Icthos Labs: The anatomy of a Vostok

By: marc_wl

Vostok watches are very particular. Komandirskie or Amphibia series, they share some very specific features that are sometine surprizing for the newbies. They are very rugged, inexpensive, with a design directly inherited from the late 60′s

The screwing crown is for instance very surprizing

. Who did not believe that the crown was broken at the first manipulation? Both Amphibia and Komansdirkie absolutely required to have their crown screwed down to be water resistant. Most of the time the other brands adopted a toric gasket on a slick tube and the screw down is just and additional protection. Why don’t we see this in details?

Our guinea pig today is the Komandirskie version of the “blue diver” (circa 2004 automatic caliber Vostok 2416b 32 jewels). Something wrong happened in the dato mecanism and I need the mesh bracelet to put it on my Amphibia version.

The main difference compared to Amphibia versions is the brass chrome-plated case instead of the all stainless steel, a ca 5atm resistance instead of 20atm, a thiner acrylic crystal, but the rest is quite similar. Straight hand and no lumed spot on the second hand.

The mesh bracelet waspurchased from my local watchmaker. It has a safely buckle.

Someone, a few time ago on this forum asked how to remove the rotating bezel. Its a good occasion to see how to proceed. First, protect the case with a piece of strong paper. Then lift off smoothly the bezel using a Bergeon-like knife.

It comes effortless and it can be snapped on back easily as well

The bezel is in brass and chrome-plated too. A bulged wire give the necessarily bezel friction :

Well. Now we can open the case. A case holder is required.

A good care is to put on a protective film on the case back to prevent any damage with opening tool that need to be adapted to the screwed ring size.

As soon as the ring is unbloked, one can continue using a safe wood pick to fully unscrew the compressing ring that can be removed :

Then we lift the case back using the small finger and remove it

Here is the movement and the Vostok rotor:

For the demo purpose I remove the gasket.

One can now extract the stem+crown. Be carefull, this screw is not the stem-liberating one but just a bridge screw!

There a specific pusher near the click that more handy that a screw

Here the stem tube with its outer thread.

And here is now the famous upsetting crown!

If the crown is not pulled out, it is fully free to move, but when you screw it down you don’t turn the stem anymore! Very clever! Now you can see the inner gasket and understand that it should be screwed down to protect the watch!!

We now remove the rotor to be more comfortable in the following steps

After putting the screw in a safe place, we can lift off the rotor

Well, we can now uncase the movement just by unscrewing the 2 casing screws on the nylon ring.

The movement is free. Be carefull not to dammage the dail and the hands attached.

We deposit it on another caliber holder to proceed to the hand lift :

We should first get a minimum alignment to lift them all at the same time. One protects the dial with paper and a sharp V:

We take the hour hand with the lifter an push gently to lift the whole

It’s Done!

That’s the Deep Blue !

We can now remove the dail. 2 small screws block the dial feet on the periphery

It comes effortless and the dato mechanism appears :

A wire spring in the small window should be carefully removed before unscrewing the plate.

So what’s going wrong in this dato??

Ha! OK. I see I broke 2 teeth (orange arrow) of the hour wheel (blue arrow). I remember that something went hard while changing the time and I forced a bit (never do this!).