A friend of mine hit me up with a request. Knowing that I've fixed some watches in the past, he asked if I could fix his girlfriend's watch. It had belonged to her mom, who now gave it to her. The issue was that when they put new batteries in, it wouldn't budge.
He sent the second picture, and I had to say yes!
Now, upon teardown, there was nothing apparently wrong with the watch. Other than some green superficial corrosion on some tracks, it appeared fine and untouched really.
I did the usual cleaning of the contacts with alcohol and a fine polish of the battery contacts. All the traces showed good connections to their corresponding spot, and would get voltage from the battery no problem. Still nothing!
I found it really odd that there was barely any info on this watch in particular, but I could not find the model number, let alone a manual or some sort of instruction on any existent power on procedure and such.
I used google reverse image search, which prompted a Gemini teardown of what it could pick up from the image. So I did what any hopeless man would do in this situation. I started troubleshooting with Gemini, who could find way more info in way less time.
Long story short, we discussed some possible faults, I tested a ton of things to isolate issues for about 1 hour, and we came to the conclusion that the capacitors had to have a parasitic short, draining the oscilator's signal before it got to the chip to bring it alive.
Knowing there was no more hope to bring this little thing to life, I removed all 4 capacitors (see 5th pic), only to find a TON of what looked like spoiled late 70's flux, full of corrosion and gunk.
I had to use new flux and my soldering iron to scrape that stuff off of the board. It didn't look pretty, and I managed to rip the main power line from the PCB, but that was an easy fix.
After cleaning the mess and resoldering the caps, we're back in business! I was super happy that the carnage actually worked.
After putting it all back together, I started playing around with the "Alarm Look" Sanyo... Only to find it's exactly that! An alarm "look"! It has no alarm function, and very obviously by taking a look, no buzzer.
Apparently it was a cheaper alternative to the actual melody alarm watches? The upper right button will only cycle through time, date and seconds.
The lower left one will switch to a barebones chronograph, start it, stop it, and reset it.
But at last! Another successful repair. Hopefully it'll make the owner happy!
I'd love if anyone can bring more insight on this watch, or the Sanyo brand at the time. Now I wanna know the story behind this thing!