Zetron melody watch – Scotland the Brave

Even as a child I thought Scotland the Brave was a stirring anthemic powerhouse of a song.

So finding this melody watch with a great melodic version of it was a lucky score!

Melody watches rarely display the song they play so it’s always a bit of a crapshoot when you get a watch that says ‘melody watch’, ‘musical watch’ or has a graphic of some musical notes.

Only the ‘officially’ licensed Beatles melody watches display the songs they contain. I suspect this may have something to do with avoiding paying copyright fees, or else the programmers of these Hong Kong specials didn’t really know the songs they were coding (most likely the former though).

This was a strange beast when it arrived, a bonus in a lot of non-working watches from the UK.

Putting batteries in and holding the piezo speaking on it and you could hear the alarm play. That was all, though, nothing on the display.

It’s sat in a box since but pulled it out today to see if some life could be breathed into it.

Removed the oscillating crystal and tested it to see if it was faulty – nope, working OK. Off came the trimmer capacitor to test capacitance – and it was in range too. There were two capacitors on the board, that were about the only components left to test. These can fail, not because they wear out, or break, but because they were installed with conductive paste which tends to degrade over time, losing its conductivity.

These ones also had resin from the blobchip on them so getting them off was more difficult still. But they duly came off, were cleaned, conductive paste removed and replaced with solder, reinstalled, and the watch put back together.

Here’s the result – a nice, fully-working watch, with Scotland the Brave ready to blare out with the press of a button, or when the alarm sounds.

There’s no stopwatch on this one, just the melody alarm, day/date and time – but it’s a great melody and now a great watch too!