The Rolex prince is an unusual watch with a large rectangle movement and displays the hour and minute on a seperate part of the dial from the seconds. It’s still a quality movement of course, as you’d expect from the brand.
With the bridges and train removed you can see an interesting feature, there is a small component in the centre held with two screws - this is where the end of the stem is held. Did they add this because wear and tear was a big issue, or was it to make manufacture easier?
Unlike most watch movement the gear train is laid out in almost a straight line.
Here you can see some really tough grime that persisted even after the movement had been through the cleaning machine. These wheels are the winding mechanism and so are under high pressure in use, it’s really important (as always) that this is properly clean and dirt left behind can eventually become a grinding paste when mixed with the new lubrication. A little elbow grease here goes a long way.
The two winding wheels are identical but because they rotate in opposite directions their screws have a slight difference - the thread on one is left-hand and the other right-hand. It’s important to make sure you don’t mix these up or there will be problems!
The movement has a right-angled escapement and a pallet fork with a counter weight, beautifully finished as you’d expect. This allows the balance wheel to be much bigger and thus can be made and adjusted better with improved timekeeping.
You can see the beautiful art deco dial has a very large seconds hand enabled by the layout of the movement.
