Entry 3: week fourteen of six

Subject: Speedmaster 145.022, circa 1969, calibre 861. Current state: 212 parts in a tray. Estimated completion: previously.

The estimate was six weeks. We are in week fourteen. We have stopped converting the estimate into a date, and the watchmaker has stopped answering directly and started answering with weather. Things are coming along. Conditions are about what you would expect for an 861 of this age. We find this soothing, which is probably a symptom of something.

The facts, as reported to us. The mainspring was cracked and had been for some time, possibly years. That tells you something about the previous owner, who timed things constantly and never once fidgeted with the crown. A chronograph that is never reset does not announce its faults. It just carries them quietly until somebody opens it.

The 861 replaced the 321 in 1968 and it is the calibre most people mean when they say Speedmaster without qualifying it. Cam-switching rather than column wheel. The market decided this was a downgrade. The service trade decided it was a relief. Ours is being rebuilt by somebody who prefers the 861 specifically because he never has to explain it to the customer afterwards, which is the most honest opinion on movement architecture we have ever been given.

A replacement part has been ordered from a supplier who answers email seasonally. We have been told the part exists. We have not been told where. Our correspondence now runs to eleven messages. Four are ours and six are automated. The eleventh contained the word shortly, in a context we have been unable to resolve.

For scale: a smartwatch update takes eleven minutes and ruins nothing except your morning. This service will take a quarter of a year, cost more than the watch did in 1969, and return the thing looking exactly as it does now. Only slightly more correct. We were told this at the start and we agreed to it in writing, which is the part that stops us complaining in public.

The tray is what we keep coming back to. Two hundred and twelve components, machined and finished by people who are now mostly dead, sitting in a plastic organiser in a workshop in a town we have never visited. They are waiting on a spring from a supplier with seasonal habits.

The watch does not know it has been disassembled. It will not know when it has been put back together. The only party actually experiencing this service is us.

Entry 4 follows when there is something to report, or when the weather changes.