Mechanical Watch
ciechanow.ski
ciechanow.ski
But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “min” part from the URI, while the majority of end users will still benefit from pulling the minified js.
In practice this seems to be a lost cause, and links to alternatively hosted source code is more common. Sadly this makes is simple to introduce subtle, harmful differences between the source and what is hosted.
Seems better just to have premassaged source available in a repo somewhere, or called out on the page itself for a downloaded archive.
Minification strips comments too though, which may be undesirable in many cases.
$ ls -la
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 330905 May 4 22:56 watch.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 152172 May 4 22:55 watch.min.js
$ gzip watch.js
$ gzip watch.min.js
$ ls -la
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 43690 May 4 22:56 watch.js.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 32507 May 4 22:55 watch.min.js.gz $ ls -l *.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 330904 5 May 01:04 watch.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 152172 5 May 01:10 watch.min.js
$ brotli watch.js
$ brotli watch.min.js
$ ls -l *.br
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 34461 5 May 01:04 watch.js.br
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 27122 5 May 01:10 watch.min.js.br
Whoops, typo: I meant to say that I'd be somewhat more content to ship an un-minified + Brotli-compressed file than a minified + gzip'd one. That is, I'd be more happy to serve the 34.4KB watch.js.br than the 32.5KB watch.min.js.gz.
I don't think the difference is significant enough in this case.
That said, I do think there should be an alternative to minification+gzipping, like e.g. a compiled version of JS that is more optimized than a browser's own JIT compiler can do. Mind you, that might up being a larger package than the JS source code.
* hopefully will be
Yeah minification is only really for obfuscation. The small and unpredictable difference is absolutely not worth the ridiculous complex "solution" of source maps. Just the fact that your debugger really doesn't work right, is a deal breaker in and itself, not to mention all the time spent configuring and fighting with webpack.
I don't think any form of "compilation" i.e. bundling, transpiling, minification etc is needed at all. Javascript can already dynamically load (additional) code files when needed, I don't understand why you need to bundle it in the first place.
I don't buy that the http request overheads are so big that it motivates all this complexity, and in the average case a user don't use every single page of the application anyway, so by bundling everything you are always serving "too much", compared to just dynamically loading additional code.
Hard disagree. "Use What's Right For You™".
Of course there is value in understanding the platform beneath your framework or generic library, but that's just an extension of "understand what you're using and why".
Doing it like this has the potential to be the most performant, but it does so in the same way as writing your programs directly in assembly is potentially performant.
I also don't think that the source code is particularly readable for me, and contains lots of magic numbers and very imperative code. I would personally find it a lot more readable if it was written in some sort of declarative way using a library, even if I have to look at a GitHub repo instead of view source.
Without abstractions you wouldn’t be able to read a text stored on a remote computer with accompanying style information displayed the same on both of our devices and with embedded 3D graphics doing the same thing on vastly differing devices be it a top of the line GPU or a simple low-end phone. Is it not abstraction?
The equivalent would be a mathematical services company, who created "free" abstraction packages that required you to rewrite all your math, away from the scientific community standards, to fit their abstractions, and who also made money on consulting and selling books. And the big benefit of it all, is really that they only abstracted away writing summaries of your papers, which is actually the easiest part that is quite irrelevant to your research.
Who is to tell whether the OSI model is ideal? It is more than likely not it, but we can’t measure these things up front, there is an insane cost associated with changing it, etc. Yet again, what is the alternative? We can’t manage complexity any other way, and essential complexity can’t be reduced.
The current idea of the OSI model was also retrofitted from what it originally was.
> contains lots of magic numbers and very imperative code
Well, we really don't know if the code was written in this form by hand, don't we.
It could have been compiled into this, to use your words, "assembly with magic numbers and imperative" from much more elegant form. We may see this form only because this is what browsers understand.
I am not saying it was compiled, just speculating that seeing pure WebGL does not mean it was pure WebGL to begin with.
Personally I'm not a fan of the magic numbers either but as I study more and more of it, it's everywhere
It also has the potential to evolve in the most efficient way.
Also, nature and graphics works as an imperative parallel machine. So the code mirrors that.
This is not written deliberately this way. Code comes out like that when you strip all the libraries, fluff, and other less-related stuff.
I also write a scientific application, and yes, This is the way.
Yeah in this case it doesn't need to; there's no extraneous or unused code or documentation blocks, and gzip (and comparable) compression is good enough, minification doesn't actually reduce the downloaded code size by that much.
With that said, the raw webGL approach here is arguably more educational, so goal achieved I think!
[1] https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/examp...
Edit: there's actually a 50 LOC watch example with r3f: https://codesandbox.io/s/bouncy-watch-qyz5r
The reason you'd use gltfjsx (which that example doesn't) is to have fine grained controls for every node in the scene graph. In the case of the watch, this would map to having a component for each mesh or gear, which can be controlled with mechanics/physics.
Adjust the flags as necessary to crawl more of the site if needed (omitting `--include-directories` without an `-l {limit}` flag will eventually crawl the whole site, please be kinder to their bandwidth than that).
Yes. Almost no one uses it directly.
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/webgl/webgl_drawing_a_triangl...
Comparing this to Canvas is almost like comparing assembly to C. I'm honestly very surprised.
If you put more vertices and indices in Step 2 you can draw an arbitrarily complex 3-D object with this same code.
And there's a lot of stuff in GLSL where you can program directly with high-level concepts like vectors, normals, and partial derivatives, instead of expressing them by hand the way you would in C.
There's at least one (great) game written like that though, Need for Madness with a custom 3D engine and just using java's 2D gfx api for rendering.
Except that WebGL didn't exist so I just had to use the 2-D <canvas>. There's probably some trick for getting antialiased polygon edges in <canvas> to not show cracks...
https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/glslCanvas/blob/mast... has most of that same boilerplate in a less repulsive form. https://github.com/patriciogonzalezvivo/glslCanvas/blob/mast... has other bits.
It’s a very bad, non-object oriented API in an object oriented language. It was designed for and by people who know GL in other C like languages, not for people who know JavaScript. It is unlike any other part of the language.
The fact that I have to write a shader myself, as a fricken string like I’m writing SQL over here, just to draw a triangle is absurd. There should at the very least be some sort of provided builder for simple shaders.
Object-oriented languages are not a good way to do 3-D rendering. If you want to write pixel shaders in JS you can totally do that but you will have to run them on the CPU; as it happens I wrote a program last week that works that way: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/trama. If you want to run them on the GPU you need a language that exposes the GPU's capabilities.
In essence your primary complaint is that the GPU instruction set is not object-oriented (and neither is your database). Well, you can design your own GPU, but I've got some bad news for you about Verilog, Chisel, and BlueSpec! And you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented, so your OO GPU will end up underperforming, like the Burroughs B5000 and the Symbolics 3600 (hopefully not as badly as the Intel iAPX432). You'll probably have more success writing an object-oriented database.
However, I do agree that WebGL is a bad API, because boilerplate is never acceptable.
I am saving this quote for future use. Thank you :)
Objects are a convenient day-to-day model in real life and software, but there are more "functional" models that comprise the object model.
Once you get through the process of drawing a triangle on the screen then you're learnt 70% of the core of OpenGL. I think you're making the incorrect assumption of "wow if it takes this long to just get a triangle on the screen it must take 1000x as long to get an entire model of a watch" when really you're almost able to draw a model already, you just need to put multiple triangles on the screen now instead of just one.
I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter.
It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.
https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1522067904522428417
Would antifragile be an applicable word to use here?
A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I showed them and they liked it and their young devs asked which library I was using. When I told them I used OpenGL they couldn't believe it. To them OpenGL was the "black magic box" and using it akin to having secret conversations with the GPU in some arcane cryptic language.
After finishing that I found out that they were already several major versions ahead and had fancy things like shaders... it really is an amazing tool.
Recently I started messing with some Three.js stuff and it does have some nice abstractions... main benefit of it for me is the ecosystem around it. Being able to just plug in some physics and interactivity and not have to deal with digging up old screen-to-world conversion code is nice.
History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.. Later he went on to found Netscape.
Even more trivial: When I moved to Silicon Valley I bought a used Porsche on a whim (my recruiter implied it was a proper consultant accessory in SV) and fixed it up a bit until it became my daily driver. When I researched the title I discovered Jim Clark was the original owner. So I’d like to credit Jim Clark for starting me on the road to speed up my commute.
You really have to admire people who do stuff like that (I can't imagine that I would ever have the patience to do that).
What I'm mildly curious about is why would anyone want to do it? Is there a demand for such stuff? I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them?
I'd reckon most would be like me in that they'd pulled enough watches apart in their younger years to already know their ins and outs (I've long lost track of the number watches and clocks I've either fixed or disassembled by the time I was a teenager).
Most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days.
First, I should say that I was perhaps a little harsh in my above comment and I didn't convey what I actually wanted to say. Unfortunately, I was distracted by the somewhat irritating fact that I couldn't view any of those drawings on two different smartphones (I could read the article but only saw white spaces where the drawings were supposed to be). It was only later when logged onto my PC that I could view them, and even then the whole page was sluggish and a pain to view. Perhaps those with faster equipment and or faster internet connection had better luck.
Thus, the thinly-veiled message behind my comment was a question about fitness for purpose—both about the subject matter and its method of delivery. My cynical inference was that if people today didn't already understand the basics of gearing, mechanical advantage and escapement mechanisms etc. then something has gone wrong with the education system in that the basics of how clocks worked were well covered in physics (in mechanics) during my first year in high school—and that should not have changed as we still live and move around in a mechanical world—and thousands of industrial mechanical devices use these principles and rely on people having a good working knowledge of them.
By third year physics, everything relevant about the essential workings of a clock would also have been covered at a basic mathematical level: Hooke's Law, gears and gear ratios, friction and simple harmonic motion. Even temperature expansion and contraction and the need to compensate for them was discussed (and in this context the physics teacher even discussed Harrison's famous chronometer and how his design included temperature compensation to ensure that changes in these parameters did not impact heavily on time drift).
In essence, by third year, everything of important in that article had been covered in the school curriculum. If articles such as that under discussion are now being used to compensate for the lack of training in high school science then we have a serious problem with the education system.
Incidentally, even if one's not interested in clock mechanisms, it's worth having a look at this 19th Century publication on mechanical movements that's on the Internet Archive (there are more types around than most people have ever likely considered: https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507
First, I learned a concept in school, and probably forgot it. Later, I heard about it again, and hung the concept on the skeleton of what I remembered from school. Only much later, when I'm actually applying the concept (in my career, during home repair, when doing my son's homework), do I connect the dots and really understand the concept front to back.
When talking to people I'll say I learned the concept {of gearing, of escapements, of the behavior of springs} in school. But it's probably just as accurate to say that exposure to experiences like this site were what truly cemented them in my mind.
I don't think so, I'd reckon you'd be pretty typical. It's basically how I learn things and I'd think it's how most others acquire skills.
From my experience, the key issue is having an interest in the subject, subjects that I was interested in I did well in and it was the opposite for those that bored me. I suppose that makes sense but in both cases multiple passes were required before I became proficient - it's just that it took considerably longer when my interest was less.
However, what I've noted on many occasions is that there are students who I'd classify as a class that are just good at learning things even if the subjects have little interest for them per se, they're the ones who would often top the class and later in life you'd find them doing jobs unrelated to the subjects they did well in. I often think I'd like more of that trait.
For reasons I can only speculate about, my interest in certain specific subjects seems to have inate origins, it's as if some a priori interest was there before I knew about them. This doesn't necessarily bode well for other subjects that are deemed essential for one to become skilled in as one's learning can become lopsided.
There's little doubt that hands-on training works for most - and that brings me back to clocks. In physics practical classes on tension, springs, mechanical advantage, etc. we actually had clocks to experiment with. These were usually old bedroom alarm clocks and such that could be pulled apart and reassembled and if damaged it didn't matter much. We all learned from these experiences, even kids with little mechanical aptitude as clocks contains just about every instance of the physics we were learning about and it was obvious how they all came together to make clocks work.
It's the same here. Without people who deeply understand a tool's input and output, we won't ever write a better tool.
[1] don't @ me, cryptographers and kernel programmers.
Agreed, but programming in ASM makes one think differently. In my opinion every programmer should do some elementary Assembler as part of their training, say some basic projects based on 8086 stuff or even the simpler 8085/Z80 etc. It's a long while since I've done any serious ASM work but the techniques one learns and the ideas one develops frame important attitudes that can't be easily gathered from high level stuff (one gains a better understanding of the underlying hardware and such).
You're right, we still need people for this work, it'd be pretty hard to optimize a compiler without them methinks.
FYI, there's stuff I omitted to mention in the above comment, I mentioned it below in my reply to bitcurious. It's interesting 'fitness for purpose' arises given your ASM comment.
Great great great work!!!
If mechanical watches tickle your fancy, there is a ton of watch repair video on YT. I particularly enjoy wristwatch revival (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD80T1s2Za4K682CQDGwEKQ).
A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive (I spend close to €1k and that is with b-quality stuff. Good stuff is 5-10x more expensive.) and can be rather frustrating. Finding parts to buy can be complicated depending on your locale, loosing parts is very easy and destroying parts, even when gentle and careful is par for the course.
I hat to put my repair hobby on halt after running out of practice pieces. All now have broken or missing parts. your milage may vary ofcourse :)
I saw a custom mod watch that paired the face/movement of a Marathon navigator with an O&W diver case*. Is a combination I find desirable (as the Marathon bezel is too chunky for my use), but the maker won’t respond to emails.
Is it possible that the combination could be “ drop in” or is it likely to require significant modification?
Where it gets tricky is if the target doesn’t use the same movement. In that case, I’d just buy an AliExpress watch with the same dial size and an ETA clone movement. Otherwise you have to ensure your target is the correct size and you’ll probably need to 3D print a movement holder.
Looking at the two watches you mention, the navigator has a Quartz Harley Ronda 373 movement and the diver has a ETA 2824-2 movement. The 373 I can't find the specs for, but from an ebay auction it seems to be a 11½’’’ diameter. The 2824-2 is the same diameter. However, all 11½’’’ ronda quartz movements I can find are 3mm thick where the 2824 is 4.6mm. So what I'd expect is that it will fit, but you might not be able to secure it properly. It really depends on how the movement is held in place. Perhaps you can fabricate/3d-print a spacer for that.
Another consideration is the lug stem, that might not be the right size. To long is solveable, to short means buying a replacement. I am also not sure wether the stems can have a different thickness, to thin and it wont be waterproof, to thick just won't fit.
You could probably try without destroying anything (no guarantees ;)), you are not really touching any of the fragile & tiny parts. But you will atleast need tool(s) to open the cases, they might be different, and a tiny screwdriver to release the lug. And I wouldn't count on it remaining waterproof, not sure.
Edit: I see that Marathon does make several watches with the 2824 (which would presumably simplify the process).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
Wrist watches are pretty hard and expensive. Pocket watches are less so. When I was interested in getting more intimate with watch repair, I went to eBay and bought up a whole bunch of old pocket watch movements. I've got about 150 of them in various condition, most of them Waltham (easy to get, inexpensive, and I happen to have spent the first 25 years of my life spending a lot of time in the old Waltham Watch Co factory building because my father's company leased out space in it).
Basic tools aren't too bad, just a nice set of tweezers, screwdrivers, and a good magnifier is enough to do a lot of repairs. But you can fall down the rabbit hole pretty quickly with the desire for increased quality tools and things like a staking set so you can replace balance wheel arbors.
I tried to move from the pocket watches into wrist watches, and while the technology is largely the same, the reduced size and increased complexity made it less enjoyable for me. Instead I ended up moving the other direction and now have a nice collection of 18th and 19th century 30-hour and 8-day clocks (more commonly known as "grandfather clocks").
This little site really helped me cement in my mind what’s going on inside of the watch.
Also, almost everything I had to import in to the EU. Importing chemicals is expensive for some reason I discovered. UPS charged me like 3 times the usual amount.
There is a lot of advice that says 'don't cheap out, just buy good stuff'; which is great if you are going to make this really your hobby for years to come. But I feel starting with some cheap tools on a junk movement is a fine start.
Here's a tip on buying watches to repair or restore - avoid the big brands at first. Many watches use the same or similar movements (ETA is a big one, but you'll find Seiko movements hiding in watches from the 60s and 70s, too).
eBay is your friend (don't fall for too-good-to-be-true items from India or Pakistan)
Hang out on watchrepairtalk.com and/or watchcrunch.com and ask lots of questions. It's a very friendly community.
1. The school route is great, but after the two year program you still won't get a parts account from anyone. You will have no problem finding a job though.
2. Self-taught. It will take awhile, but it's a rewarding hobby/career.
Every budding Watchmaker should have books. Books by DeCarle, Fried, and Daniels are great.
There are old correspondence courses that are good to. Try to get Chicago School of Watch Repair, and Bulova School of Watch Repair. Hunt around for the best price.
The quality of internet videos on the internet are spectacular. You are lucky to have them. When I started their was only one guy who taught Watch Repair.
Tools:
#2, #5 Dumont tweezers. (any tweezers will do, even the cheap ones.)
Watch back removal tools. You will need various types, including Rolex, and universal tools.
small ultrasonic bath to clean parts. A mason jar filled with cleaning fluid, and rinse will suffice to hobbiests though.
oils. Moebius are recommended, but expensive. Personally I think they are overpriced.
Presto #1,#2 hand removers.
some Radico.
A mainspring tool. These can get pricy. Look for a old set of Marshall mainspring removal tools.
Decide if you want to work with a loupe, or a 10-40x stereoscope.
a band remover.
A staking set. (Look around. No need to spend more than $250.00
A jewelers lathe, mill, etc. come way later. The biggest mistake newbies make is buying every tool they thing they might need. Then again you wealthy boys can go crazy.
Too tired to go on, but I'm in the Bay Area under "I buy Watchmaker, jeweler, amd some Machinist's estates. I'm gearing up to do repairs. I hope to have a website soon. I'm thinking about teaching, but not sure if there's a market for it.
When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.
And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too.
- The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because - The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available - Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it)
Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll.
A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.
You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.
For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual.
Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2]
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355
There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby.
This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot).
The danger was it made me want to pause all the time in case I missed something interesting, but by putting the user in control of what they get info on, you could avoid that.
X-Ray still exists, but the only way I've ever seen it used is to tell you what the background music is, and the names of all the actors in a scene. But even then, it is often incomplete.
I remember the cable companies promising this when everything went "digital."
I also remember when the movie studios promised us one of the big advantages of DVDs over VHS was that we could watch the scenes of a movie from any angle?
Yeah, that never happened.
Suspect the angles thing was the same. Sounded cool but no one wanted it (or to pay extra for it).
I want to say it was google play, but not completely sure.
This reminds me of Microsoft Encarta.
Sent this to my dad, and can't wait to talk this weekend. When I was a kid we would tinker around with watches in the basement but, alas, I had different interests and never really got around to truly understanding these mechanisms. I don't really know web development beyond setting up basic pages, but how the CAD was integrated into this is wonderful and I'd love to see more posts going through things like human joints or ICE, or maybe weapons ... other things where we kind of intuitively grasp how they work, but don't know the details. This entire blog seems to do a lot of that. So cool.
[1] https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1484013009219375105...
Put a reminder on your calendar.
So impressive.
I'm just in awe.
Also knowing that the thing will last forever, take care of it and it will probably outlive you. Can't say that about an Apple Watch.
If you want a good mechanical watch that won't break the bank I suggest picking up a Seiko SKX (though prices have been going up), a Vostok Amphibia (might be hard with the ukraine conflict) or a Timex Marlin.
Mechanical watches are still indeed cool though. :)
It still blows my mind that you can take the SKX scuba diving, especially when you factor in the price.
This may sound cynical but as I get older and see the world becoming more and more digital and connected, I find myself appreciating analog, mechanical things like watches and old cars more and more.
If your watch is a sizable investment then maybe you care about maintenance more, but otherwise I wouldn't worry that it's going to stop working in short order.
People all over the world pass down their Rolexes and Omegas, still ticking, to their children and even grandchildren. Patek Philippe is well known for their slogan, "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation," showing confidence in the longevity of their watches.
Of course those are very expensive brands, but I think part of what makes expensive watches last longer is that their owners take good care of them. Few people bother to get their SKX checked up on a regular schedule, on the other hand, because they're so cheap and easily replaceable by first-world standards.
I also have a replacement 7s26C which worked flawlessly [-5,+5] s/d out of the box and a year so far, and another watch with NH35 which still holds [-5,+5] s/d after seven years of daily use.
There are stories of SKX:s which hold good time after 20 years.
There are much cheaper watches than SKX (at their current prices) that will withstand the depth, see "Beyond on the press" pressure chamber tests, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti-GdfGbj4Y
On a side note, I have read about 40 year old Seikos being worn daily without service but that sure feels outside of the norm.
Very unlikely. You do hear the occasional story of a mechanical watch running fine for several decades without requiring any servicing, but there's a lot of survivorship bias at play there. It's extremely unlikely to go ~8 decades without needing servicing. Keep in mind there are lubricants at various places in the movement that are essential to proper operation that evaporate/denature over time.
It's a mechanical device which stores energy in a spring barrel, and consumes it through a set of gears to produce constant velocity motion.
There are a some brands that will service every watch they've ever made, fabricating new parts as needed. Few of us can afford one of those.
It usually is this one in almost all their models:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0080GQBTU/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_XX5J...
The only thing you need to be mindful of with Eco-Drives is that you can't let it lose all charge. It can keep functioning in complete darkness for around 6 months, according to the specs, but if you do this enough times the battery will lose the ability to hold charge and will need to be replaced, and there are plenty of reports to this effect. If you're not planning on wearing it, just leave it somewhere that it can get natural light, instead of a drawer, and you should be good.
While mechanical watches are undoubtedly cool and elegant, they're not perfect timekeepers, and when they do need maintenance it's not something trivial which you can perform yourself. For my day-to-day watch I'll take an accurate quartz movement with virtually zero maintenance any day. In other words an Eco-Drive, or something similar.
I do not know whether this also applies to Eco-Drive.
That said, a lot of in-house movements are little more than tweaks and high end finishing applied to existing commodity movements.
NH35 can be serviced, but makes more sense an assembled replacement part. The same argument can probably made for the entire watch. The appeal of using one watch for 30 years is more in romantic fantasy than practicality.
If a part does fail, it's usually the old blue steel mainsprings.
They can be replaced with modern White-Alloy springs. (That is just a brand name.)
Watches are my thing. I don't know why I like them so much, but do.
Servicing does take awhile to learn though. That whole 10,000 hrs probally. Servicing a watch does not take that long to learn. I'm talking about making parts with a Jeweler's lathe. And getting to the point where you know those parts well enough to visualize exactly what's wrong with a timepiece by looking at it.
If you did learn to clean/oil your mechanical watch, it's something that will be passed down to loved ones.
Oh yea, Service a mechanical watch when it stops keeping good time. That is unless you take it in the water.
I know a watchmaker who told his father he needed to Service his gifted wristwatch. His father got it 30 years ago as a present, and just wore it daily. The watchmaker was expecting dried up oil, but to his astonishment, the oil was still there. It was hermetically sealed. Oils do breakdown, but he couldn't find any damage to parts using a 40x stereoscope.
As others have noted, if you own a well-known brand like a Seiko you can easily purchase an entirely new movement for $50-$75 and this should take a watchmaker no more than one hour of labor or you can DIY. (Many non-Seiko brands use NH35/36 movements, which are made by Seiko)
Still, though - keep in mind that entire Seiko movement can be bought for like $50-75. And many of their most common movements are interchangeable. For example, an older 7S26 can be replaced with a new NH36 that sells for about $50. https://chronometercheck.com/seiko-7s26-movement/
It's not entirely unfeasible to imagine buying a spare movement or three if you were, say, planning on doing sort of a heirloom thing and wanted to ensure a supply of parts N decades into the future.
I asked them how this works, and they said anything younger than 80 years Omega just sends them parts without any issue, anything older they have to send back to Switzerland for service, and yes, then Omega might have to manufacture the parts required on the spot - and yes, that then turns really expensive.
I was lucky enough to inherit my grandfather's pre-COMEX 5513 in very good condition - one or two tiny specks on the dial and a light scratch on the case. The appraiser gave me the warning that I should never send it to a Rolex repair center for servicing under any circumstance. If I did, I'd likely end up having the original acrylic bubble being replaced with crystal, the case polished high heaven, new tritium applied, and it'd probably be worth $15k less.
Collectors want a watch that shows signs of life; they value a nice patina. Many watch manufacturers service things to "modern spec" and try to make a watch look new. For a watch that old, I'd strongly suggest you find an independent watchmaker or two and get them to give you an estimate before you do anything.
Yeah, but I don't. I don't have this watch as an investment - hopefully I'll use it for another 50 years and then someone else can use it again for 50 more years. In fact in addition to the service I paid £300 to have the dial replaced with a brand "new"(old stock) identical dial, because mine was showing very minor signs of corrosion. If a collector somewhere has an issue with that.....tough? Also I have no idea how anyone could ever even tell the dial was replaced, the new one is original Omega, just......flawless.
>> If I did, I'd likely end up having the original acrylic bubble being replaced with crystal, the case polished high heaven, new tritium applied, and it'd probably be worth $15k less.
That sounds perfect, if it were my watch I'd absolutely do that. Who cares how much it's worth at the end? If it's your grandfather's watch, then you probably won't ever sell it, will you?
Either way, I understand this is a personal choice.
>>for a watch that old, I'd strongly suggest you find an independent watchmaker or two and get them to give you an estimate before you do anything.
I did, both of them went "oh it's an omega, it's going to be about £400 for a full service mate" - so servicing it with Omega wasn't that much more expensive and it was a much better shout in my book, I know that whatever parts they replaced are original and brand new.
edit: just to add to the above - sorry, I realized I came across as very defensive. Yes of course your advice applies 100% if someone cares about maintaining the value of a vintage watch. Identical advice applies to maintaining vintage cars as well. But if you buy a vintage watch like me, to use it as....a watch....then just keep that in mind too.
The two things I wanted to flag were
1) watches can have surprising value fluctuations, so they're worth being appraised professionally: just because you have "a model X from company Y dating back to Z" doesn't mean you'll get the valuation right if you try. If Papa were a desk diver at COMEX instead of Arthur Andersen I'd have likely ended up with a 5514 instead, and my six figure watch would be in a safe somewhere, not on my wrist.
2) many companies, when repairing, will not hesitate to add modern components. Rolex is apparently notorious for this, but others do it as well. In the opinion of Rolex, a watch is a watch: your GMT-Master with a Bakelite bezel is no different from a GMT-Master from 2022, it's just out of spec and needs a refresh.
The combination of this has lead to horror stories where people send their watch in for what they expect to be a fairly routine service (cleaning, oiling, etc.) and end up with an entirely different watch.
Take it to a watchmaker, a fix like this would be pretty straightforward.
That said, simply adjusting the tick rate to regulate timekeeping is very easy and if you've got steady hands and a sharp eye then you can do it yourself with a wooden toothpick, assuming you've got a tool to remove the watch back. Any shop (offering repair facilities) could do it as well in a matter of minutes.
This suggests it's completely out of spec, and maybe beyond saving. However, regulating functioning Seiko movements is certainly within reach for enthusiasts using a timegrapher device, or software with a microphone. Persistently adjusting over a few days, it should be able to get within -10,+10 seconds per day.
The timegrapher will also reveal the condition of the movement and whether further work is worthwhile. Servicing these movements is likely more expensive than replacing them.
I've adjusted a couple of my watches over the course of a week or two by making small adjustments, noting the time, wearing it for a day, and then noting how much the time had changed versus a "known good" time. It's a pain but doable.
There are mobile apps that use the phone's microphone to measure the watch's "ticks" and graph them for you. They aren't anywhere near as accurate as a "real" timegrapher but they'll get you close enough.
At one point I had about a dozen mechanical watches. These days I have three, and only one that I wear almost exclusively. It's a Maratac Mid-Pilot, which uses a Miyota 8245 movement. I've used the "adjust and check later" method to adjust it, and it loses about 10s per week - well within the acceptable range.
The other two that I've kept are a Seagull 1963, which I wear as a "dress watch", and a Vostok Retro 1934, which I sometimes wear when I want a change of pace. It has a white face and I have a variety of brightly-colored straps for it.
One day I'll step up and buy a Hamilton, but I'm still savoring the serotonin from looking at them and anticipating :).
This is just an app now. All a timegrapher is is a microphone and software, and, well, your phone has all that. This is the app I use; I highly recommend it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watchaccur...
Sadly this advice is a little bit out of date, as the SKX has been out of production now for a few years and the price on uses examples has risen above what one is worth (except to collectors).
The newer advice is to grab a Seiko 5*. There's a million different choices, and all the current ones come with the 4R35 or 4R36 movement, which are better than the 7S26 which was in the SKX divers.
* https://www.seikowatches.com/us-en/products/5sports/lineup
I like a watch that gets out of the way - it just works. I've got a Citizen watch a little like this: https://www.citizenwatch.co.uk/stiletto-ar1130-81a.html
It's a quartz watch, powered by solar power through the face. It has 'just worked' for as long as I've had it. From an accuracy point of view, it loses negligible amounts over the several month interval between me being forced to adjust it anyway (daylight savings, international travel).
I usually set my watch a few minutes fast on purpose. I just use it to get an approximation of the time: "oh, it's nearly 5"
When I need the exact time I look at my phone, and naturally that's where my calendar reminders and such live as well. So I'm not missing any appointments if my watch is off, and if I did rely on my watch I'd be a few minutes early.
The two work well in tandem for me.
Of course, I also know lots of watch owners who prioritize accuracy from their wristwatches. If I was one of those people, I really couldn't imagine wanting to deal with a mechanical watch. They are wonderful, wonderful little machines and it's a miracle they're as accurate as they are... but, they are not as accurate as a $10 digital watch.
Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn't matter. I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week.
Checks out. Tungsten Carbide and Corundum (sapphire watch crystals, the hardest watch crystal in use) have the same Mohs hardness of 9 and will scratch each other.
And I'd guess that a $300 watch probably doesn't use Corundum but rather mineral glass.
Orient has a few automatic models (Kamasu, etc) that can be had for under $300 with sapphire.
Are these two things somehow related to one another?
There are antimagnetic watches. Or you can use a cheap watch demagnetizer.
I don’t know how many mechanical watches really will last a lifetime, but they will easily last longer than a so-called ‘smart’ watch.
Six years ago I seriously considered purchasing a ‘smart’ watch. Eventually I realised that they were just another money sink and attention leash, and put the money into a couple of automatic watches instead. I still have them, and wear them regularly. Had I bought an Apple or Android watch, I would have replaced it multiple times by now.
That’s the plus side. The minus side is that I don’t wear one of those two every single day because … I gotten bitten by the watch bug, and now I have a pile of other watches, and I wear those too! I still think that I am ahead of the game, though.
BTW, I write ‘smart’ watch because I don’t think they are really that smart; if anything, they should be called unwise watches, because they are an unwise expenditure of resources, money and attention. Also they just don’t look good. I predict that in thirty years we’ll look back on them much as we do digital watches: as a fad.
The minus side is that I don’t wear one of those two
every single day because … I gotten bitten by the watch
bug, and now I have a pile of other watches, and I wear
those too!
In reality they are all very modest watches, most under $100. The entire collection is not worth more than a nice laptop. But whatever.
As a bonus mechanical watches, unless I'm mistaken, will last longer if not running 24/7/365.
The best current advice for beginners is probably on the Just One More Watch youtube channel, most watches are in the price bracket that the SKX occupied, and you will learn about micro-brands that exceed Seiko in quality, beat them on price, and under the hood have Seiko movements that are easily replaced & serviced for decades to come.
My Helm Komodo reccomended by Jodi of JOMW gets as much wear as my Rolex Submariner and at a fraction of the price. It isn't the same price or quality, but I enjoy it just as much.
This site, and the most recent blog entries on this site, are excellent examples of why web technologies are not all bad. People seeking new ways to make money make everything bad, eventually, and thankfully there are bastions of utility without sales still to be found, sprinkled around.
The “capitalism bad” trope is a tired one indeed.
monsters create those companies, and monsters grow them.
growing larger and more profitable at any cost is called metastasis, and that's what's happening. lives get worse for most while the cancers grow and grow, almost unabated.
I run a small and nice visual weather app for Apple Watch and iPhone (https://weathergraph.app). Some people in reviews object to price, but if I wasn't able to charge a subscription (because weather data costs money continuously), there would be no app. And if I wasn't able to make (about 50 % there right now) a living, I would work for a corporation like I did before, and I wouldn't be able to dedicate enough time to make it great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I'm talking about companies that make everything they touch demonstrably worse if it earns them any money at all.
there is a very clear line between you and the companies I'm talking about. you provide a service; the companies I talk about are late-stage capitalism monsters who exist solely to provide value to shareholders, and they don't care if they create a dystopia by doing it.
Also, seeing this web page I got frustrated by the fact it doesn't tackle what got me the hardest time: how can the crown move the hands without any clutch mechanism (some have) ? It's a matter of friction and torque, so it's hard to get while reasoning on a "perfect" mechanism.
> Notice that when we turn the minute wheel only the cannon pinion turns. That pinion fits tightly inside its driving gear – it usually turns with that gear. However, when the driving gear can’t rotate because it’s blocked by the rest of the gear train, the cannon pinion can overpower the friction of that tight fit and rotate on its own. This lets us set time without interfering with the gear train, which could break the delicate parts.
Personally, I was wondering how one can wind the watch from the crown without engaging the weight of the autowinding mechanism. I'm guessing that winding with the crown causes the ratchet to slip on both pairs of blue/yellow gears.
https://www.amazon.com/Watchmaking-George-Daniels/dp/0856677...
Daniels also wrote a riveting autobiography. He rose from the most abject poverty to world eminence, largely because of the British guild system.
He also collected, restored, and raced old cars. He used to drive his Blower Bentley to his gentlemen's club (!) in London[0]. All this is described in his autobiography.
He needed to do business in Switzerland, so he simply drove his restored Rolls-Royce across the Continent.
Overall, a fascinating workflow.
This is peak Internet, huge congrats to the author(s).
I believe when someone no longer needs to concern themselves with financial consequences for taking time out of their day to create content for the public, and knows that there is reciprocity in the relationship between themselves and the rest of the world for whom they produce content, they can dedicate themselves more completely to their craft.
Watches are robust technologies that work without internet connectivity, are crafted/maintained by people paying attention to mechanical parts that are sometimes about as thin as human hairs. Humans have used them for hundreds of years and they are really freaking cool.
If you think the animation is awesome(it is), consider owning the real thing. Not just for my brother's sake, but maybe for your families.
Gerald Sussman Teaches Mechanical Watch Ideas at MIT:
whoa, is this the origin of the word "hacking" in the "throw something into the wheels to make it work" sense? very interesting.
I have been wanting to buy an old mechanical watch. When I do, I will never again complain about how much a watch repair shop charges.
Also, the explanation, presentation, and animations are top-notch. Amazing work by the author!!
I would call it "clever" if one or two engineers created this over perhaps a decade or so. With thousands of engineers over several hundred years, however, it just feels like the natural evolution of things.
I feel that a lot of things happening in today's society will be the "watch" in 100-200 years. A marvel of complexity at first glance, and then an acknowledgement of how much "standing on the shoulders of giants" contributes to things that are enjoyed on a daily basis.
A word of warning, diving into watches and clocks can be a time/money sink.
If you're not careful you'll end up building something like this: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...
If Bartosz is reading this, I'm genuinely curious how much time did it take him to create this post. It looks like an insane amount of work with all the knowledge acquisition, write up, animation and so on..
This article is pure gold. It makes me thinking how much of know-how is already lost and how much can we find in some old book stores... I'd buy a book about clock making.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski
This creator is absolutely among the best at his craft. I lack the words to properly describe my admiration.
You could do it cheaper by buying random parts off eBay or Taobao, I did this for a second watch - using the following video from the "Watch Repair Channel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rieKmfaKMCY
But having your initial attempt somewhat de-risked gave me the confidence to dive head first into other concepts and ideas.
I'm not quite ready to do a tear down and service of a movement, but with a timegrapher on the way... it won't be long before I'll end up scratching that itch too!
I've understand mechanical watch internals thanks to hundreds of hours of procrastination spent on watch-repairing youtube channels, but I wish I had such presentation several years ago.
Same with GPS - I've deep-dive into GPS when I've bought my first receiver, I think in year 2002 or something like this, and it was HARD at these times (there was Internet, of course, but good texts on GPS were very hard to find).
Now, thank you to Bartosz, I have two excellent links to hand out if I'm asked about these topics. I understand them well, but I never ever will be able to explain them so clear and accessible.
(The div needs the class 'playing' added, e.g.
<div id="stop_lever_interaction" [...]>
[...]
<div class="play_pause_button playing"></div>
</div>
<div class="play_pause_button"></div>[0] https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/#stop_lever_interacti...
> This mechanism protects the fragile tips of the balance shaft from braking when the watch experiences a sudden jerk.
“Breaking”, presumably.
More generally, am I the only one who finds that the temporal aliasing in the fast repetitive animations just before the balance is introduced looks funny to the point of being misleading? Might be my combination of mobile hardware, though, I wouldn’t normally expect it to synchronize to the framerate to this extent, but I’m seeing that it does.
(I appreciate the immense effort it would take to make this account for aliasing with motion blur or similar. I just went “huh?” when fiddling with the speed slider there, because it really was confusing at first.)
Worth mentioning, most mechanical watches will have a sapphire back, so when you take them off you can admire the movement privately.
https://www.watchtime.com/featured/watch-spotting-at-the-vie...
I really like the correspondence between the respect for the ingenuity of this technology and the "handcrafted" WebGL.
Last line:
"With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive."
it has a cool [8800] co-axial escapement: https://www.kapoorwatch.com/blogs/through-the-scope-the-omeg...
another crazy one is Zenith's all-silicon oscillator:
https://masterhorologer.com/2017/09/14/zenith-defy-lab-the-w...
https://monochrome-watches.com/zenith-defy-lab-revolutionary...
most (all?) that i've seen have a power reserve gauge. if it's a daily wearer, that needle will be pegged to max and basically useless clutter. complications for their own sake are not my cup of tea.
most (all?) that have a date function have the extra-wide single digits, which i'm not a fan of.
(i could go on)
i know it's not one model, but there's certainly similar design language to them (as there should be, perhaps), likely due to the geometry of the movement itself. i havent seen anything wildly varying, as you say.
If you do want a date, but it's specifically the font on the date wheels they use that you don't like, then you're probably SoL.
(Search for 3 Hz and click the Audio icon)
both movements have an audible "twang" of the hairspring at each tick -- you can hear it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYCujza8JU. the sound is somewhat different for each watch, since the 8800 has a Si14 hairspring and the cheaper 2824-2 is metal. if you want another rabbit hole: [1]
what's interesting is that if you leave the watches on a hard flat surface, like a table or nightstand, the entire surface amplifies this twang, so you can hear it from several feet away.
[1] https://watch-insider.com/reportages/omega-defeats-mechanica...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhSQ_Azkr8
Not the best video you'll find on it now, but he was a fascinating man.
Definitely helped me to understand how clocks work. And it’s fun to watch it.
Creating something like this takes a lot of work. Consider supporting the creator on Patreon if you want to enable them to create more of these: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski
I think that should say "unlocks the escape wheel", not the balance wheel.
I want future generations to have access this so I have to ask - how can I back up this page with all of the interactive 3D animations still operational? Simply saving the HTML file doesn't seem to work.
If there's one thing I'd love to see, it would be a similar breakdown of manual and automatic transmissions.
Often a seller will be a small time watch maker and their components will all fit together, a good way to save on shipping.
Result: it's become my favorite watch, I wear it every day.
Next project was to use a bunch of cheap clone parts and a 3d printed dial, still working on that one :)
Check out this site for many others: https://explorabl.es/
Max Hetzel's patents are a good starting point - https://www.accutrons.com/tuning-fork-watch-patents
Full build playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsETq9h35dgQ...
Direct link to the first episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Y146v8HxE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
I wonder how minimal this kind of watch could be if you had a unrealistically accurate 3d printer and the design was essentially optimal (done by machine learning perhaps).
If every subject could have visualization like this I could learn anything!
> However, when the driving gear can’t rotate because it’s blocked by the rest of the gear train, the cannon pinion can overpower the friction of that tight fit and rotate on its own. This lets us set time without interfering with the gear train, which could break the delicate parts.
How can the cannon pinion (green) both overpower the friction to slide freely and also be attached to the driving gear (blue) when functioning regularly?
Does this imply that the driving gear and cannon pinion wear each other out every time you adjust the time?
1. building a custom mechanical timer, which I want for practical use.
2. designing a real-world alethiometer - a fictional watch/compass device with chaotic (magical) behavior - which runs entirely on clockwork. I've been wondering how to incorporate a source of significant entropy into a watch movement. One idea, for example, is something like a double pendulum, but made from torsion springs.
It was only in 2017 that China joined the elite club of countries capable of making ballpoint pens. Is it that hard?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/a636135/greubel-forsey-ha...
Regarding tolerances, your OPs article states that they were actually able to produce them before, but not at a satisfying quality. I don't know what a 'good enough' quality is, though. It's a good story nevertheless :)
1) Source a movement from a big manufacturer (eg; ETA/Valjoux or a japanese/chinese movement) and use it as is but design the case/dial yourself 2) (1) but modify the movement adding functionality, replacing parts, or refinishing it to your own standard 3) Designing a custom movement around specialty movement parts from a supplier like Jaeger LeCoultre. They make some of the trickier parts (gears, balance springs). They can also manufacture special parts on a swiss screw machine. 4) Going through a bespoke movement maker like agenhor. You tell them what you want and they have both the machinery to make many custom parts and source the rest from elsewhere. They also provide movement design expertise.
Actually machining the watch parts isn't the hard part... the tricky part comes in things like hairsprings and escapements which are made from sometimes exotic materials like silicon. Some tiny watch parts are made using electrical discharge machining which costs $$$$$$$$ as well.
I feel like the field of actually nicely designed quartz watches is dead from competition with mechanical and smart watches. Where smart watches are just ugly, and mechanical watches look amazing but are more hobby or conversation pieces than actually good for telling time.
I'm using
wget --page-requisites \
--span-hosts \
--execute robots=off \
--adjust-extension \
--convert-links \
https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
I could post more but just go to the archives and see. Every single one is a treasure and there are few enough that you can read them all: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
My favourite escapement is the detent escapment. I saw a cutout model at the Imperial Science Museum in London. Even after staring at it for ages I could not figure out how it worked!
How was any of this even manufactured at such miniscule scales...
One of my favorite memories, as a kid, was visiting a museum in Toronto (I think it was the Science Museum).
Many of the exhibits had buttons that you could press, to make them go.
I remember a giant steam piston. That was cool.
It's really fascinating seeing this mechanism alive, even in a simple mechanical kitchen timer with plastic gears. When wound up, the balance wheel starts to swing a little and quickly accelerates on each tick.
Stuff like this is a smaller percentage of the web these days, but in absolute terms there's more of it than ever before and a lot of it is higher quality too.
The hardest part for me when doing open source work full time was giving it up and getting a day job. I was fortunate that my wife was the breadwinner, and that I got to see what it was like to be a stay at home husband. I’ve often wished to go back to it. Did the author figure out a way, or is he wealthy?
He could also be a Superman, being able to do this with a full time job or contracting work.
I spent a few days studying their blog. The work is so good that when I retire, I’ll make a conscious effort to copy their style as closely as possible. It seems like the optimal way to transmit knowledge.
I wish there was an equivalent to YouTube sponsorships for blogs. If this had a 3 minute preroll ad, they would be rolling in money.
Superman it is!
Whilst I agree that the amount of time required do this doesn't professionally cover that, it's a very nice hobby which makes somewhat real money (very much depending on how many sharp the tail of £54's are) and garners some serious traffic whilst building a very solid credability in the industry.
Plus I signed up, so now they make £2.50 more!