Fixing the Indiglo and beeper on a Timex Expedition watch (Shallow Thoughts)

Fixing the Indiglo and beeper on a Timex Expedition watch

For half a year now my Timex watch (yes, I'm one of those old fogeys who actually wears a watch) hasn't had a light. And it doesn't beep when I use the stopwatch. I don't care so much about the beep, but the light was handy.

I replaced the battery at some point, and apparently got something wrong when I put it back together. I've been meaning to go back in and figure out what I got wrong, but life intervened, so I've been putting up with it for way too long, until now.

I felt a bit better about having messed up when some web searching showed that many, many people have this exact same problem. Some of the web pages I found had succestions that got the beeper working again; but the light still didn't work.

Curiously, it worked fine with the watch disassembled: the watch's brains and battery are all in one self-contained module, and if you push the tiny button in the front, the light comes on. It's just that the big button in the front didn't push the tiny button on the watch module.

Maybe there was some tiny piece that went sproinging off to freedom the first time I opened the watch. No matter; if so, it's long gone now. But you know what? Several pieces of masking tape stacked up over the inner button worked fine -- and now my Indiglo light works again.

A few other tips for Timex fixers, some of which aren't obvious from the how-to sites:

• The "scratches" on my crystal -- so bad I'd been thinking it was time to buy a new watch -- were actually melamine (or some such material) that had rubbed off from the artists' table I use as a desk. It cleaned off nicely with alcohol.
• I used a needle to open the spring clip over the battery.
• Rotating the back cover 180° was probably what fixed the beeper.
• You may or may not need to reset the watch by shorting the two contacts as suggested on the label inside the watch. If you see an error code or the watch doesn't work right, try shorting the contacts.