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Replica Watch Basics 101
Just getting started collecting watches? Ziggy outlines some
of the basic information on movements and their care and feeding.
He details the different kinds of movements used in replica watches
today and gives some basic information on how they function and their
reliability.
So you probably have your first ever mechanical watch, now what do you
need to know to keep it running a lifetime. What do all these new terms
I hear mean:how do I wind my new watch:..here are a few answers and
information to guide you, and make you the life of the party.
Care and feeding of Manual watches (as opposed to Quartz ones)
This
is the first in what I hope to be a series on watch basics to help
everyone and provide answers to the most common questions.
Glossary
Movement
- the mechanical part of the watch, the engine that makes a watch work
Automatic
- a movement that has a Weighted Rotor which rotates as the watch moves while being worn and winds the movement
Manual
- a movement that requires you to manually wind it
Balance wheel
- a wheel that has a small spring attached to it. The wheel rotates in
one and then the other direction, clockwise and counterclockwise
Hairspring
- the small spring on the balance wheel that determines the speed (rate, timekeeping) of the movement.
Motion works
- the gears that take the power from the mainspring and transfer it to the balance wheel
Beat (Beats Per Hour - BPH) speed of the balance wheel.
-
A watch with a 28,800 BPH ticks and tocks 28,800 times per hour,
meaning the balance wheel makes this number of swings CW and CCW every
hour. Each swing is a "Tic" (or Toc) and the number per hour, divided
by 60 minutes, and 60 seconds, will tell you how smooth the seconds
hand runs. In this instance, you have 8 "Ticks/Tocks" per second, and
the hand will appear to "Sweep" across the dial, this is the smoothest
you can get. Other common BPH are 21,600 (7750, Venus 175) 6 ticks per
second, and 18,000 BPH (ETA 6497-1 manual wind PAM models), 2.5 ticks
per second.
Power Reserve
- how long the watch will continue
to run without being wound, i.e. how long does it take for the
mainspring to unwind from a full wind.
Keyless works
-
holdover from pocket watch days, when Key's were used to wind watches
and set the time. This is the only part of the watch that an owner can
actually interface directly with the inners of the watch, and as such,
this is ruggedly made, and the one area where most problems occur. Why?
Because it's the only area that the owner can interface with the
movement:.
Servicing a movement
- doing a motor job on the movement. Full disassembly, cleaning, reassembly, adjustments, oiling etc.
Running seconds
-
the dial and hand that turns constantly whenever the movement is wound.
Used on a chronometer, it's the one that you can't turn on or off, as
opposed to the Chronometer Seconds hand, which only runs when the
Chronometer is engaged.
What is a mechanical movement
A
mechanical watch can either be Automatic (it winds while you wear the
watch), or manual (you have to wind the watch every couple of days).
The
basics of a mechanical watch is a spring that you wind up, and the
spring unwinds at a constant rate, and the watch "tells time" by having
hands attached to the output of the gears that make up the Movement
(the mechanical part of the watch). The watch contains many gears and
very small and fragile parts, the most fragile being the balance wheel.
The balance wheel is the pendulum of the movement, it rotates back and
forth and is the timekeeper which assures the spring unwinds at a
predetermined constant rate.
I can't stress how fragile a watch
is, the balance wheel pivots are protected from damage with a shock
absorber system. If you exceed the design specifications of the shock
absorber (by dropping the watch) then you will break or bend the pivot
and the watch will not run correctly.
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