Bas and his rattling Speedmaster Pro

Bas van Dorp emailed me the following story:

Some months ago, I went snowboarding for a week with some friends. As every
year, I just wear my Omega Speedmaster Pro during snowboarding. I figured that
a Speedmaster Pro should be able to deal with this quite easily.

However, after a few days on the slopes, I noticed a rattling sound coming
from my watch. It sounded as if something had come loose. Ooops! The watch
was was still running, but I had these visions of what could happen when a
part would get stuck in the escapement or somewhere in the geartrain. I
gathered all my courage and I decided it was the best thing to to open the
watch immediately.

I didn’t have a caseback tool at hand, and the pliers on my Leatherman where
the next best thing. I do not recommend this to anyone, if you slip you will
damage the caseback really bad, but a broken movement is even worse so I did
it anyway. Now that was a tough job, after 5 years the O-ring became so
sticky that the back seemed glued on. I then used a razor blade to flip of the
antimagnetic shield.

There was not one, but two loose screws in the watch! Incidentally, the watch
had just stopped running because one of the screws lay on the hairspring. The
sweat poored from my forehead but turning the watch upside down made the
screws fall out, and the watch started running again. Phew!

The screws were too small for me to put them back, so I put them away safely
and closed the watch again. The watch didn’t seem to miss the screws, it’s a
good thing Lemania over engineered the movement 🙂 Back home, I had a
watchmaker put the screws back and my Speedmaster is happy ever since.