Migrating one of my watches from Quartz to Automatic
How hard could it be? 🫣
It turns out … IT’S INCREDIBLY HARD!
Forgive me, but this is going to be a non-software story. I need to document this little side quest as a reminder that life in the non-CTRL+Z world deserves more respect than I gave it 🫣.
I spent the first decade of my adult life in college athletics. At UCLA, I was a student manager and then the Director of Ops for the Men's Golf program. We won an NCAA Championship in 2008 after an epic battle with USC & Stanford.
We all got our names etched in UCLA history (some more deservedly than others) and a gaudy championship ring1. As an added bonus, the NCAA threw in this janky watch that, for years, never made it onto my wrist.
But as I got older, and more involved (and interested) in the world of watches, I started thinking about that janky gold watch sitting in its box.
There was just one major flaw …
A gold watch is supposed to give off Goodfella vibes. Tony Soprano vibes. This one gave off flea-market junk-drawer vibes: a cheap, rusty bracelet with a POS quartz movement.
So I impulsively bought a donor watch off eBay to attempt the dial swap myself.
🤦🏻♂️
It’s all fun & games until you can’t put it back together
A dial swap is exactly what it sounds like:
You take the dial from one watch and transplant it into another, like a kidney. Except I’m not a surgeon. I’m just a Pixel Pusher, and there's no CTRL+Z out here.
There were about two weeks of pure excitement when I started this project:
buy tool, wait for tool, use tool, realize I don’t know how to use tool, watch YouTube video, discover I need another tool, repeat.
SUCH FUN.
SUCH LEARNING.
SUCH TINY LITTLE PARTS.
After two weeks of squinting through a loupe and holding my breath every time I picked up a screwdriver, there was about five whole minutes where I thought: “Holy F. I’m actually going to pull this off.”
See Exhibit A below:
But, sadly, my joy was short-lived. The watch stopped running almost immediately, and when I took it apart again to try to fix it, I only made things worse.
Loose crown. Bent second hand. Broken dial feet.
Any further and I'd destroy it entirely.
So I called in a professional.
Paging Dr. KODA
I found KODA Watches through the SeikoMods subreddit. He lives half a world away in Australia, but still graciously accepted my commission. The initial idea was to undo my stupid and make it work with the TISSOT PRX 35MM donor I had provided:
But after some back-and-forth, we took a slight pivot. We went FULL mob-boss and ended up with this bad boy:
I cannot thank you enough Koda Watches! I will be wearing this thing all summer! And I’ve learned my lesson: leave the surgery to the professionals. I'll stick to pushing pixels.
A ring that I never felt worthy of wearing actually. I was a glorified cheerleader on the sidelines who never hit a single shot so what gives me the right to wear that thing? At least that’s how I’ve come to see it.