24 Mar 2012, 21:33
On the glass removal technique. Heating for extended period is NOT the way to go. I use a hot-air gun (the kind that is used to strip old paint or shrink heat-shrink tubing). It goes to about 400 degrees F., so there is no danger of melting solder or breaking the glass, but it makes short work of the epoxy. Hold the muzzle about an inch from the glass and keep it there for 60 seconds; a little pressure from the inside, and the glass should just drop out. Make sure to clean any residual glue from the case while it is still hot; if you let it cool, it almost welds to the metal, and is much more difficult to remove. The whole process, start-to-finish, should not take more than 90 seconds. So, stop putting your watches in ovens for 10 or 20 minutes! You're taking out a watch glass, not baking blueberry muffins! This nonsense got posted on a website, and spread through the collector community like the mumps. It's wrong, unnecessary, and basically, a waste of time (I guess, one of these days, I will have to post a video of the process). Believe me, I've done nearly a hundred of these, and never had a failure.