Camaro restoration

I have been loooking for a sad Camaro in need for some TLC for a while and I was pleased to get hold of a rather sad looking ref. 73343 NT.

The crystal was smashed in and cracked. The dial was dirty but unharmed and did clean up nice.

This is how it arrived. It did not look good. If you look behind the faults there's still a lovely little Heuer that want to shine again.

I dismantled the watch and gave the dial and the case a proper clean. The case was full of old gunk and human dna...

Next I installed a NOS pusher, a new crystal and repainted the red minute register hand. It should be orange like the big chronograph hand. that hand is missing at the picture, but it was included in the deal.

This is how it looks after a few days at my work bench. There's only one thing left, and that is reluming the minute and hour hands to a color that match the lume dots on the dial. The present relume job is way to green in color.

A beautiful ref. 404

This is a great looking vintage Heuer from the late 1950s or early 1960s. This is the ref. 404 with a red tachymeter scale on the dial.

This watch belongs to a Norwegian watch collector that wrote to me after reading the Classic Heuers blog. He tells a interesting story about this Heuer.

He bought it in Sweden and the seller claimed that this watch has been owned by the well known German football player and coach, Berti Vogts. There's no proof of this ownership but it's a fun story anyway. Berti Vogts won the World Championships in 1974 with the German national team.

A 1974 picture of Formula 1 driver Ronnie Peterson (L) and Berti Vogts inside the Lotus F1 car.

This chronograph was one of the last with no name on the dial. In 1964 the Carrera legend was born. The ref. 404 is often referred as a pre-Carrera chronograph.

The movement is a Valjoux 23 correct signed Ed. Heuer on the bridge. After 1964, and the merge with Leonidas, the brigde would have been signed Heuer - Leonidas.

This watch is waterproof and has a screw in case back and watertight pushers.

Thanks to Marius Goberg Pedersen for the pictures of his nice Heuer.