Post Your Watches

What kind of a sadist are you? :p
 
Maybe not quiiiite what this thread was intended for, but what the hell. Got myself one of these:
AkvjLJr.png

That counts as a watch, right? ... right? :p
 
Well, it's a custom casing for a miyota quartz movement. They shouldn't be really expensive.
 
Well, it's a custom casing for a miyota quartz movement. They shouldn't be really expensive.

Breitling 80's and 90's quartz chronos have miyota movement's and those cost 2-3k?. Service cost's 700? and it is new 15? movement and cleaning of parts. But in defence, it is Breitling and when it came out, miyota movement wasn't 15?'s.
 
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Ooooooh, pretty!
 
Quite surprised nobody has released a smart watch with an automatic movement to help extend battery life.

At least I haven't heard about one.

Can't see myself ever owning or needing one though. The trusty Chronographe Rattrapante has years left in it hopefully and I intend to bequeath it to Junior by which time he should be all grown up and will have learned how to take care of nice things properly.
 
I wonder just how much a dynamo would be able to recharge a li-pol battery. Judging by some horribly failed similarly conceptualized battery packs, probably not that much. Plus, it would only add bulk and it would be positioned right where a bunch of sensors are.
 
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I've wanted a square watch for a while, so when I realized that my local Japanese watchmaker store had 20% off everything. I decided to go ahead and get me a very slightly fancier-than-normal Seiko.

ORIENT-UNAX009W.jpg


Mine actually has a cream-colored face with golden watch hands and crown, but it's the same movement and design so...close enough. I'll get a leather band for it in time.
 
Dropped my Steinhart from the night stand this morning, and it started getting stuck every minutes at 15 seconds. Manually winding it or gently tapping it would unstuck for one more minute, then it would get stuck again.

I was able to adjust the time and date, but not the day of the week. /me sad :(

And then, for some reason, around noon, it came back alive, and has been working perfectly ever since. All functions are normal, including the adjustment for the day of the week and the chrono. /me happy :D
 
On the topic of breaking watches:

A co-worker and I own Citizen World Chronographs (picture), which are basically digital watches made to look like old school mechanical ones. And he managed to break his watch while he worked near the generator of one of our X-ray tubes. But not in the way you are probably thinking right now.

In short, the generator transforms 400 V AC into up to 60.000 V DC. At some point during that conversion there are two big coils involved. These coils produce a somewhat noticeable magnetic field. Turns out that field was strong enough to break his watch. After he was done, only the minute-hand still worked. Everything else was dead.*


*everything else on his watch. He obviously survived.
 
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I wonder just how much a dynamo would be able to recharge a li-pol battery. Judging by some horribly failed similarly conceptualized battery packs, probably not that much. Plus, it would only add bulk and it would be positioned right where a bunch of sensors are.

Not likely enough to be of use. Seiko Kinetics essentially do this- they use a mechanical oscillating weight like a mechanical automatic watch which drives a dynamo to recharge what is now a lithium-ion rechargeable cell (originally they some type of capacitors, but those were found to fail too frequently and had a short service life). Most of these watches will run without additional input for 4 weeks to 4 months depending on the specific model (some newer ones have a feature that shuts off moving the hands after a certain amount of time without movement but continues to keep track of the time and will jump the hands to the correct position once moved again to conserve battery life, and they can keep track of time for up to 4 years this way). Compare that to the capacity of an equivalent silver oxide cell in a watch which has a lifespan between 18 months to 3 years of constant driving in typical watches. I don't think there's enough energy potential there given the size requirements.

On the topic of breaking watches:

A co-worker and I own Citizen World Chronographs (picture), which are basically digital watches made to look like old school mechanical ones. And he managed to break his watch while he worked near the generator of one of our X-ray tubes. But not in the way you are probably thinking right now.

In short, the generator transforms 400 V AC into up to 60.000 V DC. At some point during that conversion there are two big coils involved. These coils produce a somewhat noticeable magnetic field. Turns out that field was strong enough to break his watch. After he was done, only the minute-hand still worked. Everything else was dead.*


*everything else on his watch. He obviously survived.

Not terribly surprising. Quartz watches operate using tiny magnetic stepper motors, too strong a magnetic field can cause erratic behavior, stop the watch, or even permanently damage it if the field is strong enough to change the properties of the stator and rotor. This is also the reason a quartz watch should never be demagnetized. In any case, when this happens there's really no way to repair it short of replacing the magnetic driving components, and to my knowledge those sort of components for the movements in Ecodrives are not available. It would have to be returned to Citizen where they would probably replace the entire movement. Quartz chronographs typically use several stepper motor setups so they are able to independently drive multiple features at once, so it's certainly possible to damage some of them and not others, falling right in line with what you said happened.
 
Thanks for the explanation. What we found surprising was that the generator put out a strong enough magnetic field to even cause damage. There are no warning labels on it to indicate anything of the sort. Usually when some device is capable of creating a large magnetic field then you get lots of stickers telling you to stay the hell away if you have a pacemaker (among other things). And that's not even our biggest generator: we have another one that's nearly twice as powerful, and that has no warning labels attached to it either... except of course for the obvious X-ray related stuff.

Anyway, he sent the watch back to Citizen for repair.
 
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