It's true that polishing always removes metal...but when it comes to a gold watch,
losing too much metal can REALLY hurt your pocket!
In this video, we're going to find out just how painful that can be!
Let's conduct a little experiment and put our scratched up $40,000
Rolex Yacht-Master 2 to the test. To get the job done with the minimal
amount of polishing possible, we used the best watchmaker we know, Chrono Sky!
So let's take the watch apart and work some magic!
These parts right here are not made out of gold, so we'll set them aside.
These other parts contain gold, but don't need to be polished.
And let's not forget the case tube for the crown and the ones for the chronograph pushers.
They won't need polishing either. Here's the bare-bones case.
As you can see, it has quite a few scratches on it. We'll certainly be removing those.
The caseback is scratched up too, so it also needs to be buffed up.
And let's not even talk about the bracelet. It definitely needs some work!
Time to weigh all the pieces that need to be polished.
6.775 ounces of 18-karat gold. Now, this is where the fun begins!
...Oh no, wait! How much gold do you
think our Rolex will lose when all is said and done? $50 worth of gold? $100? Maybe even more?
Hold that thought for a moment and comment what your guess was at the end of the video.
The process starts at our Angel 85 polishing bench.
It uses an air suction and water filtration system
to recover the gold dust the watch is about to lose!
Now that the polishing is finished, it's time for a little ultrasonic cleaning and steam!
Everything is now shiny and squeaky clean! Remember how the parts looked at the beginning
of the video? Check out a side by side comparison of the case.
And now the caseback.
And the bracelet. Pretty crazy, right?
Do you think that a lot of gold was removed to make the parts look like this?
Let's see… Remember that the total weight
before polishing was 6.775 ounces. This is the moment of truth!
Almost there….
And we have our final weight….6.745 ounces. That's a difference of .03 ounces or around
.85 grams. Using a market price of about $59 a gram for 24-karat gold and multiplying by .75,
since 18-karat gold is only 75% pure gold, we come up with a total loss of around $37.63.
Surprised? How close was your guess? In a previous video, we determined that
this same Rolex model contained around 210.6 grams of 18K gold.
This means that our watch lost approximately .4% of its weight in gold during polishing.
.4% may sound kind of low, but this number could have easily been a lot higher if
extreme care wouldn't have been taken to minimize the amount of polishing required
given the initial condition of the watch. So, the two important lessons you need
to learn from all this are… First, take care of your watch
in order to minimize the amount of times you need to polish it,
And second, if you do decide to polish your watch, seek the help of a highly
skilled watchmaker who can, with a light polish, make your watch look brand new!
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channel if you're a fan of content like this. See you next time!