I wanted on of those Seiko QR/QT/QZ series quartz watches from the dawn of the quartz watches which were made with premium material and design.

This 3863-8020 with its blue coarse grain dial design attracted me to bid on a job lot of quartz watches in questionable conditions.

Of course this didn't turn out well.

The crystal was badly scratches and didn't survive the crystal press (as usual) during re-installation.

One of the spring bars was so rusted I couldn't depress it to remove the also heavily rusted steel bracelet, leading to damage in one of the spring bar holes during my forceful spring bar removal.

The hole has been enlarged somewhat that new spring bar tip found it more comfortable sitting at an angle.

The period authentic caseback gasket disintegrated into a million pieces during its removal (as usual).

The movement, suffering from rust and battery leak, unsurprisingly showed no sign of life with a fresh LR44 battery.

It didn't take long before I announced the watch DOA, but that also means I have nothing to lose in my attempt to revive it.

How does a quartz watch works?

A quartz oscillator, oscillates at 16384 Hz (in case of 3863 movement) when electricity flows through, and reduction electrionics will reduce the pulses into a 1 Hz alternating signal to magnetize the coil, causing a stator to magnetize and turning a rotor by 60° at a time, translating to a 6° rotation into the second hand through a train of gears.

I encourage you to look up the 3803A/3823A serviec manual online which explains this in great details and is equally applicable to the 3863 movement.

Back in the days, quartz was really good stuff.

That means there are 3 major ways a quartz watch can stop working:

1. Circuit boad/quartz oscillator fail to generate the 1 Hz signal to the coil
2. Coil unable to magnetize the stator to turn the rotor
3. Gear of train damaged or stuck

Using a multimeter, it's possible to measure the pulse output and resistance of the coil, as well as whether anywhere in the circuit that's shorted, effectively eliminating cause of malfunction (1) and to a certain extent (2).

Why can't (2) be eliminated with a healthy coil? That's because the coil works in conjunction with the stator configuration to ensure that the magnetic field is properly positioned to actually turn the rotor.

At this point, without cleaning the parts, it's no possible to know whether it's (2) or (3) or both that's causing the watch to not run.

Indeed, the stator and rotor were dirty with dirt fragments attracted by the permanent magnet on the rotor. A light swipe with Rodico would clean them out.

However, after cleaning the stator/rotor combo, the watch still refuse to run. Perhaps like what happened to the watch fettler, the stator requires adjustment to align the magnetic field such that rotor would properly turn.

Apparently, on a good day the stator shouldn't be removed during cleaning because the relative position of both stator plates requires precise adjustment, otherwise the rotor wouldn't turn.

Hence begun my repeated attempt to adjust the stators as per documentation to no avail.

After several futile attempts to breathe life into the mechanism, I was hit by a realization that I hadn't clean any of the jeweled pivots on the plates holding the wheels.

After cleaning the hole jewels, the rotor can be seen happily jumping second by second through the holes

Since the movement is ticking, the rest is just like a walk in the park.

I couldn't do much about the corrosion between the 1-2 o'clock marker on the dial caused by battery leak though.

At first I couldn't find a matching crystal so an acrylic crystal went on before I was about to source a 1.5mm thick sapphire crystal, which on the surface matches the original crystal.

However, what I found out is the bevelled edges of the original doesn't count and only the heights of the flat parts around the rim of the crystal counts.

That means a 1.2mm sapphire crystal would fit while a 1.5mm wouldn't.