Excellent post - saved for future reference!

Cheers
Mike

 

Awesome work! Thanks a lot Dave!

 

This is may be off-topic, but is there a way to hack a VHP's seconds hand to correct for several years worth of drift?

 

If you pull the crown and turn it slow, the seconds hacks to :00 and you can set the time to the minute.

 

Nice information. I have changed mine myself and did everything you described.

Good post.

 

Mr. Moderator is deciding what action to take on the OP.

 

If the hands do not park at 12-oclock the watch is faulty !

I was told by my anonymous source that if the hands don't park at 12 o'clock a short crown press takes you into a menu where you can adjust the hands as well, similar to how you adjust the perpetual calendar setting. I have not tried to do this however, so I can't vouch for its accuracy.

 

I tried to do it, but because ( I guess ) the hands had parked OK it ignored my short presses.
I have changed my procedure to suggest that re-synchronisation may be possible if the hands do not park at 12.

 

Thanks so much for posting this! When I first got my VHP, I remember searching for this information in vain.

Discovered my watch was at the "all hands at 12" position when I pulled it out a week ago. I thought I'd missed the EOL timeframe completely and would be starting from scratch, but, after putting in the battery and doing the 2-sec long press, I found the hands in the right position for today (1/10/2023), so the battery must not have been dead, dead yet.

I did find the factory battery was a Renata 380 vs the 394 I saw mentioned in another thread. From what I can find online, this is pretty much the 394 but in a lead free version? Anyway, a 394 did the trick and fit the battery holder perfectly.

Unrelated to the battery change, I hadn't worn my VHP in a while because I was kind of disappointed with the case finish. It has so many sharp edges, including the crown guards. When trying to spin the crown quickly to change hours, I feel like I'm cutting/scraping my finger pads. Zero chamfer/round on those at all. And, as I've seen elsewhere, the case back engraving has no smoothing either and is very sharp. Didn't know what other peoples' experiences had been.

 

I did find the factory battery was a Renata 380 vs the 394 I saw mentioned in another thread. From what I can find online, this is pretty much the 394 but in a lead free version? Anyway, a 394 did the trick and fit the battery holder perfectly.

The 380/394 have the same dimensions. The 394 is the std (low) drain version, the 380 is the high-drain version of the same basic cell. High drain means the cell is capable of higher current draw with little voltage drop, high current draw functions like chronograph functions and in the VHP line flipping between local and GMT time would qualify as "high drain". The 380 is nearly impossible to find, it looks like Renata is the only company that makes one best I could tell.

With the 394 cell you'll likely wear it out faster than a 380 if you use those advanced functions often (assuming your VHP has them). My guess is if you have a 3 hander or rarely use the chrono/GMT functions in a VHP watch you'd not see any difference in battery life.

Also, if you believe Renata's datasheet, their 394 seems to have a higher mAh rating than one from other brands, with Energizer being way less than every other brand's 394 offering. I've never seen any of the other Energizer batteries having such a low mAh rating compared to their competition.

And mercury was used in the past in silver-oxide cells (ie the cells used in most traditional quartz watches) not lead. Most every silver-oxide cell is mercury-free these days.

 

One other thing I was wondering about (and this is really just a thought experiment since I don't expect to be around at the time), is how do you set the years past 20xx? If the hour hand represents the tenths position (e.g. 2 o'clock = 202x), do you just keep going around the dial to get to 21xx? e.g. 9 o'clock is 209x, 10 o'clock is 210x, 11 o'clock is 211x, 12 o'clock is 212x, 1 rotation + 1 o'clock is 213x?

~Dan

 

When setting the year, the hands roll from 9:45 (99) to 12:00 (00).

Leap years are the same next century as in the current (except for 2000/2100) so your great grandkids shouldn't have a problem.

 

Long story short, it's easy as long as you are comfortable with the correct tiny screw drivers and tweezer.

It took me quite few minutes to find the missing screw. So maybe the watch was effectively reset, I think I'm lucky the watch works normal after the mobile sync.

Original battery was Renata, new one was Maxell.

Will tell more details later.

 

I did my battery replacement 2 days ago, by luck I guess.

 

So it's just unscrew the two screws holding the battery in place, exchange the battery, and then backwards?

How long will the battery last nominally?

Cheers,
Oliver

 

Goldtop : the expected life of the battery according to Longines is 4 yrs. using a Renata 380 battery. Some owners here have reported less life than that, like 2-3 yrs.

Huchiz, what kind of life did you get on the original battery? And if you used a Maxell did you use a 394 instead (SR936SW)? Maxell makes a 380 (SR936W) but I could never locate a seller. Of the other major battery companies no one else makes a 380 except those two.

 

I did this with mine as well. Simple and easy as long as you have the right tools, a steady hand, and patience.

 

This is my procedure for battery-change on the current Longines VHP
I have carried it out about 10 times on 3-hand and GMT models.
Longines say that a watch will not ‘die’ until it has been more than 1 day without a battery, so you should not need to re-synchronize the date.
But I think that the procedure is still useful because :-

• It stops you pushing the crown before the watch is ready
• It tells you how to check the stored date
• It stops you from accidently changing the stored date.

I think that it will probably allow a ‘dead’ watch to be resurrected, but have not had the courage to ‘kill’ my watch by leaving it for a few days without a battery !

The VHP date-display compensates for 4-year cycle ‘standard’ leap years and 100-year cycle ‘miss out’ leap years but not the 400-year cycle ‘leave in’ leap years.
On the 29th February 2400 its date will change to 1 and will need to be re-synchronized !

A warning !
The battery is held in place by 2 tiny screws, skill and the correct screwdriver are needed to carry out the change. The first time that I did it I managed to lose 1 of the screws.

---- Here is the procedure ----
No need to pull out the crown

Remove the battery, and leave the watch without battery for 5 minutes.
I have found that the watch does not enter the correct ‘new battery’ procedure unless given a few minutes to detect that the battery has been removed.
Longines say that the watch will remember the date so long as the battery is not removed ( or discharged ) for more than 1 day.
As an experiment I left the watch without battery for 3 days !
The watch did not forget anything, but I had to re-synchronise to 'bring the date up-to-date' .

Fit the new battery
The date wheel should do a complicated dance to check its position,
- then end up reading the stored date.
The hands should do a complicated dance to check their positions
- then they should all park at 12 oclock.
If the date-wheel ends up reading the wrong date or the ‘Longines wing’ then :-
- re-synchronisation is needed (see below).
If the hands do not park at 12-oclock

• re-synchronisation is probably needed.
• I have never seen this condition, but a short press of the crown may allow recovery

After the hands have parked wait for 5 minutes.
I have found that the watch ignores any crown-presses for a few minutes after the end of the hand-dance. Perhaps it is preparing for the synchronisation procedure. When I first tried doing battery-changes this ‘sleep time’ had me worried !

Then long-press the crown.
After about 2 seconds the hands should change position to indicate the stored date.
Suppose that the watch has remembered 12th November 2028

• Seconds hand moves to the 11-hour mark = November
• Minutes hand moves to the 8-hour mark = 8 year
• Hour hand moves past the 2-hour mark = 20 year
• The date-wheel should already be reading 12.

If the stored date is the same as the current date

• Long-press the crown

• After about 2 seconds :-

• The time reading should change to 12 am (mid-day)
• The date should not change
• The watch should start to tick

- Set the correct time in the normal way.
- Job done

If the stored date is wrong the watch needs to be re-synchronized
- Suppose that the correct date is 25th August 2023
- short-press the crown, the seconds hand rocks.
- By rotating the crown move it to the 8 hour mark (August)
- short-press the crown, the date rocks.
- By rotating the crown, move it to 25
- short-press the crown, the minutes hand rocks.
- By rotating the crown change the time to 15 minutes past 2 (23).
- The new reading is 2 hour 15minutes and 40 seconds on the 25th
- which indicates a date of 25th August 2023

- Long-press the crown.
- After about 2 seconds :-

• The time reading should change to 12 am (mid-day).
• The date should not change
• The watch should start to tick

- Set the correct time in the normal way.
- Job done

edit 2022 09 01
-- added note about problem in February 2400
-- changed 'hands do not park' indication from 'fault' to 'needs to be re-synchronized'
edit 2022 09 12
-- added note about watch surviving for 3 days without battery

Late to this party, but this is great news. I have always wanted a current 3-hand VHP, but their dependence on the manufacturer for setting the date had stopped me... until now! Thank you.

Did I read that Longines are stopping the VHP? I'd better be quick...

 

Did I read that Longines are stopping the VHP? I'd better be quick...

Yes. Get it while you can.

 

I'll add another data point to this thread. My brand new Longines Conquest VHP (purchased from an AD just over a month ago) started doing the EOL movement of the seconds hand. Not wanting to send a brand new watch in for a warranty battery change I used these instructions for the post-change validation of the perpetual calendar.

My perpetual calendar was correct after the battery change, and with these excellent instructions I avoided messing up the calendar settings.

Thanks @DaveM!

 

Well my new Longines VHP GMT has the wrong date by 3 days and it won’t adjust. Guess QC was missing that day. On the way back for exchange.

 

IMHO Flash setting from your phone would have cured the problem

 

Sounds like we should maybe start a list of compatible phones in order to keep one around in the future for this purpose.

My iPhone SE 3d Generation works.

 

You could just pull the battery and reinstall and follow the procedure above to reset the calendar.

 

Just adjusted my 3 hand VHP following the OP’s guide. When adjusting the date allow the adjustments to finish completely before rotating the crown again to go to the next date. I think I rotated the crown too quickly between movements of the date and couldn’t get it to set to the proper day. Taking battery out and redoing things from step 1 fixed the problem, but still FYI.

 

Thanks for that.
I am not sure at what stage you had the problem.
I have added step-numbers to the procedure, can you indicate at what step you had the problem and perhaps give a bit more explanation.
I can then add a warning to the OP.

 

ALSO my hands parked post adjustment to 12:00PM not AM as indicated in the OP the second time I adjusted, but the first time it parked to 12:00AM. No clue what caused this change in behavior.

 

When I recently changed the battery in my 3-hand VHP I put in a Renata 394 because that's what I had on hand. I wasn't happy with the accuracy after that, and also one day the watch experienced a large jump in time (gained about 0.125 of a second in one day). No idea if this could be due to the battery or not but to rule it out I ordered a strip of Renata 380 batteries.

Today I put the 380 in there and followed the process. The time was approximately 10:12 a.m. when I did the change.

Just as you experienced it seems that when the hands parked at 12 it was at 12 p.m., not 12 a.m. because I moved the watch back to 10:12, not forward to 10:12, and the date didn't change back a day to the 22nd, and the date didn't roll forward to the 24th when noon arrived.

Honestly I didn't really think about a.m. or p.m. when I put the 394 in back on March 15th. I did that battery change at about 1:38 p.m. After the hands parked at 12 I'm pretty sure that I only dialed forward an hour to set the time to 1:xx p.m. Assuming my recollection is correct (that I only advanced one hour, not 13 hours) then that would mean the watch was at 12 p.m. when the hands parked that time as well.

When the hands park at 12 it would make a lot more sense for it to be Noon instead of Midnight. Most people won't be changing a battery at 2 in the morning, so parking the hands at Noon makes setting the watch to the correct time a lot simpler. Imagine if the battery change was done at 5 p.m. If the hands parked at Midnight you'd have to advance 17 hours. If the hands parked at Noon you only have to advance 5 hours.

Actually, @DaveM I think there is an error in your instructions. Here's what you have for Step 5:

(5) If the stored date is the same as the current date

• Long-press the crown
• After about 2 seconds :-
• The time reading should change to 12 am (mid-day)
• The date should not change
• The watch should start to tick

- Set the correct time in the normal way.
- Job done

Mid-day is 12:00 p.m., not 12:00 a.m.

 

Dave your guide is invaluable to owners.

Ron, could you make this thread a sticky? Dave, if Ron makes the procedure a sticky could you create a single thread of your latest/greatest battery changing procedure? that should be the sticky with a link to this thread at the bottom of the post.

Now if someone could crack the code for adjusting the hands when they're out of kilter.... 😁

 

This is how it works now :-

• This is a normal thread, anybody can post about ideas or problems.
• My first post is the guide. I keep it up-to-date ( & add revision notes ) based on the content of later posts.

It would be good if there was a sticky

• It could contain only a copy of the guide ( first post in this thread).
• Or contain a pointer to the guide ( first post in this thread).
• No extra posts to the sticky allowed

The sticky could include a request for people to post about ideas and problems in this thread.

I think that the excellent sticky 'A quick presentation of the HAQ-EZChronos experiment' was meant to work like this, but has accumulated a lot of normal 'chatter'.

 

A stickie can be made, but what are the contents? Merely this thread?
Due to future bloatage, I will lock this stickie.

 

Regarding the proposal to sticky this, I support the idea. But it really feels like the sticky should be in the Longines forum, not the HAQ forum.

I diligently searched for battery change instructions quite some time ago when wanting to do a change on my VHP chronograph, and didn't find this thread. I even made a post in the Longines forum and nobody knew the answer.

But where ever it gets stickied I think it's good to allow discussion to continue in the stickied thread. That way feedback can be offered to contribute to the ongoing maintenance of the instructions, and any problems, tips, hints, etc. will all be in the same place as the instructions.

 

We now have the stickty 'VHP battery guide'

To view the guide (from here or the sticky) :-
Click on Battery change on the latest Longines VHP
This takes you to the first post in this thread, which is my battery-change guide.
I will update the guide to incorporate ideas posted later on in this thread.

To post any ideas, problems or comments :-
Just click on 'Jump to Latest' to go to the end of the thread

 

I just bought a Conquest VHP Chrono from a grey market vendor that was DOA. Mine has the plain black dial so I can only assume it's been sitting on the shelf for years. All hands were parked at 12 and didn't budge when I tried to take it out of power save. It seemed silly to return the watch without attempting a battery change.

This procedure worked great! The last saved date was March 23rd '23, so it had been fully dead for about a month. Date synchronization worked on the first try. I was only able to source a Renata 394 quickly so we'll see how long that lasts. However, so far so good and I really appreciate DaveM's time creating this tutorial!