Vicknair Restorations, Vintage Watch Repair and Restoration Weblog: Repairing a Vintage Glycine Airman

Here we have a 1957-ish vintage Glycine Airman, the OG pilot's watch (or at least the most infamous), powered by the excellent Felsa 692 movement.

I say "infamous" because the watch seems to be best known for its unique, if crude, seconds hacking mechanism. Maybe mechanism isn't the correct term, let's say "device". In any event, they are very often broken/inoperative. This situation is almost always (actually, always) caused by the machinations of either those who are unfamiliar with the design and are not expecting what they find, or those who are just fumble-fingered dolts, who don't really give a s**t. This watch was clearly the victim of the latter.

The hacking device in the Airman is simplicity itself: a lever, pivoted roughly near its middle, is engaged at one end by the winding stem (which is modified to provide a "groove" into which the lever slots) and at the other end, attached to a small (VERY small) wire. This wire protrudes through the dial at the top center and, when the lever moves about its pivot, the wire is either pulled downward, clearing the seconds hand, or pushed upward, thus interrupting the movement of the seconds hand.

This device imposes its own disassembly and reassembly method: one does not simply release the winding stem and yank it from the watch. Side cutters most certainly are not called for, yet were apparently employed at some point, as evidenced by the damage caused to the original hacking device. As well, the wire that does the actual stopping of the seconds hand was broken off. So, with the stem-end of the lever snipped off and the wire broken off, I was left with little choice but to make a replacement device in its entirety.

The original lever is made from round wire, ground flat on one side, and with a "squashed" area to provide enough material for the pivot screw threads and for the stud that holds the wire. I'm certain it was the most efficient design from a production standpoint but, since the replacement is a one-off, I was going to be a little less caveman about it.

This what it looked like when uncased (yes, it came in with the stem removed).

The casing spacer was a bit worse for wear as well but easily corrected.

I made a pantograph pattern at 10X that would give a "blank" part, meaning that the holes would be located and the proper curvature established. After cutting the blank, the pivot hole is tapped and the lever is fitted to the stem. With that done, the next step was to turn the stud for the Nitinol hacking wire, create the aperture for the wire to pass through the stud, then assemble it and adjust the height of the wire's protrusion through the dial.