My amphibia stopped working
And I thought it was kind of indistructable. Turns out that banging ketchup bottles on your palm is more that the shock absorbers can digest. I am ordering the replacement parts and may post a pic if I get it working again.
When I'm into something it's all or nothing and consumes m. I researched the history of the watch factories and the whole bit, This is what I had on file on this machine for Vostok Amphibia.
If you don't know what a real one looks like you're subject fallng victim to a cottge industry of people with boxes of parts that put together watch faces with hands, stems or cases that never caome out of the factory. Then you're beat. All mine were confirmed at watchuseek.com by Russian guys who sold them on the street on up to big time collectors:
Vostok (Wostok) – Восток
Vostok means East and is a well known Russian brand which made high quality watches and instruments for the Russian military. It is not to be confused with the post soviet era, break away company of Vostok Europe which trades on its Russian credentials but which are made in Germany/Lithuania.
Original Soviet made Vostok watches are mainly divers style watches although not exclusively. The ranges include “Komandirskie”, “Amphibia”, “Generalskie”, “Admiralskie”. The movements are higher quality with multi-jewelled movements. Vostok made, and still continue to do so, the popular “komandirskie” and “Amphibia” watches with military images on the dial.
These watches have since become desirable watches in their own right. Examples with the wording “ЗАКАЗ МО СССР” “by order of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR” on the dial are the most desirable as these were commissioned by the Soviet government for sale in Soviet military establishments.
Vostok Amphibia
Vostok Amphibia Diver – Russian mechanical/automatic dive watch. In the Russian watch industry an Amphibia watch was what the west would call a Diver watch. Produced in great quantities for the Soviet/Russian military, these watches gained great popularity worldwide.
The first Amphibia watches were manufactured in 1967 in USSR on Vostok Watch Factory (BOCTOK). Professional divers and submariners gave their preference to Vostok Amphibia watches because of their simplicity and reliability. Non-failure operation on depth up to 200 meters in conditions of significant temperature drops, in any excited environment – mechanical watches Amphibia stood extreme overloads and impacts.
Especially under the order of the Navy of the USSR was made the military modification of Amphibia, and tests of watches had passed during exercises of fleet by the Northern Sea.
The submarine has laid on the bottom on depth of 130 meters, simulating failure. A brigade of the divers, who had taken part in rescue of people, was provided with new Amphibia watches while they were participating in rescue. Both, tests and exercises had passed successfully.
In 1975 Amphibia watches had been in the space by the spaceship Soyuz-17 and to the station Salute-4.
Amphibia watches were also tested by less exotic, but not less evident ways. They were run over the trucks, hammered, but they continued to show an exact time.
Accuracy of work of Amphibia watches in many respects is obliged to the Vostok movements, and reliability to the shock-proof device of balance unit is a heart of mechanical watches.
History
In 1967, Mikhail Novikov and Vera Belov, designers at the Chistopol watch factory, had a challenging task: to design and produce a new dive watch reliable to 200 meters and the associated changes of pressure and temperature.
The design team at Vostok decided on the name "Amphibia" as it evoked a watch equally at home underwater and on land. Coming up with the name was the easy part. Producing a watch capable of meeting the needs of the Soviet defense department was the real challenge.
Of course Switzerland was capable of producing watches with such specifications, but according to Novikov (here, as paraphrased by Google translate), “many [Swiss] designs we could not repeat, because our equipment can not provide the necessary accuracy.” If the quality of the machines available in Russia meant that copying the techniques of the Swiss were out of the question, then Novikov and Belov would have to approach the problem differently altogether.
The conventional way to build a watch capable of withstanding pressure at great depth is to make a watch case, crown, and crystal that will have a static resistance; a Rolex submariner in the bath is exactly the same as a Rolex submariner 100 meters underwater. The design of the Amphibia is different (in a way similar to EPSA’s compressor system), in that the water resistance of the watch is improved as the pressure around it increases.
Central to this elegant design solution is the Amphibia's caseback. Rather than a more usual screw down caseback, the Amphibia utilizes a bayonet style caseback with a threaded locking ring. This caseback system alone does not provide adequate resistance, so the Amphibia also has a very large gasket made from sintered rubber (an innovative process Novikov and Belov cribbed from Russian space programs). At greater pressures the case back is actually pushed into the rubber gasket, making the water resistant seal tighter and more effective as depth increases. The thick acrylic crystal operates in a similar fashion, flexing at high pressures. The ingenuity of the designers was to factor this distortion into the tolerances of the watch.
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