Site Policies

Refund and Returns Policy

Due to the nature of vintage electronics, sadly it isn’t feasible to offer any guarantees. However, given these watches have stood the test of time so far, the likelihood of imminent failure is negligible. In lieu of refunds and returns, a comprehensive primer on the generally rather small risks of failure is offered, in the hope of providing a reasonable degree of assurance.

Power cell leakage

Anecdotally, the leading cause of digital watch failure is 1.5V alkaline power cell leakage, largely occurring after the cell has expired and been left in the watch for some time. 3V lithium cells are all but immune to this problem, while 1.55V silver oxide cells are somewhere in between. Thankfully, 1.5V and 1.55V cells are interchangeable, so this risk to 1.5V watches can be somewhat avoided by using silver oxide cells.

So Primitive’s stock is stored in an unpowered state, until a watch is ordered (except for solar watches, which are kept charged to maximise power cell life). The buyer may request the power cell not be fitted but supplied, due to concern regarding the slightly elevated risk of leakage during the low pressure of air freight, or the buyer may request the power cell not be supplied if the buyer’s national postal system is known or suspected to pose difficulties regarding this, due to a halo of paranoia surrounding the unrelated lithium-ion rechargeable battery chemistry known to be a fire hazard (looking at you, Thailand).

Water ingress

Watches rely on rubber seals to keep water out; depending on the specific composition of the rubber and the environmental conditions it experiences, these seals will gradually lose more or less effectiveness over time. Although manufacturers may recommend seal replacement as often as every couple of years, this is wildly conservative – it may not be unreasonable to expect little cause for concern in the first twenty years. Beyond that, results tend to vary, but a major cause of seal failure is a lack of care during power cell replacement resulting in a poorly seated caseback gasket becoming pinched and elongated, often making it impossible to successfully re-seat the gasket.

Otherwise, sealing failure may eventually set in when the rubber has lost nearly all of its elasticity, which will usually take anywhere from a long time to a very long time (30 to 60 years?)… Unfortunately, most digital watches don’t employ circular caseback gaskets, which are of course readily available, unlike the highly non-generic gasket on anything without a circular caseback. However, the application of silicone grease to the gasket interface can restore some measure of waterproofing, and is a matter of routine. A missing gasket is rather more difficult to address, and a better solution than employing double-sided tape is yet to present itself. Any such deficiency is duly noted in the description.

The caseback gasket is the only seal on a handful of touchscreen watches, but everything else has additional pusher grommets. Fortunately these tiny little o-rings are both easily sourced and tend to fail in a good way – by getting tight rather than leaking, but on the other hand they are rather labour-intensive to replace. Any watches in the collection which arrived with tight pushers have had their grommets replaced, so water ingress past the pushers is quite unlikely to be a cause of failure.

LCD failure

There are four general failure modes for LCDs:

• Aging of the polariser film, probably by UV, reducing its effectiveness
• The film’s adhesive can gradually turn brown, and become quite dark; whether this is due to UV or the specific adhesive is unknown
• A rainbow pattern can form inside the glass sandwich, where a patch of the display approaches the opposite polarisation
• The seal around the edge can fail, allowing air inside which forms black areas; this is known as screen bleed
• Missing or extraneous segments are almost never the fault of the LCD itself

The first two issues can be addressed, although what may appear to be a failing polariser may be revealed to be a failing capacitor on the PCB, if viewing the LCD through a suitably oriented polariser doesn’t cause activated segments to appear dark. Front polariser replacement has been performed on a number of watches in the collection, and the reproduction of screen graphics is being investigated in order to enable rear polariser replacement. Unfortunately, any rainbow pattern, which may be barely visible, will be greatly accentuated by a fresh polariser.

The dreaded screen bleed has spoiled most of the models it affects by now; it appears that vulnerability to this problem may have been largely solved at some point in the mid to late 80s. Casio’s duplex LCD models were particularly affected, no doubt due to the extra layer inherently doubling the risk of leakage, possibly increased by other factors of the duplex construction, and other makes and models of the era also fell victim at lower rates.

By now, it’s somewhat unlikely that any screen bleed will dramatically worsen, but it’s possible that large variations in temperature or pressure may affect this. Air freight poses a slight risk of worsening any existing bleed (and virtually no risk of initiating it), but a comparison of pre-purchase photos with the current state of bleeding screens shows no noticeable worsening after an air journey of more than 8000km. These comparison photos are provided with the other photos of affected watches, together with the time interval between, to inform your own judgement.

Random failures

Entropy comes for us all. The more intricate a device, the greater the number of possible failures. It may well be the case that earlier integrated circuits prove more robust than modern ones, due to the much larger features of the etched components in the chip. On the other hand, early ICs are far more susceptible to death by static discharge; for this reason it’s probably worth wearing latex gloves when performing battery replacements or other work on watches from the 70s. It might even be the case that elevated exposure to cosmic rays during air freight does a watch in, once per 50,000 hours or something like that. In the event of such incredibly bad luck, in many cases the watch will retain a significant fraction of its value as a source of spares.

If the preceding litany of miniscule risks has you spooked, please remember that these risks are in fact rather negligible; out of approximately 65 vintage watches purchased in running condition, not a single one has arrived not functioning perfectly. These watches have stood the test of time, and will almost certainly provide many more years of faithful service.

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Standard boilerplate stuff:

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