The movement and dial of this Elgin pocket watch from 1913 belonged to the Great Grandfather of a ClockSavant customer. Visit the ClockSavant Instagram page to see the video associated with this post. For more than 50 years it was stored, without a case, in household drawers with other items and sustained major damage and corrosion. There are many reasons a watch will lose its case over the years. I do not know the specific cause here but common ones include being melted down for gold value during difficult economic times or the case was badly damaged. The mission, should I decide to accept it (I did), was preservation-- make the watch run once again while changing as few parts as practically possible, match the watch with a correct era case, and stabilize the dial but do not change it. The customer understood the level of time investment required. By preservation, we maintain the history of the watch, its connections to the past, and its journey to today. If we swap anything out we don't need to on this watch in-particular, we steal what remains from the past. The owner's focus on what's inside (the movement) is an important message for collectors focused on dials and cases and not the movement. During this watch's era, Elgin and other makers had many "by-hand" manufacturing operations and thus parts between watches were often not interchangeable as-is and there were frequent design changes within the same model (grade.) For this reason, many individual parts have matching unique serial numbers to document interoperability. In this watch, the most sensitive components of the escapement-- the balance complete (balance, cock, hairspring) and pallet-- were damaged beyond repair. The watch had damaged jewels, corrosion, and other issues. While it is absolutely true that having a spare part from a donor movement is needed, there can be considerable work in modifying that part to work with a different (your) watch. Fortunately, this watch survived and is now running very nicely once again for future generations.
