Citizen Promaster

Disclaimer...

I am not a watchmaker.
I am not a watchmaker.
I am not a watchmaker.

I’m just a hobbyist who has read a few books, watched a bunch of videos, taken apart a couple of watches, and works with a very limited budget for tools and supplies. I’m not saying that what I do is the right way—I’m simply sharing what I did, how I did it, and what results I got. Maybe this can serve as a guide, but honestly, I write these articles mostly for entertainment.

Now, a quick word of caution: this watch has some tiny, springy parts that could fly across the room—or worse, into your eyes. Please know what you’re doing and don’t get hurt.

Some watches contain Tritium or Radium or other radioactive elements! Don't start working on watches unless you really understand the dangers of radiation and know how to reduce your exposure and protect yourself!

Be safe—and enjoy the read!

Citizen, Seiko, Casio, the Japanese are awesome!

You really want a timepiece that stands the test of time? One that won’t break the bank? Then you can’t go wrong with a Japanese caliber. These movements might not be the most luxurious or the most refined, but they’ll always get the job done—and keep doing it for decades.

The first brand-new watch I ever bought was a Casio calculator watch, and guess what? It still works perfectly (yes, even the calculator!). Don’t get me wrong, Swiss watches are tough too, but when it comes to pure reliability and unbeatable value, nobody does it better than the Japanese.

As you can see from the pictures below, this particular model besides being one of the dirtiest watches I have ever seen, also had a battery explode inside its case. But guess what? It will be fine, what could go wrong on a Citizen?

Disassembly

These things are the worst! Really Citizen & Miyota calibers are a horror to take apart! Get yourself the manual and make sure to take a million of pictures when taking these little things apart!

The gallery below shows the recording of the disassembly, feel free to use it as a reference.

*Yes, I know WB is totally off. I had an awful LED work light on and just was not paying attention, I am human, after all :)

Cleaning

If you want to see how I clean my watches, read the cleaning section on my Raymond Weil, that is basically the same method I use, with one important detail! Keep plastic parts away from the cleaning solution! The solutions I use are based on solvents and these are not very compatible with plastics, I suppose, therefore I only clean plastic parts in soapy water, then rinse them a couple of times with clean water and give one final quick rinse in IPA.

Again, clean the motors only with Rodico, to avoid damaging them. The smaller parts went into separate containers for ease of reassembly.

You’ll probably notice in the pictures that the holes in the watch case are filled with Rodico. I did that because I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to remove the glass — it still looked fine, with just a few light scratches. So instead of taking it out, I sealed the openings to keep dirt out while cleaning the case.

For the cleaning itself, I only used wooden picks and polishing tools — no water, no ultrasonic cleaner. The inside of the glass had some haze from condensation (most likely due to humidity ingress — as a rule of thumb: watch + water = bad idea). I managed to clean most of it off with a microfiber cloth; only a tiny "rim" of condensation remained at the very edges.

The metal wristband was cleaned in soapy water and ultrasonic cleaner, you can see a jar with black water in one of the pictures, that was the color of the water after the cleaning.

Assembly and testing

I did not take a picture by picture report of the re-assembly, for that you can use the disassembly gallery and scroll through it backwards. I recommend getting yourself a different movement holder, one that supports the bottom of the watch movement too, because when assembling this movement I had it clamped on the plastic, but that leaves the metal base plate loose and makes it slide to the bottom, really making it difficult to assemble the movement.

Beware of the three motors this watch has, there are very very hard to get in place.

The lubrication of this movement is also a challenge! I know that one should lube the pivot once it is in the jewel/bearing, but with this watch, that is sometimes simply impossible to do. Then you have to decide to either lub it before assembly or leave it dry. It is up to you!

The assembly of the watch hands is another challenge. In the service manual it is stated how to adjust the chronograph second hand and the 1/10th of a second hand, so for those hands it is only important that the hand is aligned to any one of the markings. Now, the chronograph minute hand is different, for this one I figured out that aligning it a 12 o clock would make it show one-and-a-half minute after one minute has elapsed in the chronograph, therefore I had to set it right at the beginning of the 12 o clock mark, run the chronograph 1 minute and verify if it was aligned at the 1 minute mark, and it was! The asme is true for the 10 and 20 minute marks as I tested later.

So, to assemble this watch one need to power it with a battery. I then lightly inserted just the minute hand at 12 o clock and left the watch run for 3 -5 minutes to see if it runs. Once I determined that part of the watch worked, I set the small second hand and the big second hand and started the chronograph, once I determined that worked as well, I removed all of the hands again and begun by setting the date, the hour-hand, the chronograph sencond hand, 1/10th of a second cronograph second-hand, set them both aligned as good as I could (I just realized as I write this that the big second hand is not perfectly at 12 o clock, well, at least for me it is good enough), after that the chronograph minute hand and the chronograph hour hand.

While taking the watch apart, one unfortunate mishap is that i damaged the chronograph hour hand a little bit, a small bit of the laquer of the hand broke off, an unfortunate thing that a real watchmaker would probably have fixed by re-assembling the watch using a new tiny hour hand. Have I told you already that I am not a watchmaker?

Finishing touches

Unfortunately this watch was used and used well, in one of its combats it lost its spring bar and with that it lost one piece of the original metal wristband. I was unable to find a similar watch or a similar wristband, so I went looking for an alternative and found one from Fluco. I find it really suits this timepiece well, besides being comfortable