Jack Spiggle's Upcycled Apple Watch Drops the Electronics in Favor of a Mechanical Movement

Maker Jack Spiggle has an Apple Watch with a difference: it's an upcycled housing for a mechanical watch mechanism, externally indistinguishable from the original hardware bar the lack of display and the mechanism visible through the rear.

"It all started around last December when I was shopping for a regular Apple Watch and I realised that I would be spending a couple hundred dollars minimum, for features I did not really need, probably would not use, in a package that would be useless in five years either from lack of support, or degraded components," Spiggle explains of the project. "At some point, this idea popped into my head and I found it so funny. I just knew I had to make it."

The object of Spiggle's attention: a second-hand Apple Watch Series 1, which was technically functional but whose non-user-replaceable battery had degraded to the point it could only drive the smartwatch for around four hours per charge. "No-one was ever going to use this watch again, it was e-waste (still cost me $50 somehow thanks to the premium materials)," Spiggle explains, "and hopefully I have given it back at least another couple of years of use!"

After disassembling the Apple Watch and removing its display and other electronics, Spiggle gathered components: a Seiko NH38 movement, a Côtes De Genève rotor which automatically winds the spring through body movement, Nautilus-style hands, a mineral crystal back glass replacing the original watch's sensor window, and a selection of brass tubing, brass rod, and bronze sheeting — plus a range of adhesives to fit everything together.

Squeezing the mechanism into the housing was only one piece of the puzzle, though. Spiggle wanted the device to be externally identical to an original Apple Watch, and that meant re-using the false crown — a digital input on an unmodified Apple Watch — to wind the clockwork mechanism and set the time. "If I wasn't so set on being able to set the time/wind the watch with the original button and crown," the maker says, "I could have just added a second crown on either side and this project would have taken a weekend or two instead of taking three months."

The problem lie in the fact that the mechanism expects a crown in the dead center of the watch's side, while Apple's fake crown lives towards the top instead. The solution: a pulley which turns motion on the original crown into activity within the mechanism, despite their lack of alignment.

"The crown only works to wind the first ~20% because after that the pulley system I made does not have enough friction to overcome the main spring," Spiggle admits. "It fully winds from the rotor in about two days of constant use. It lasts the Seiko-rated 40 hours easily after winding the rest of the way with the rotor."

Spiggle has fully documented the build process on the project's Instructable page.