4 Watch Repair and Restoration Masters on Their Most Memorable Fixes

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In 2001, when Laura Kivel joined the team at Grand Central Watch—a watch repair business in New York City owned by her husband’s family since 1952—she was “dazzled by the watches but overwhelmed by all the history they carried for the families,” Kivel tells Robb Report. “So many people would come in with a watch after someone had passed away or went to assisted living. They’d want to know what it was or what it was worth, and we could tell them those things but not why their grandparents had kept it.”

The most poignant stories involved the families of immigrants. “This watch was important enough for someone to put it in a small bag of possessions to emigrate,” Kivel says. “It was one of the very few items they took with them on that boat.”

About seven years ago, Kivel was inspired to do something about all the stories she’d heard. She decided that Grand Central Watch would offer custom keepsake books as an add-on service to clients who brought their watches in to be restored. “I had this idea: When we restore heirlooms, let’s preserve the story,” she says. “So when someone finds this watch or it’s passed down to them, they know why.”

Grand Central Watch’s custom keepsake books, which cost $495 in addition to the restoration fee, document the restoration process and provide info about the manufacturer, the model, and any significant details about the watch at the time of its production. Kivel does research, in conjunction with family, about the original owner and the watch’s service history, customizing the information based on the family’s wishes. “This is an open letter to whoever is going to get this watch after you,” she says. “What do you want them to know?”

Of course, not all watches carry deep family histories. Some service stories are remarkable based on the watch itself—its rarity, its provenance, and/or its unusual technical details. Below, we share four memorable service stories from watch repair and restoration shops around the country, beginning with Kivel’s tale of a special watch brought in by the great nephew of a wild spirit named Uncle Jack.

Uncle Jack’s Omega
In December 2021, a Grand Central Watch customer named William (“Billy”) Lee Murdoch brought an Omega Constellation Reference 168.005 to Grand Central Watch for a complete service, Kivel says. The watch was named “Uncle Jack,” after Murdoch’s great uncle, Jack Torres, who purchased the watch new in Los Angeles in 1962 and soon after took it to Mexico City, where he outfitted the piece with a custom gold bracelet featuring Aztec symbols.

Uncle Jack was from Honolulu, where he worked as an underwater welder during World War II. After he died, Jack’s sister, Annie, inherited the Omega. After she passed, the watch went to Murdoch’s mother, Olga, a hula dancer who then gave it to his older brother, Gordon. The watch, Murdoch told Kivel, eventually came to him and he treasured it because it “carried the spirits” of his Hawaiian ancestors. In a story shared in the keepsake book, Murdoch said that when it comes time to choose the next steward of the watch, “it will be the person in my family that carries the same spirit of adventure in their heart that Uncle Jack had.”

The Audemars Piguet Revision
In early April, WatchCheck, an online watch repair service, received a rare and collectible vintage Audemars Piguet wristwatch from the 1940s. Known as the Precision, the model features two subdials even though it’s a time-only watch. That’s because it’s equipped with a base movement originally built for chronographs and later used by both AP and Patek Philippe.

“Audemars Piguet only made about a dozen examples, and Patek Philippe maybe four to six,” Linden Lazarus, founder and CEO of WatchCheck, tells Robb Report. “Only the purest collectors buy this watch—it’s time only and can cost $200,000. And AP no longer makes parts for it.”

And therein lies the challenge. When WatchCheck received the watch at its watchmaking facility in Dayton, Ohio, the team disassembled it and “found a host of problems,” Lazarus says. “The dial feet had been severed and someone had glued back the dial to the main plate. Someone had also glued the balance to the watch to essentially avoid having to go in and replace or manufacture the parts needed.”

WatchCheck explained everything to the collector, who’d paid about $150,000 for the timepiece. “He was understanding but also probably horrified,” Lazarus says. “We compiled for him the extensive restoration work we could do to put on new dial feet and remake the parts. We hand-drew him a diagram of exactly how we would build this watch back together. Originally, we’d quoted him something like $800 or $900 for the service and it was obviously going to be more expansive. We spent weeks putting it together, quite a bit longer than our typical four-week turnaround. But in the end, the customer was extraordinarily happy.”

The Benrus Type II 
“We recently did a restoration of a Benrus Type II for a retired Naval officer who has had the watch new since it was first issued to him 50 years ago,” Eric Ku, co-owner of LA WatchWorks, says. “It’s hard not to get romantic about military watches still with their original owners, so we wanted to do the watch justice. The original fixed bars were ripped out, and we re-did them back to factory spec. In addition, we gave the watch a full mechanical overhaul and replaced the crystal with a new one. When done, the watch was ready for another 50 years of service.”

The Rolex “MilSub” Submariner
Greg Petronzi (a.k.a. @true_patina), a New York City-based psychologist with a thriving side hustle as a vintage watch repair specialist, is the go-to Rolex and Tudor restoration specialist for celebrities, politicians and captains of industry (the former president of Mexico, José López Portillo, is a client).

One of Petronzi’s specialties is MilSubs, a sub-category of Rolex Submariner models issued to military forces, especially the British armed forces, in the mid-20th century. 

“They had fixed bars so they could only be worn on fabric straps; sword hands instead of classic Mercedes hands; a fully graduated 60-minute bezel instead of the civilian Submariner bezel, which has only 15 minutes of graduations; and issuance numbers inscribed on the caseback noting what year it was made, what the issuance was, whether it was designated to the Royal Navy, SBS, or the British army, SAS. 

“Roughly 1,200 were made between 1972 and 1978,” Petronzi adds. “And of that 1,200, it’s purported that only 130 or so still exist to this day. And of that 130, there are between 20 and 30 examples that are actually full spec, or still in their correct configuration. They have fixed bars, issuance numbers and sword hands all intact. There are very few that remain in their full spec configuration and because of their association with the British military have become very collectible in the world of vintage Rolex.

“I’ve been lucky enough to have serviced 12 of these, maybe six have been full spec,” he says. “One of my good friends recently managed to find an example of a MilSub that was really good except the caseback had been swapped with a different MilSub, so it had the wrong numbers on the back and did not have a correct insert. It so happened that someone reached out to me looking to sell a MilSub with the correct insert. I put them in touch. My friend flew to the U.K to buy this insert and while this was happening, he managed to dig up an old post on a collector forum where someone was asking about a specific caseback with certain numbers. It turns out, the person who posted on the forum and my friend had each other’s casebacks. This guy was in Singapore. And what’s more, I had actually worked on his watch. My friend had this non-full spec watch that would soon return to being a full spec watch thanks to the community and connections. It’s now in my workshop and I’m getting it ready for him to take to Singapore to marry the correct caseback—he and the collector will swap them and another full spec MilSub will be back in the world. 

“It’s such a trip to be a part of this community of collectors, and to be in a position to be looked at as something of an authenticator because I’ve worked on so many and know what to look for in validating them. It’s a sub world of a sub world of a sub world. And when you get really into it, it’s a deep dive (no pun intended) into history, provenance, and something really fascinating. Even beyond the value of these watches, it’s so cool to be involved in the learning. When I take them apart, it’s certainly not lost on me that it’s a piece of horological history.”