasons as the 56 series. Problems with time and quickset on 62 series are the result simply of wear to the teeth of the gears in the setting wheel lever, coupled to damage to the teeth of the clutch wheel. Replacements are still available or can be sourced from scrap movements so nothing like the headache associated with the 56 series.

And finally, I assume that when advancing the day by moving the hands back and forth across midnight would also make the date change, right? If so, for adjusting the correct day/date combo I would need to ensure (first) that the date is the correct one for whichever day the watch is displaying, and then do the back-and-forth trick?

My interest in watches is fairly new, I bought my first low-cost automatic watch (seiko 7009) 1 year ago.

A watch that has already been revised, but what made me switch to this passion was the magnificent weekdater.

With the indexed tension ring fitted to the crystal, I would hope that alignment ought to be straightforward. You can use the gentle pressure from a crystal press to hold it in position as you position the crystal, and then just press it home when you are happy. The challenge is probably whether to do this with the dial and movement in place or whether to align with some other reference.

After trying to install about 3 times and some of my own troubleshooting myself (grub-install not found?) I literally cannot understand why Devuan can't configure grub properly itself. I have a 500MB FAT32 EFI partition first on my SSD, then the rest an ext4 partition I choose to install to. Nothing prevents the next boot after installation resulting in a GRUB rescue prompt. What do I do?

Just encountered this today again when installing on an older machine. Non UEFI. No luck with Daedalus desktop image after three tries to partition the disk with recommended Gparted, GPT, EFI, ESP and FAT32 plus install the bootloader and all. Just no boot.

However, I've seen some other threads here with the same issues with Daedalus and it's a bit worrying actually. I mean, one argument for switching to linux is to revive older machines. And then there are these issues.

That's seems to be true. Or, the instructions aren't very clear here, or they are too directed towards UEFI systems. I've used Linux for years but I'm still not used to UEFI and I do not do dual booting with windows either.

If you post or paste or send me refractainstaller.log I might be able to see what the problem is. (If you use the cli installer, please start it as 'refractainstaller -d' to get a more verbose error log. Thanks.)

Now I have created an EFI partition, root directories, swap and /home.

I installed openSuse first, everything went fine, the bootloader is installed in UEFI, there are two of its folders in the partition, etc.

@aluma - are you using a live-iso or one of the installer isos? In either case, If you booted in uefi, then you don't tell grub where to put the bootloader. It knows to put it in the esp partition. If you're doing it on command-line, the commands are just

The installation media has to be booted either in legacy mode or uefi mode, one medium for both installation methods. This mode determines the grub installation method.

One way to do that could be the boot override option. On my X570 boards this is the F8 key, on my laptop F12. I see there a USB stick twice. As example one entry "Toshiba 8G", a second time the same stick as "UEFI Toshiba 8G". Guess what that means.

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