Hello All,

I sent this question out to a number of watchmaker friends of mine, and one of them who is also quite familiar with this movement shared his comments, which I'll repost here (without attribution):

"Basically the 1045 was a cheap vertical clutch chronograph. It has a couple of plastic risers and a plastic date platform that holds down the chronograph hammers on the disk dial side. Main problems are wear to the stem slot, causing the stem to come disengaged, and problems in the auto system, causing problems in auto and manual winding.

Amazingly, ETA has decided to re-release the movement as the C01.211 and with a new plastic escape wheel and pallet fork. Tissot is currently using it."

A little later he added this:

"I finally had some time to read over some of the posts on Chronocentric and I must say that Jack Freedman pretty much covered it. Certainly its true that any watch can suffer from the same problems I mentioned but the 1045's that I've seen almost always suffer from severe damage (mostly due to people not having them serviced on a regular schedule) in the same few places. As Jack mentioned, servicing them is no picnic and troubleshooting them can be a real nightmare, given the complexity of the assembly process.

I can't say that the plastic driving parts are any more likely to fail than metal ones but it can certainly be harder to see the problems as they tend to be hidden by the general flexibility of the material in the first place.

As to their longevity, I think that they will be serviced as long as it seems profitable for ETA to continue to produce replacement parts. Given that Omega still routinely fixes 565's from the 60's, I don't see why they won't continue to see replacement parts for 1045's for some time."

- A. Watchmaker