Watches

I’ve been getting into watches now … yes, yet another quirky hobby/interest to get my head around and suck all my money ! 😀 Anyway, I thought I’d throw this article together to just explain some of the more technical aspects that have been fascinating me over the last month.

We’ve all probably had watches, especially if you are of an age over (say) 30, pre smart phones when carrying a hugely powerful, internet connected computer became normal. As a kid I had a Swatch and various quartz Timex or Casio watches, like the now ubiquitous black, 3-button F-91W, which I wore until the strap fell apart.

Then later I got myself a Fitbit and an iPhone and suddenly wearing a watch just because you want the time on your wrist became a lot less important. I had the time on my phone and it was a bit charmless but it was always accurate to the millisecond.

But recently my partner was buying some jewellery to treat herself and I bemoaned the fact that guys have so few options for jewellery … until I remembered watches! 

Movements

When I was a kid I was mainly given quartz watches because they are pretty foolproof – the time is accurate enough that you probably only need to correct it every few months and you just put a new battery in it every 2 years. A quartz movement is basically just a battery, a quartz crystal, a printed circuit board and a mechanism to move the hands or an LCD digital display. The crystal oscillates when electricity is passed across it at a known and fixed rate (in theory – see below) and the circuitry moves the time forward based on that crystal oscillation. The accuracy is ridiculously good – better than the highest quality mechanical movements – and you just don’t have to worry about them.

In terms of accuracy all you can do is use higher quality crystals and have more complicated circuitry that allows for minute variations in the oscillation rate caused by temperature variation etc. High Accuracy Quartz (HAQ) will achieve ±10 seconds per year but of course you pay more for it.

My mum had a manual-wind mechanical watch and I learned how to wind it but there was no way a child was going to be disciplined enough to remember to wind a watch every morning. My father had a lovely chunky automatic with a steel case – a proper man’s watch – and I remember marvelling at how he just had to keep moving it and it wound itself, as if by magic! Both were entirely mechanical with no batteries needed – just a clockwork mechanism in a case and a coiled spring to give it power. It’s amazing really when you think about it. We’ve had weight-driven clocks since the 1300s and pocket watches came along in the 1500s with incremental improvements appearing all the time but now we are at a stage where a very good automatic movement might give you ±2 seconds per day.

Modern improvements 

In the quartz world Japanese companies like Citizen and Seiko have innovated to improve the accuracy of quartz movements even further by picking up time signals transmitted around the world*. Most do this via the network of radio time transmitters but, for areas where the radio is weak or absent, they pick up GPS satellite signals. GPS is known as a system for locating your geographical position but they satellites actually just broadcast a time signal – with 1 satellite in range it can correct the time, and with 5 it can correct your timezone too.

[* There’s a small caveat to this in that many JDM watches will only be configured fo their Japanese receiver, so if you get one you can set it using an app called Clock Wave, which spoofs the local time as if it were being broadcast from the Japanese radio transmitter].

They have also striven to remove the need to keep replacing batteries by using solar panels to charge an internal rechargeable cell. On Citizen Eco-drive watches the panels are just behind or around the translucent dial and the cell can keep the watch running for up to 6-months in the dark – even for years if it has a stand-by mode. The cells themselves then last for between 15-20 years and are easily replaceable after that. I bought a JDM Seiko Selection solar watch recently (see image below) and it was fun to see it “wake up” when I took it out of the box, the hands automatically setting themselves to Japanese time. Luckily my model was one of the rarer ones that can receive European radio time signals and all I needed to do was change the timezone and force an update, which it did perfectly. 

Mechanical movements – a deeper dive

You might be thinking that, now we have accurate quartz then why do people still buy much less accurate automatics? Well, over the years watches have become less about telling the time and more like a piece of statement jewellery. They make the wearer feel good and they are a piece of tech that the owner enjoys engaging with. They can be a beautiful piece of jewellery; a fidget toy (one watch salesman actually admitted to liking his chronograph because it gave him buttons to fiddle with when he was anxious!); and something that engages with us – we obsess over keeping the time accurate and winding it up. Also the sheer pleasure of wearing a piece of exquisite mechanical refinement is satisfying in its own right. Quartz are nice but they lack … soul. 

So, if we think about mechanical movements, using a chunky pocket watch as an example, the mechanism can be divided into the following component parts:

• the winding gear – or “key-less works” from the days when not needing a key was a novelty! Most modern watches allow you to wind the main spring at the default position (0) and if you move it out it will halt the movement (called ‘hacking’) and allow you to move the hands to set the time.
• the power – the barrel and power train that gears up the barrel to wheels that spin for the hours, minutes & seconds. This is always a coiled spring made from hardened steel, housed inside a flat drum called the barrel. The main problem of watchmakers in the past was that springs don’t deliver even power – it’s high when fully wound but the power dies as the spring slowly unwinds. This meant that you can’t use it directly to control the time – you need something clever to release the power evenly and govern how the time is incremented … the balance and escapement (below)
• the balance & escapement – this is the watch equivalent of the pendulum in an old clock – the balance wheel sits over a coiled hair-spring and swings clockwise and anticlockwise, given impulse by a tiny device called the pallet fork, which in turn engages with the escape wheel. Together this regulates the power delivery and gives a consistent tick-tock that manages the watches speed. 
• the dial & hands – the part we all look at but which hides all the complexity beneath! Over the dial is the glass or acetate “crystal” and around the crystal is often a metal ring, called the “bezel”. 

In the above picture you can see the crown (the grooved pommel used to wind up the watch and set the time) at 1 o’clock and under the large bridge* there are 2 large wheels (one marked SEIKOSHA PRECISION) that convert a series of winding cogs underneath into force that winds up the main-spring in the barrel hidden underneath in the next layer that you can’t see until that big bridge is removed. On the left of the big wheel is a tiny little ratchet called “the click” and this makes the classic clicking sound as you wind the watch and prevents it from just unwinding through the winding gear. 

To the lower right is the smallest of the 3 bridges with a little lever and scale marked F(ast) and S(low) – this is the balance wheel regulator which gives you the ability to adjust the watch to run faster or slower. Directly below it you can see a  large brass wheel which sits over the hair-spring – you can’t make out this because the watch was running at the time I took the photo and it is blurred, but it is the watch’s “pendulum”. Below the balance, hidden by a semi-circular plate, is the pallet fork which engages with the little wheel. to the left, with widely spaced teeth, the escape wheel. Under the medium-sized “SEIKOSHA” bridge is the power train that is engaging with the big centre wheel that is running the hours and minutes on the dial. 

[* a bridge is a piece of metal that goes over wheels, giving them a pivot to work on]

Regulation 

As we have seen, most mechanical watches have a way to adjust how fast or slow it runs, called the regulator. In some watches there are also other subtle adjustments of the balance wheel and pallet fork interaction. Unlike a pendulum, which just swings under gravity, the balance wheel swings horizontally, being pushed by the back end of the pallet fork. The 2 different adjustments are: 

• Regulation: changing the effective length of the hair-spring 
• Beat: If the pallet fork’s neutral position is misaligned with regard to the impulse jewel on the balance then it will push harder on one side than the other so your “tick tock” will not be even and you’ll have what’s called a “beat error”. 

Most adjustments can be visualised by just remembering that the pallet fork provides a push to the balance wheel … how hard that push is depends on the power in your mechanism, created by the spring in the barrel. You speed it up or slow it down by slightly shortening or extending the length of the hair-spring.

Luckily we don’t have to make adjustments by trial and error because we have devices like the timegrapher. The commonest of these is the Weishi 1000 (below) which you can pick up fairly cheaply (£120) from AliExpress. It’s simply a microphone that listens to your watch ticks and then works out several key indicators of health, which you can use to interpret problems and make adjustments. You can twist the microphone to test the watch in different orientation and you’ll usually find that it can vary the readings quite significantly. In fact savvy automatic owners know that, if their watch gains seconds while being worn, leaving the watch on its side or back will actually slow the watch down enough to help correct it! 

The timegrapher here is showing that my Christopher Ward is working well within the COSC chronometer certification, giving an average of +2s/d. Manufacturers regulate their movements and then send them to COSC for certification. This doesn’t mean that you can’t take a normal movement and adjust it yourself to achieve similar scores, but it just means it has been done for you and you have a certificate to prove it. 

The timegrapher is showing:

• the accuracy – in seconds/day – this is the easiest thing possibly to understand but don’t think that it is all you need to know. The other readings are at least as important and knowing these will prevent you wasting a lot of time.
• the amplitude – the degrees of arc that the balance wheel is swinging, which is a proxy for the power being imparted to the balance wheel through the pallet fork and the general health/efficiency of the movement.
• the beat error – the variation in time between the ticks and the tocks relative to perfect symmetry, in milliseconds – this is an indication of how well-centred your impulse jewel is in relation to the neutral position of the pallet fork

Before testing you also need to feed 2 numbers into the settings:

• beat rate – the number of beats (half oscillations) per hour – the Weishi is able to work this out and guess the movement average if you leave it on “auto”
• lift angle – the degrees of arc that the balance wheel moves while still in contact with the pallet fork – called the lift. If you think about pushing a child on a swing it’s the amount of degrees that your hands are in contact with their back.

First wind up your watch and then leave it 20 minutes to settle, then put it on the timegrapher – you might need to dial-up the gain (mic volume) if the watch has a particularly faint tick due to being in a thick case. I usually let it work out the beat rate and I start by using the default 52-degrees of lift … if you get the lift angle wrong then it will just mean your amplitude is recorded too high (too high lift angle) or too low (too low a lift angle). You’re looking for a nice 2-line trace that will wander about the screen recording the ticks and the tocks. Obviously a fairly stable accuracy with low numbers is desirable but it is all about averages over different positions and longer times. A high amplitude is desirable and anything really low might indicate a lot of friction or a spring problem. Beat error is recommended to be low but anything under 2ms should be fine. 

What do I own, and why?

Before my recent interest in watches I had a Casio Waveceptor [3053 WV-58Y] digital and Seiko [7N43-0AB0] titanium quartz analogue – the digital satisfied my need for accurate time via radio, while the Seiko was a birthday gift to myself – my first >£100 grown-up watch. I wore these for about 15 years but recently I noticed that it was a bit small on my wrist and I felt like getting something that stood out more, like jewellery. 

I looked around and quickly fell for a Citizen Zenshin Eco-Drive [AW0130-85Z] with titanium bracelet and a lovely salmon dial. It’s beautiful and colourful without being gaudy and the 39mm case width stands out without looking like a slab on your wrist. 

My next watch was a bit special, in that I’d read about Christopher Ward, a British/Swiss company based in Maidenhead, and loved their beautiful but understated designs. In particular a “The Twelve 40 Ti” in Nebula Purple [C12-40ADC1-T00P0-B0] really took my fancy so when I heard that they do showroom tours I booked one and really had fun chatting watches with Oliver the showroom manager and trying on all the ones I liked the look of. But after that visit the purple Twelve still kept calling to me so decided to get one. The COSC certified movement appeals to my sense of perfection and the styling is very like a Tissot PRX Powermatic 80 that I had been looking at, but better! The Twelve might not have the 80-hour power reserve of the Tissot but it has a 56-hour reserve and it beats the accuracy of a PRX. 

While getting the Zenshin bracelet resized I spotted the stunning Seiko Presage Cocktail Time Negroni [SRPE41J1] which comes with a more understated leather deployant* strap. In the sun the red dial gleams. I didn’t buy it at the time but it was high on my wishlist for later.

Then I heard about Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) watches and I already buy quite a lot from Japan (as is witnessed on this blog!) so I started started looking at what I could buy from there. I quickly spotted a beautiful JDM Seiko Selection [SBTM339] with solar, radio control and a beautiful blue dial – an immaculate November 2025 watch being sold with box, warranty & extra bracelet links. You need to be a bit careful buying second hand in Japan because a lot of people there have smaller wrist sizes than Europeans and they usually don’t have the spare links. This one had everything and the price was right so I bought it and all I needed to get it running was to adjust the timezone using the crown and force a radio signal update. 

About the same time I took a bit of a punt on a 2004 vintage JDM Citizen Attesa [H410-T003788] with radio and solar, in very good condition but marked as “not working”. This time the strap didn’t have extra links and the length looked a bit 50/50 but the price was £20 so I couldn’t say no! As the watch was >20 years old then it was a fair bet that the only problem was the rechargeable cell needing replacing. I have looked inside and sure enough the cell looks original so I have sourced a new cell from eBay and 2 extra links from Japan.  

[* deployant straps allow you to quickly take the watch off or put it on without rethreading and buckling the strap]