Watch Thread

I bought my wife a Citizen ecodrive for her birthday last year. She was looking for something where she didn’t need to change the battery all the time and white and this satisfied those requirements fine.

At full charge it should be able to keep time for several months if kept in total darkness. On low charge it lets you know by shifting the second hand 2 seconds instead of 1 second, but that hasn’t happened yet.

I like the build quality and it’s pretty accurate. My G-Shock is off by 20 seconds per month while the Citizen is only 4-5 seconds a month. The last time I set it was for daylight savings at the end of March and it’s currently 9 seconds ahead of the time server I use for reference.

I’m looking at Seiko watches currently but wasn’t aware of QC issues. I know they recently had a Street Fighter series which was nice. Especially Chun-Li

 

I bought one for mine, on one of my trips to London, five or six years ago. They are not all expensive, especially if a sale is on.

She took it to the shop for a new battery. Even I had completely forgotten that it was solar charged! The shop man said, we can change the battery, but they are expensive: just keep it under a lamp for a few days. That worked.

 

Apparently the battery doesn’t need to be replaced for 9 years. 5 years is too soon for sure

 

That's good to know. We had actually forgotten the whole USP of the thing!

 

Was on my shortlist. When I go watch-hunting I take my time.

The issue is that mail services in NL are no longer as reliable as they once were (pre-2020). Thus eating the customs fee/taxes is okay, but dealing with lousy mail/package delivery is not.

I know certain Japanese products are of such high quality that they are worth it if they meet your exact specifications
(audio, photography, watches, manga, cinema etcetera).

 

I did not know that Ulysse Nardin had an orgy watch

Spoiler: NSFW

https://youtube.com/shorts/STUOPREnyVA?si=WTuLuFfVP8q6nDsq

BTW it’s $300k. For super rich swingers

 

Why I wasn't tagged on that watch?

 

i came across this gadget

https://ganance.com/

It basically adds smartwatch features to your traditional watch

 

At hampton Court Palace. This would have been much more apropo if I was wearing a Tudor...

 

I'm a bit late to this party, but - because we have headphone measurement rigs, there's an app for that:



This one is for Windows, but there are others for other OSes around as well. These programs will record via a mic and sound card to give the same sort of analyses you'd get from a proper timegrapher, ie not only rate/rate error but other beat-dependent parameters that might allow diagnosis of mechanical problems.

My 60-year-old Aquastar recently started running stupid fast and became impossible to regulate without overcompensating. Watch-O-Scope provided data suggesting a solution:



The program can produce traditional timegrapher-style displays like the one above, or amplitude-based displays that are useful when there's a lot of background noise: below, the two bolder lines are the tick & tock, the 'background' red pixels are ambient noise. The big vertical line is Mrsdegraded dropping something on the floor above my head:



These results suggest my watch might have become magnetized. While it wasn't running overly fast, I'd already adjusted the regulator well into negative territory, and the amplitude was low. After some passes through a demagnetizer, pushing it around my field compass resulted in almost no deflection, and reanalysis indicated some changes:



The rate is now negative, and amplitude, while still on the low side, is getting towards more acceptable for a movement this old. The beat error remains a bit high but because this movement doesn't have an adjustable stud carrier, reducing it would require disassembling the balance and tweaking the hairspring mounts - which with my DIY skills would likely result in disaster, so I'll live with it.

Timegrapher measurements, even in different positions, really only represent snapshots compared to what happens during actual wearing (@Cspirou alluded to this earlier), so I'll keep an eye on this over the next few days to see how it behaves after re-regulating. While also keeping it away from the speakers etc...

 

If you're looking for a guide to all the workings of mechanical watches, this page has great illustrations and descriptions:

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

Excellent 3D drawings, many of which are animated and can be run at different speeds, can be turned to view in different directions, and/or can be exploded.