How to Choose a Mechanical Watch
Getting the Best out of Automatic Mechanical Wrist Watches
Mar 2, 2009
Mechanical spring-powered watches are more than luxury items for collectors. Consumer brands continue to have mechanicals in their line up. Quality Swiss and Japanese automatic watches can be had for US$200 or less.
Popular brands include Invicta, Seiko, Citizen and Hamilton.
Mechanical Watch Advantages
Frequent travelers will find it easy to adjust the time for different time zones, more easily than with a digital watch.
With mechanical watches, there are no worries about the battery going dead at a bad time (when camping, traveling in a strange country, fighting off zombies as the last human alive in New York).
Automatic self-winding mechanicals are the most convenient. The only maintenance required is a time adjustment every week, and a date adjustment every two months (for months that have less than 31 days).
What about solar or hand-motion powered quartz watches (Citizen Eco-Drive, Casio Tough Solar, Seiko Kinetic)? Quartz watches need a rechargeable battery or capacitor to store electricity. These batteries last for years, but like mobile phone batteries, will still need to be replaced.
Mechanical Watch Accuracy
Watches with jewels are more accurate. Not for decoration, these are low-friction bearings for the gear wheels. The number of jewels is normally printed on the watch dial, or engraved on the back of the watch. Around 15 to 20 jewels is a good number to have.
Watch repair shops can adjust a 20 jewel mechanical watch to an accuracy of 5 to 10 seconds a day or better: about a minute a week.
New watches need time to break in. Owners should wait a month for the mechanism to settle down before sending the watch for adjustment. Unadjusted watches can run fast or slow from 15 to 60 seconds a day. Anything more is likely a mechanical fault, requiring repair.
Watch Features
Features such as date and day-of-week displays are common. Slightly more advanced features are
- "Hacking" where the second hand stops (that is, the watch stops) when the watch crown is pulled out to adjust the time. This allows the setting of the time to one second precision, allowing the wearer to play "let's synchronize our watches" like in the movies. Non-hacking watches can be stopped with light pressure to turn the watch hands backwards, but this is probably not good for the mechanism.
- Winding without shaking the watch. Not all automatic watches can be wound up by turning the crown (useful to top-up the spring tension after the watch hasn't been worn for a while).
More advanced features include
- Stop watch function.
- Moon phase display.
Maintenance
It is often recommended that mechanical watches be serviced every 2 years. This makes sense for expensive luxury watches.
For consumer watches, the cost of servicing a few times can be more than the cost of the watch. Owners may wish to wait longer: 5 to 10 years, or until a problem develops.
Mechanical versus Quartz and Digital Watches
Mechanical watches were developed to a high degree of refinement a few decades ago, before quartz watches took over the market. While not as accurate as a quartz watch, a shop-adjusted mechanical watch will be accurate enough for most uses.
Their simplicity (no need to read a 10-page manual to use one) and battery-less operation make them an appealing choice, even (or especially) in today's computerized digital world. "Skeleton" mechanical watches with transparent fronts or backs to show the workings of the inner mechanism, are popular.
Unlike the latest electronic gadgets, most are built to last, to be handed down from one generation to the next.
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