I recently serviced this beautiful 1940’s Vulcain Campos vintage watch for a ClockSavant customer. Its beautiful lugs, so characteristic of the style and grace of the 1940’s, wonderfully aged dial with art-deco inspired numerals, large size, and Vulcain movement draw you in. I’m not as familiar with the Vulcain Campos model, if any followers are familiar with it, please feel free to comment. When you work on Vulcain movements, you almost always see very high-powered watches running with strong amplitude— I feel this is from Vulcain’s history, and destiny, as an alarm watch manufacturer wherein in the alarm complication demands so much power. Vulcain mastered the art of designing movements that can manage highly powered mainsprings and the net of it is they can run with a very strong balance swing and I don’t see inordinate wear in the movements from the more powerful mainspring. So they knew what they were doing. With that said, all it takes is one botch to nearly finish-off a beautiful watch and such was the case here. The watch was sold as “serviced”; however, its hairspring was badly damaged and of course it wasn’t particularly clean either. I’ve mentioned this many times— if you foul the hairspring or balance on a vintage watch, you are not looking at simply swapping a new or used part in if you can even find one. These are custom fit to the watch and escapement and in this era, frequently numbered to the movement on the balance cock or balance itself. Complex hairspring manipulation is difficult, an expensive skill to build, often time consuming, and high risk. Depending on the value of the watch and/or my willingness to invest in the watch, it may not be salvageable. It’s now running strongly again, ready for its new future.
