Your first month of watch repair

Watch repair starts simpler than you think and gets harder faster than you expect. Here's how to spend your first month building skills that will last a lifetime.

By Colin B. · Published June 7, 2026

There is a temptation at the start of watch repair to buy a lot of tools and then look for a movement worthy of them. Resist this. The right move is the opposite: buy the minimum, find the cheapest possible watches to open, and break things until you don’t anymore.

Every watchmaker alive learned by destroying practice watches. The skill is not innate. It accumulates one case back at a time.

Week 1: Open everything, fix nothing

Before you touch a good watch, you need to handle ten bad ones.

Go to a thrift store and buy five to ten cheap quartz watches. Casio digitals, fashion watches with no-name movements, anything with a snap-back case and a price tag under $10. These are your education. You are allowed to ruin them.

The first skill to build is opening and closing a case without scratching it. A case back knife goes into the small notch on the case back; a case back opener grips and turns screw-back cases. Neither is intuitive at first. You will slip. You will scratch a bezel. That is why you are doing this on a $7 Goodwill watch and not on something you care about.

Once you can open and close a case reliably, change the battery in each of your practice watches. Look up the movement number printed on the case back (usually a number like CR2032 or a movement ID) to find the correct battery size. A fresh battery in a dead quartz watch is the quickest proof of competence.

At the end of week one, you should be able to open a snap-back case cleanly and change a battery without touching the movement. That is a real skill. It is enough.

Weeks 2-3: Your first real look inside

Once you can open a case reliably, the next step is looking at what’s inside without breaking it.

A quartz movement has very few parts compared to a mechanical one. The main components you’ll see: the battery, the IC (integrated circuit chip, do not touch), the coil, the stepper motor, and the gear train that connects the motor to the hands. You do not need to remove any of these. You need to be able to look at them, identify the circuit board, and find the setting lever that lets you remove the crown and stem.

The crown and stem removal is the skill you want this week. On most quartz movements, there is a small lever or button near the stem (it varies by movement). You push this lever while pulling the crown out. Do it wrong and the crown comes out without the stem, which is annoying. Do it right and the stem slides out cleanly. Then you can remove the movement from the case.

Once the movement is out of the case, set it on a movement holder (or a folded piece of lint-free cloth) and look at it. Do not poke the gears. Do not touch the wheel jewels. Just look. Understand the layout. Close it back up.

Repeat this on three different practice watches. The mechanism differs between movements, but the approach is the same.

Week 4: Timing, demagnetization, and a first diagnosis

By week four, you have handled enough watches that opening them is boring. This is the right time to add diagnostic tools.

Demagnetizer first. Magnetism is the invisible cause of many erratic watches. A watch that runs 40 seconds fast per day with no apparent reason is usually magnetized. Pass every mechanical watch you own over a demagnetizer before you open it. The process takes two seconds: hold the watch over the unit, press the button, then lift the watch slowly away while still pressing. Release the button only after the watch is clear. Releasing early re-magnetizes it.

Timegrapher second. A timegrapher listens to the tick of a mechanical movement and reports three numbers: rate (seconds per day gained or lost), beat error (whether the balance swings evenly in both directions), and amplitude (how energetically the balance is swinging). These three numbers tell you everything about whether a service succeeded.

A healthy vintage watch in service should show: rate within +/- 15 seconds per day, beat error under 0.5ms, amplitude above 250 degrees. If you service a movement and the numbers don’t improve, you learned something. Most beginners are surprised to discover that watching the numbers change while they adjust the regulator is genuinely addictive.

The mistakes every beginner makes

Every beginner makes the same handful of errors. Knowing them in advance won’t stop you from making them, but it shortens how long you spend confused.

Forcing a case back. Screw-back cases turn counterclockwise to open. Fashion watches look like screw-backs but are snap-backs. Snap-backs have a notch; screw-backs have serrations around the edge. If it isn’t moving with tool pressure, you have the wrong type. Forcing it will scratch or distort the case.

Touching wheel jewels. The small red or pink stones set into the movement plates are jewel bearings. Skin oil on them attracts dust and degrades the oil in the jewel hole. Use Rodico on a pegwood tip to pick up anything near jewels, not your fingers.

Not labeling anything. You will open a movement, set all the parts on a parts tray, and then lose track of which screws came from which holes. Photograph everything before you remove it. Draw a diagram. Watchmaking requires a kind of spatial memory that develops slowly; don’t rely on it until it exists.

Using too much oil. Watch oil is applied in microscopic dots. The oil applicator touches the oil, then touches the jewel hole once. If you can see the oil clearly with the naked eye, you used too much. Too much oil migrates onto wheel teeth and into places it shouldn’t be.

What to do in month two

By the end of your first month, you have a clear picture of what watch repair actually involves. Month two is when you decide how far you want to go.

If you want to stay at the hobbyist level (battery swaps, strap changes, basic quartz servicing), you are there. The skills you have are genuinely useful.

If you want to go further into mechanical movement servicing, the path is:

• Pick a movement to learn. The ETA 6497/6498 is the traditional first mechanical service: large parts, simple layout, widely documented. The Seiko NH35 (or its predecessor 7S26) is another excellent choice. Do not try to learn on a vintage Swiss dress watch; the parts are too small and too delicate.
• Watch the full service video first. Mark Lovick and Wristwatch Revival both have specific movement teardown and service guides. Watch the whole video before you open anything.
• Source practice movements. eBay sells non-running Seiko movements for $15-30. Buy three. Expect to ruin the first one, get frustrated by the second, and have a real experience with the third.

The skill plateau in watch repair is steep but narrow. Most people make significant jumps in a short time once the fundamentals are solid. The watchmakers who plateau are the ones who stay in their head and avoid breaking things. The ones who improve fast are the ones who open more watches.

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Ready to equip your bench? See our watch repair gear guide for the tools worth buying first and the expensive ones to skip.