Wostok 2604

Description

An interesting caliber is the 11 1/2 ligne Wostok 2604, formerly known under its name “Saturn”, which was part of the movement family “Pobjeda”.
It offers a decentral seconds indication and a weekday indication at 12 o’clock, but no date indication.

All important bearings of this movement contain rubies, the escape wheel even one cap jewel on each side, so that in total, 17 jewels were used.

The Wostok 2604 uses the traditional gear train with directly driven center minute wheel, third wheel, seconds wheel at 6 o’clock and steel escape wheel.

As escapement a swiss type pallet lever escapement is used. The golden toned, non shock-protected screw balance has got eight screws of same difference. It seems, that these screws were not primarily used for posising the balance, but for visual improvements.

Nevertheless, the caliber 2604 uses a kind of Breguet shaped hairspring with bent end curve. It can be regluated with a long regulator arm.

On the dial side, you see the mechanism of the odd weekday indication:
There’s a pin on the hour wheel, which twice a day advances the weekday disc with its two-cyrillic shortened weekdays. A spring at 11 o’clock ensures, that the disc snaps in properly.

Besides that, the Wostok 2604 uses a yoke winding system, a further indicator for its fair quality.

In the lab

Timegrapher result

You clearly see the age of this movement, especially in the vertical positions the deviation is really large, while in the horizoncal positions deviation and amplitude are perfect. Probably due to an aged mainspring, too, this movement starts to lose 50° of its amplitude after four hours.

Technical data

Usage gallery