-According to Mikrolist, Ricoh was registered in 1938 and began producing watches in 1957; it competed in Japan with the two big ones, Seiko and Citizen, with beautiful models and movements of very good manufacture; it stopped manufacturing watches in 1979 and is currently engaged mainly in photocopiers.
I can't tell you the problem or not yours, but this brand was very good; the vintage Ricoh that I have works perfectly and the date has the number of the day and the date, with a quick pass from the crown; they were innovative watches and with boxes originals against the big 3 of the '70s, Seiko, Citizen and Orient;
Mine, "Spacial" model, with faceted glass;
Greetings!

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-According to Mikrolist, Ricoh was registered in 1938 and began producing watches in 1957; it competed in Japan with the two big ones, Seiko and Citizen, with beautiful models and movements of very good manufacture; it stopped manufacturing watches in 1979 and is currently engaged mainly in photocopiers.

So who has been making all the Ricoh branded watches produced since 1979?

 

I also want to mention the website that helped me with some pictures about the RICOH watches:

Ricoh’s Automatic Watch Movements

Ricoh was the number four Japanese manufacturer of self-developed mechanical watch movements, after Seiko, Citizen and Orient.

watch-movements.eu

From what year is your watch please ?

In Romania they were really rare before 1989 as my watchmaker told me. He told me that some Romanians working in some Middle East countries building oil drilling platforms brought such watches from time to time. I have a kind of brown colour dial that was quite appealing to some Middle East countries in those times.

 

I can't tell you much, but I assume this watch is from the early '70s - starting in the middle of the decade, Seiko basically stopped using mechanical movements, and Citizen also started using more Quartz watches at the time - I assume Ricoh did this, too, because when I do see Ricoh watches on japanese auction sites, they tend to be Quartz.

Seiko and Citizen use a system where the first digit in the serial number stood for the year - maybe Ricoh did this, too? In that case, your watch would date to 1974, because "4" is the first digit in the serial number. Now, I'm not sure of this, but I'd call it a "half-educated guess" ;-)

I also know that the U.S. watchmaker Hamilton and Ricoh cooperated on electrical watches, basically from the start of the Ricoh watch production. Pretty much cutting-edge technology at the time - in an electrical watch, the mainspring part was replaced by a battery, so the watch would not need to be wound at all.

 

If you watchmaker can't help you, there is little chance of us being able to help you unless your watchmaker is not really any good! The only thing that I can say is that, unless the cannon pinion or the hour pinion lack teeth, the hour pinion might have too much shake. When you take the dial off a movement, there should be a little bent "washer" underneath that pushes the hour pinion down. If this is missing, there is scope for the hour pinion to be pushed upwards to the extent where it can rotate freely and independently of the cannon (= minute) pinion. In such a case, it might jump an hour. But if this is not the cause of it all, I really don't know what's going on without being able to see it in person.

Hartmut Richter

 

Is it ok if for a Ricoh automatic watch if you manual wind for a bit but just for the first time use before putting it at wrist ? Is it ok just to only automatically wind even if it was not worn for a very long time ?
In my first question I want to know if this watch can be manually wind just for the first time and when using it the next days you just put it at your wrist and it will automatically wind. Someone told me that you should do this to a Ricoh watch but not to an Orient (and other Japanese automatic watches).

 

It is OK for practically any automatic to give it a few turns of manually winding if it has run out of energy completely. With some Seiko calibres, this is not possible - you have to wave the watch around for a while - but most other automatics will do it. The trouble with automatics is that the automatic winding system is not decoupled from the manual winding so that, as the power builds up and resistance from the mainspring increases, some of the manual winding power is diverted to the automatic winding system, making the gears in that spin rather faster than they were really designed to do. But a "manual kick start" never really hurt any automatic watch.

Hartmut Richter

 

Two years ago I wrote about a problem with setting the hour and a click sound and that I felt in my fingers a sensation like there is something that hangs in the teeth of the gears inside the movement.

I again serviced the watch to a watchmaker and this time succesfully found the cause. There were four parts involved in the problem and that were changed with RICOH parts from another watch. I can tell about two of them. One of them was a kind of axle with two close together and vertical cogwheels on it (with design similarly to a railway wheel and axle) which is situated in the zone of the calendar window at the hour 3. Another one was a cogwheel near the center of the movement that is involved in the minute hand direction. This cogwheel worked well if you tried to turn the minutes counter clockwise direction, but if you turned the minutes hand clockwise the cogwheel worked loose. The next two parts were situated between the axle described above and the cogwheel near the center. Now the watch works flawlessly !

 

Glad to hear it! Thanks for the update.

Hartmut Richter

 

How do you date this watch ? 70s or 80s ?

 

I will come with another update. I think that the watch was made somewhere between 1966 and 1968. I found a website where there is a table at the section named "The Ricoh 30 series" where for the caliber of my watch which is numbered 48 the manufacturing date is not known, but the caliber 48 is placed between the caliber 44 made in 1966 and the caliber 49 made in 1968.

Ricoh’s Automatic Watch Movements

Ricoh was the number four Japanese manufacturer of self-developed mechanical watch movements, after Seiko, Citizen and Orient.

watch-movements.eu