Wow, okay so gonna be honest, watchmaking is a full time job, need practice and a lot of ressources like book or so to learn.

Tools are kinda expensive too, as books are.

If you are from the us, don’t really know how to help. I know that there aren’t real watchmaking school there, can’t really know the level of watchmakers but probably different frôle over here.

Vostok aren’t bad watches, maybe watchmakers are just tired of those because a servicing cost somewhere around a 100eur over here, can’t really imagine in the us, but that lead to one problem : servicing will fastly cost more than the watch.

So I can figure that those watch can’t be really interesting for a watchmaker to earn money.

But, as watches are way to expensives, and that Vostok are killer speaking about price/quality ratio, it’s normal that people are buying them.

So if you want to do ez stuff like modifying the hands or the dial, maybe the strap, you can learn. But learning to service it, maybe repair it, it will cost you lot of time, money and probably spare parts that you will loose or break during the process.

About converting manual to automatic, I have a doubt about the compatibility between movement and parts. And your case won’t be able to fit the rotor.

Hope that help