Le Cheminant isn’t a particularly popular brand, but I’m constantly being surprised by the quality of their vintage watches.
(Click pictures to enlarge)
Unless you’re deeply entrenched in the world of vintage watches, there’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of Le Cheminant, as they aren’t exactly a household name.
Though the brand was founded in 1822, the period I find most interesting is the 1960’s and 70’s when they produced a mix of dress watches, diver’s watches and chronographs – I wrote a brief history of the brand in a previous post, so I’ll direct any interested readers to that post here.
Any search regarding Le Cheminant watches will undoubtedly lead you to the Master Mariner range. There were other model lines such as the Invincible and Skymaster, but the Master Mariner range dominated their output.
I’ve already written about the restoration of a few Master Mariner chronographs on the blog, which prompted the owner of the watch in this post to get in touch.
Bought new in 1966, the watch had been “retired to a drawer” many years ago and as you can see from the first picture, it wasn’t in the best of shape!
It was sent in for an initial appraisal and I opened it, expecting to see a Valjoux calibre inside, but was pleasantly surprised to see a calibre that I’ve never had on the bench before, a Landeron cal. 39.
Although Landeron are primarily known for their ‘cost conscious’ cam-lever chronograph calibres (try saying that after a few yeasty beverages!), which they produced in huge numbers during the 1960’s and 70’s. Prior to that, they produced a small range of column wheel chronograph calibres – nine different calibres to be exact.
The Landeron cal. 39 in this watch was produced from the 1930’s until the 1960’s, so this one must have been one of the last.
From the same family is the Landeron cal. 42, which is essentially the same calibre, but with an added 12 hour register. The Landeron cal. 42 was used by Breitling in several of their chronographs during the same period.
When checking the functions of the watch, there was no sign of life at all from the movement, which wasn’t really a surprise as the oils had completely dried out. The keyless works seemed fine and the chronograph would start and stop, but wouldn’t reset, which was a concern as finding parts for this rare calibre would be difficult.
Further investigation revealed that the pin was missing from the reset lever for the chronograph, it should have looked like this (… ‘stock photo alert’ because the dopey author accidentally deleted the pictures for this bit! 🙂 )
The logical thing to do was make a new pin to put things right, which worked well initially, but failed eventually as the hole in the lever had been stretched when the original pin failed. With a little remedial work and a more substantial pin, a second attempt proved more successful.
With the movement problem identified and a fix in place, it was on to the cosmetic issues. The bezel as you can see above, had lost most of its original markings, here is how it would have looked originally.
It seems that this isn’t uncommon, of the three examples I could find of this model, two of them had suffered exactly the same fate.
With the chances of finding a new bezel being zero, after a discussion with the owner, we decided that removing the rest of the markings and painting on a simple triangle to act as a marker would be an acceptable solution.
I painted on a neat black triangle using enamel and baked it under the UV lamp – how durable that might prove to be over the long term is hard to say, but it was worth a try, given the limited options.
The owner decided to leave to dial and hand lume in original condition, so with the movement serviced, bezel issue address, case cleaned, and a new crystal and caseback gasket fitted, the watch was fully functional once more. Another interesting chronograph from a hidden gem of a brand.
Rich.
** Many thanks to Ian Hamilton for letting me feature his watch on the blog. **
