1948 Heuer Chronograph Restoration

Early, “pre-TAG”, Heuer and their involvement in early motorsport has been intriguing to me since digging into the world of vintage watches.

I was super happy to come across and win this 1948 Heuer Ref. 418 chronograph in an online auction. This reference is often referred to as a “Big Eyes” chronograph. The dial was showing it’s age, missing a crystal, and the Valjoux 23 movement definitely needed a full refurbishment but the solid 18k yellow gold case was in nice shape and was an otherwise original and undisturbed watch.

After assessing the watch in person I set off with the plan to give it a complete mechanical overhaul but leave the dial and case untouched aside from some simple cleaning and hand polishing. The dial has various scratches on the sub dials, presumably received during servicing over the years. Retouching the dial isn’t really something I’m interested in and certainly outside my skill set at the moment. I prefer the patina and story told by the original anyway.

The watch is powered by a Valjoux 23 movement, a manual winding chronograph with two registers: running small-seconds at 9 o’clock and a 30-minute counter at 3 o’clock.

The watch had suffered from moisture ingress at leading to some significant corrosion on a few movement components (the minute jumper, minute jumper screw, and nearby case screw in particular). In addition to the corrosion, the click spring was found to be broken and the ratchet wheel was missing some teeth. NOS replacements and a new mainspring were sourced for the reassembly.

I cleaned all the jewels with peg wood and subjected all the piece parts to your typical ultrasonic cleaning process. Reassembly was aided by various technical and service manuals for the Valjoux 23 and it’s now clipping away ready for service.