Unless you don’t wear your watch daily or you’re an extremely inactive person, you won’t have to wind your automatic. A slipping clutch prevents the spring from getting overwound. As long as you’re wearing it, the mainspring maintains tension thanks to the weighted rotor in the movement that oscillates with your arm’s movements. The automatic, or self-winding, watch, functions as its name suggests. Make a habit out of winding your watch every day before you strap it on. Wind the watch off your wrist to minimize stress on the winding stem.Ģ. The typical watch has about a two-day power reserve so winding it up before you strap it on each morning is a good habit to form.ġ. A watch typically keeps best time when the mainspring is above half tension. Stop winding when you first feel resistance. This isn’t like topping off your gas tank, so don’t try to give it a little extra. You’ll know when it’s wound when you can’t turn the crown anymore. While it may be tempting to give the crown a few twirls while you’re surfing the Web at work, the angle can be awkward and put lateral stress on the delicate winding stem. First of all, wind the watch off of your wrist. While winding a watch is a simple process, there are a couple things to be aware of. The mainspring is wound, as the name suggest, by turning the watch’s crown a few dozen times. A handwound watch is the purest form of the mechanical timepiece, which is part of its appeal. That coiled mainspring will only provide power for a day or two (or sometimes longer) if you don’t keep it wound. One of the beautiful things about a mechanical watch is that is requires interaction with its owner to function. So the jewels are suspended in a floating frame that absorbs vibrations and shocks, saving the pivots from sure death. If there was no wiggle room for those delicate pivots, a sudden jolt from say, your arm scrambling eggs, could shear one off, a death blow to the movement. The pivots of the gear wheels ride in the center of these rubies, which are polished smooth to provide nearly frictionless surfaces. Those red shiny discs you see in the bridges of a watch are rubies, formerly real ones, currently most often synthetic ones. Friction is mitigated by regular lubrication and smooth “jeweled” bearings.
But, as you might guess, friction and external shocks are archenemies of the mechanical watch movement. But a well-adjusted chronometer-grade movement can keep time to a 99.999% accuracy. With all of these meshed gears and delicate springs, it’s a wonder these contraptions are as precise as they are.
Most modern hairsprings are made up of a metallic alloy that compensates for temperature changes, and some made from silicon, which is immune to magnetism. The precision of the watch depends largely on the tension of this hairspring, as well as its resistance to temperature changes and magnetism. The hairspring is the heart of the watch if you’ve seen a mechanical watch movement running, you’ll appreciate that metaphor, as the hairspring “beats” back and forth at a steady rate anywhere between 18,000 and 36,000 times per hour. This so-called “lever escapement” controls the energy release from the mainspring, feeding back this power through the geartrain, driving the hands of the watch to count out seconds, minutes and hours. The pivoting of the lever is controlled by a delicate spiral aptly known as the hairspring.
The escapement consists of a wheel that is caught and released intermittently by a pivoting lever. Therefore, the barrel that houses the mainspring is meshed with a precisely-sized geartrain of toothed wheels that terminates in what is called the escapement. Left unchecked, this mainspring would quickly unwind and give up its energy in an instant. Synthetic “jeweled” bearings minimize friction and are suspended to protect against vibration and shocks.
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