When my Vostok Amphibia arrived, I spent a bunch of time getting it setup. I had to adjust the band and of course set the time. Luckily for me, I received an English manual right?

The watch is kind of tricky because of the mechanism on the crown. Instead of pulling the crown out, you have to unscrew it. Then you pull it out to set the time, or turn it to wind it up. The instructions came with a cryptic message on how to change the date, except it said to rotate the watch head instead of the winding head to change the date. What the heck is a watch head? Turns out what the meant is that there is no dedicated mechanism to change the date so you have to change the date by shifting rotating 24 hours at a time.

But wait, there’s a shortcut thanks to Russian engineering. If you rotate the hands until the hour hand is at midnight (not noon, so you might need to experiment a bit), and then rotate the hour hand back (clockwise) to BEFORE 9PM (so 8PM), you can increment the day by rotating the hour hand back to 12. That means you can shift a day in 1/6th the time, which was helpful as the date was set to 31 and I had to rotate it forwards to 28.

I ran into a second problem. Apparently, you can stop the second hand by rotating the crown backwards (clockwise) when you’re adjusting the time. I couldn’t get it started again. I searched and tried a lot of things but the following worked:

1. Use a watchmaker’s flick on it (watch face up and then violently shake it left/right like a pendulum where your elbow is static)
2. Unscrew and set the crown to position 3 and then alternate between clockwise and counterclockwise. I had a spot where the second hand would jump a bit so I rotated to there and then alternated

Then the second hand started moving on its own again. Maybe I should never take this watch off so I never have to adjust the time again.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: russia, watches