WATCH This!

[vmurphyslaw420]

This is tied with my citizen for favorite. Its atomic,solar,altimeter, compass,thermometer, barometric, timers ,alarms,auto backlight

 

[kronin323]

Here's that other dress watch I was talking about - not trying to kid anyone; it's not as high-end as the big names, but a nice construction with 25 jewel Swiss ETA 2824-2 movement.

Diamonds are at the 12:00 position and the points of the Big Dipper:

 

[joycy]

 

[Carrera1963]

The one on the right is my daily wearer - easier to replace than the vintage ones (of which this is only a small sample!).

Vintage Heuer Carreras are another collection of mine, and where the user name comes from.

 

[vmurphyslaw420]

TE="kronin323, post: 414515, member: 8326"]Here's that other dress watch I was talking about - not trying to kid anyone; it's not as high-end as the big names, but a nice construction with 25 jewel Swiss ETA 2824-2 movement.

Diamonds are at the 12:00 position and the points of the Big Dipper:

View attachment 107459 View attachment 107460

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Kinetic? Jewels are used at points of friction?quartz is used for vibration?

 

[Kuztomized]

Daily wearer for 2 years now...

Tissot Couturier Automatic Day/Date with ETA 2834-2

 

[kronin323]

Kinetic? Jewels are used at points of friction?quartz is used for vibration?

This may be TMI but please allow me to indulge in a little "Font of Useless Knowledge" for the greater audience:

The traditional watch uses mechanical movement. In a nutshell, a spring is wound up (storing kinetic energy) which is then gradually released through gearing to turn the hands. This technology has been around since the 1500s, though it's been refined quite a bit since then. Jewels are used as low-friction bearings and were introduced to the technology in the early 1700s.

Though there were early wristwatches, they were primarily worn by women as jewelry and men used pocketwatches, mostly because it better protected the mechanism from the elements. Soldiers began to adopt wristwatches in the late 1800s due to the impracticality of using a pocketwatch on the battlefield (these were essentially pocketwatches strapped to the wrist). In the early 1900s, purpose-built wristwatches were being produced and they quickly overtook pocketwatches in popularity. Wilsdorf & Davis, the company that eventually became Rolex, started in 1905.

The mechanical watches that must be wound by hand are called manual watches. Automatic watches (like that 2nd dress watch I posted) are mechanical watches that are wound automatically through the wearer's movements - they use a weight on a central pivot to provide the winding. The technology has been around since the late 1700s but wasn't as practical with pocketwatches and was rarely used. With the wristwatch, the typical volume of arm movement was a better fit for automatic winding, and the first automatic wristwatch came out in 1923. It was known as a "bumper" watch because the winding weight could not rotate a full 360 degrees (it hit a bumper). Rolex came out with the first automatic watch where the weight could rotate a full 360 degrees in 1930, the Oyster Perpetual. This is the basic design of all automatic watches today.

Quartz watches are a very different technology. While the power of mechanical watches is provided by a wound spring and the measure of time by gearing, quartz watches are powered by electricity and use a science known as piezoelectricity, which literally means electricity resulting from pressure. In a nutshell, piezoelectric materials accumulate electrical charge when mechanically stressed, and, in reverse, generate mechanical strain when an electrical charge is applied. Quartz is a piezoelectric material.

Simply put, when you apply electricity to quartz, it vibrates. In quartz watches, the "beats" of the vibration are "counted" and that is how time is measured, whether it's displayed by moving hands or numbers on a LCD. (BTW the "clock speed" of your computer processor i.e. 2.5GHz etc is the same thing.) Though the 1st quartz clock was made in 1927, the first quartz wristwatch didn't come out until 1969. By the 1980s, quartz watches had taken over the market, with mechanical watches mostly only being made in high-end watches for the appreciation of the craftsmanship.

So that's it - all standalone watches are either mechanical or quartz. The "Kinetic" watch is Seiko's branding of what is known as an automatic quartz, where a mechanism similar to the winding mechanism of an automatic mechanical watch is used to generate electricity to run quartz movement. Eco-Drive from Citizen is similar; quartz movement powered by solar power (both kinetic and solar use a storage battery / capacitor in the middle).

Atomic watches are radio controlled quartz watches. Atomic clocks use radioactive decay to measure time and are the most accurate. But they're way too big to be used as a wristwatch. So an atomic watch picks up radio signals transmitted by the world's major atomic clocks and synchronizes with that info.

The 2824-2 movement in my watch is not considered ETA's most upscale but is one of their widest used. And ETA provides the majority of movements found in Swiss automatic watches today.

While I'm at it, crystals....

Watch "crystals" are different - they don't mean jewel pivot points or quartz movements. They're the "window" on the face of the watch. There's four basic types:

- plastic: cheap, light, unlikely to shatter but scratches easily.
- Mineral crystal: basically a high quality glass (which is made out of quartz, coincidentally). Mohs hardness of around 6.
- Sapphire coated mineral crystal: mineral crystal coated with a layer of lab-grown, colorless sapphire. Sapphire has a Mohs hardness of 9 (out of 10) and is by far the most scratch resistant.
- Sapphire: The complete crystal is lab-grown, colorless sapphire (these are the crystals on both of those dress watches, both the front face and the display window back).

I'm spent...

 

[vmurphyslaw420]

You know what pisses me off.my bulova kinetic I can't stop the second hand and set proper time,it holds a charge alot less than my Seiko to.

 

[Kuztomized]

You know what pisses me off.my bulova kinetic I can't stop the second hand and set proper time,it holds a charge alot less than my Seiko to.

Ever hear of back-hacking? I'm not sure if it works on all watches, but I used to do it with a non-hacking Lum-Tec (now sold). Let the power reserve run very low, then very gently turn the crown slightly towards the direction that would move time backwards, not actually turning it, just back pressure. This should pause the second hand as long as pressure is maintained. Release when it is at the desired time, then get that power reserve back up.

 

[vmurphyslaw420]

Ever hear of back-hacking? I'm not sure if it works on all watches, but I used to do it with a non-hacking Lum-Tec (now sold). Let the power reserve run very low, then very gently turn the crown slightly towards the direction that would move time backwards, not actually turning it, just back pressure. This should pause the second hand as long as pressure is maintained. Release when it is at the desired time, then get that power reserve back up.

Ill try.people think I'm weird I want it to the second lol