You can see it on the tips of the little hooks that engage with the inner wheel. Anyone with a vintage Rolex is aware that these don’t come cheap (usually around £100 a pop), and they do wear. The balance staff pivots, all the wheel pivots, the barrel and barrel arbor, and, most importantly, the reverser wheels. And that will affect a fair amount of crucial parts. You can have as much oil in there as you want to, you still have wear. Any mechanical device that moves causes friction, and friction causes wear. So in my book, this will degrade the oil faster. In the second scenario, we keep the watch going, and the oil between the jewels and pinions will start moving as well, exposing more surface to the oxygen. In the first one, the watch doesn’t run, the oil doesn’t move, and the oxygen will of course over time degrade the oil. So the oil in our watch is exposed to that constantly, even when it’s waterproof, as there will be oxygen contained in the air inside the case. This is where I want to put some arguments forward …įirstly, there is the myth that oil “dries up” when it’s not moved around. It comes with the territory.The question of using an autowinder for watches that aren’t worn has been discussed long and wide, but without a general consent. Then again, we’re talking about collecting an archaic timekeeping technology here. Yes, it’s overly whistful and wholly unnecessary today. Like shifting between gears in a manual transmission car, or placing the needle on a spinning record, it’s an obsolete-yet-satisfying act that deserves to be preserved amongst enthusiasts. I quickly learned to make winding a daily ritual upon waking up: twist the crown, hear it rachet, feel the mainspring tighten until you can’t turn the crown anymore. When I first got my hand-winding watch, I’ll admit that I initially often forgot to wind it, only to find my watch hours behind the actual time when I looked down to check it. Sure, that tactile experience may come at the cost of convenience, but it’s worth it. But physically having to wind a watch adds another tactile dimension to the experience. Find a watch, buy a watch, affix watch to the wrist, then look at it. No matter how you want to justify watch collecting as a hobby, there’s no getting around how fundamentally passive it is. It may seem trivial, but for so many enthusiasts the appeal of having a high-end watch is experiencing the machinery underneath.Ī hand-winding watch is one of the few instances in which the wearer can truly engage with their timepeice. Take it away, though, and you have full access to the bridges, screws, gears and other machinery. The other big downside to an automatic rotor is that it will always obscure about half of the movement if it’s visible through a transparent case back. Hand-winding also leads to prettier movements. It’s for this reason that most ultra-thin watches favor hand-winding. This, in turn, adds to the height of the movement, thus making the overall watch fatter. Automatic watches are almost always thicker than hand-winders because they need an oscillating rotor affixed to the bottom of the movement to wind up the mainspring. There are a couple of advantages that hand-winders have over their automatic counterparts. I reckon that if you were to ask a watch executive or designer why this is, they’d tell you nobody actually wants to have to wind their watch every day. Aside from those, most mechanical watches these days come packing automatic winding. There are a few instances where this isn’t true - many niche-within-a-niche watch types have them examples include the classicly-styled field watches such as the Weiss or ultra-thin dress watches, like Christopher Ward’s C5 595. It’s a shame, then, that there’s a dearth of hand-winding watches on the market. Secondly, now that I own a hand-winding watch that I wear on a daily basis, I feel the same way. One, this was probably the only time I witnessed somebody really getting the whole mechanical watch thing for the first time. Really makes it apparent it’s mechanical.” Usually “that’s an ugly watch.” It was to my surprise, then, that once he had returned the Weiss to me, he said something along the lines of this: “I like that you have to wind it to get it going. He, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t a watch guy, whose opinions on timepieces were mostly concerned with aesthetics. About a year ago, I coordinated a watch loan - specifically a Weiss mechanical field watch - for a photo shoot a colleague was working on.
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