My love-hate relationship with mechanical watches

This is the story of a love-hate relationship with one (1) mechanical watch.

The complaint about big dials is familiar, watches trend big these days, but literally everyone who wears a watch has preferences for what they want to wear, this has no bearing on a watch being mechanical. I don't have many watches, but the largest dial is 40mm.

I'm at a bit of a loss about the bit where mechanicals stop running after awhile. ...yes? The watch in question is an automatic, so the author could get a winder if they don't want to reset the date.

Nothing at all wrong with a bargain Seiko, that said springing for sapphire is a great way to avoid having to baby a watch. The bit about feeling unsafe wearing it in the rain is pure neurosis, however: a 30m resistant watch can be worn in the shower, bath, pool, nothing bad will happen. Just don't dive with it.

So if you're reading this: you like Seiko, you don't like glass, you don't like resetting the date, and you worry about water resistance. Get a nice sapphire Seiko, put it on a winder when you aren't using it, and calm down about water, Japanese engineering is more than up to the task.

Edit: worth pointing out that for a Seiko 5, there are sapphire crystals which a professional can install, so that's another option.

> Like other analog products that persist in a digital age (see vinyl, print media, and board games), much of the popularity of mechanical watches can be attributed to nostalgia. Quartz watches are superior in almost every metric: they cost less, tell better time, pack more features, and are far easier to repair. Yet it's mechanical watches that are the world's most sought-after, expensive timepieces.

This is a fascinating point. When it comes to our hobbies, romanticism trumps pure utility, and I think that's a lovely thing.

I think the main thing here is to get a watch that matches what you want to get out of it.

I have a mid-range watch, an Omega, that I got new. It's automatic (meaning it's mechanical but it automatically winds as I swing my arm from walking). I wear it nearly every day and almost always just works. I don't mess with it "every other day" like OP, I mess with it every other month when I have to reset the 31 day date window on my watch because the month only has 30 days.

This matches my use better than even a smart watch, which requires more charging and maintenance than my automatic watch. Of course, I could buy like 10-20 apple watches for what I paid for it :)

The watch is 5 years old and it only loses around a second a day on average (it's rated for +-2 seconds). Incredible that it's completely mechanical, and it's part of why I think it's such a cool device to have.

I would tell anyone buying a mechanical/automatic watch to also buy a watch winder.

Complaining about the fragility of (in this case) cheap consumer products is also, unfortunately, self-defeating. I have a Tag Heuer that I've been in a (semi-serious) car accident with - which came out with a bent buckle & still works fine to this day.

It's akin to buying a bottle of Lagavulin & complaining about the smoky taste.

> My Seiko has only 30m of water resistance, which in the watch world is pretty much akin to not having any at all. I don't even feel safe having it on in the rain.

How is rain even remotely the same as >30m submersion?

For me it's having just one thing I own not be disposable, and built like it. My favorite watch has a sapphire crystal and ceramic dial. I bash that thing into walls and doorknobs constantly and after many years I still can't even tell it's even happened once. I'd be fine if it was quartz, but it would have to be some kind of quartz movement that I knew could be repaired or replaced in 20 years. Despite what watch nerds say, I'm pretty sure that's entirely reasonable, but it's just not the norm for some reason. Grand Seiko is the exception, but I'm far too casual a dude for that brand.

My son is into mechanical watches but he's also into shooting a black powder muzzle loader. Before he got into that I thought you'd be crazy to shoot a gun without cartridges but I found it was pretty fun when I tried it out.

Winding my watch and setting/checking the time is a morning ritual. It also helps me set my own inner clock. Usually I know what time my watch says before I look at it.

Likewise a timer. The motion of the hands gives much better sense of the movement of time than numbers changing on a digital readout, and a screen rendition of hands moving is so clearly an illusion, my subconscious regards it as a fantasy.

Why would I want a digital watch? Just another set of annoying updates and notifications and battery needs charging and system updates and ....

Watch enthusiasts are almost exclusively about mechanical movements. Younger generations are about smart watches, if they wear a watch at all. So quartz doesn't have much of an enthusiast market (with some exceptions, mainly Casio). What you get then is cheap and cheap looking watches with quartz movements. If you want a nicely crafted watch it's probably going to have to be mechanical. Which is ok, as they are mainly jewelry. But I find it a shame, I would love more choice of nice quartz watches.

It's hard to convey how and why I am so attached to mechanical watches. I'd say that looking down and seeing the pallet fork dance like a skeleton and the balance wheel spin in perfect time makes me feel like everything in the universe is deterministic and I don't have to worry so much. This tiny bit of ingenious engineering on my wrist brings me great comfort. When I don't have it on I am more likely to feel depressed or anxious.

It is for this reason I wear my favorite mechanical watch every day (currently I am infatuated with the 44mm Zenith DEFY El Primero 21 with a skeleton dial) so I rarely run into the problem this author describes. It also doesn't have any complicated functions that must be set (the sole additional feature is a timing mechanism that uses a separate movement and power reserve), so in the rare case I am not wearing it for a couple days I don't have to spend a lot of time fiddling with it. This guy should get a watch winder though. And have someone install a sapphire glass crystal after market (or do it himself if he wants to have some fun). And uhh, you can shower in that thing bro (just don't press the buttons while you are showering, this can create a gap in the seals). It is fine.

Also a fan of mechanical watches, including doing mods/builds of them.

I don't mind winding mine up and setting the time, but if that bothers you, you can get a watch winder that will keep the spring topped off on automatics.

Regarding size, there seems to be a consensus that trends are slowly gravitating back towards more reasonable case diameters. Even Panerai (famous for its massive chonkers) released its first 38mm recently. You can also get into vintage watches. Over 40mm was very rare and mainly limited to dive watches some 30 years ago. Thinness was more of a priority back then too. As an adult male with a standard 7" wrist, 38mm diameter and under 12mm thickness is my preference for a comfortable all-day wearing experience.

Those who genuinely do love sporting a huge dinner plate on their wrist need not worry though, since I'm sure they'll always keep making plenty of the big ones. In the smart watch world, I suspect certain models will get bigger as users demand more battery life and functionality. For example, Garmin recently came out with the 51mm Fenix 7X.

I also got interested in mechanical watches about 10 years ago and bought a Vostok Amphibia to play with.

One additional burden of mechanical watch ownership is regular maintenance. This isn’t mentioned in the article, possibly because the author has not had their mechanical watch long enough to need it. But every mechanical watch eventually needs to be serviced. At least disassembled, cleaned, and re-assembled, and maybe some parts replaced.

I didn’t appreciate this until my Vostok needed it; it just stopped being reliable over time. Then I thought I should have just bought a nicer watch, but nope: even Rolexes and super expensive watches are supposed to go in every few years for servicing.

It was actually very difficult to find someone to do the Amphibia. Seiko and nicer watches have official servicing programs and networks of authorized repair shops. None of them wanted to touch an obscure cheap Russian watch.

And the watch itself only cost like $50 used… I was reluctant to spend $hundreds on a servicing. So it sits in a drawer, stopped. And I’m back to my Timex Ironman, which is on at least its 3rd battery.

I have a 1960s steel Omega that keeps pretty good time and that I wear most days. It's comfortable and pretty and never actively tries to get my attention (other than being an objectively nice object to look at). It's also, in comparison with a modern watch, tiny. 35mm or so. I can't imagine wearing some expensive heavy monstrosity every day.

> Another thing that watch enthusiasts definitely warned me about but that didn't hit me until I actually started using a mechanical watch was just how annoying keeping up with a mechanical movement can be [...]

There are automatic mechanical watches. Together with a watch winder you don't have to worry about winding your watch. But I guess there are none in sub 40mm? Haven't payed attention to the space in the last 15 years.

> Like other analog products that persist in a digital age (see vinyl, print media, and board games), much of the popularity of mechanical watches can be attributed to nostalgia.

In addition to that one of the other big reason is probably that expensive mechanical watches are a status symbol, and are also a decent investement. Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, A.Lange & Söhne etc. hold their value well or increase over time.

I too love me mechanical watches.

However I'm not wedded to them being exclusively analog.

I have a orient ray raven II, which is big, but really practical. (I did have to regulate it my self, as its was off by 4 minutes a day. so it was desperately impractical before then) I've had it on all the time for about 5 years. It feels solid, and has 200m of waterproofing (supposedly)

I have other watches, some of them are tuning fork watches (batshit crazy mechanism) or quartz controlled tuning fork. I have a cute mechanical moonphase watch with a famous cartoon character on it.

Finally I have a High accuracy quartz watch as well.

But OP's point about them getting bigger is spot on. Lots of modern mechanical watches are getting to the 45mm size. which is far to fucking big.

However I've stopped thinking about them as "time pieces" and just accepted that its all just jewellery, that makes life far more logical.

Sems strange to complain about an automatic mechanical watch being itself - like complaining that a manual car needs you to change gears! He has a very nice watch. Setting the time if he doesn't wear it takes a 10 seconds (a minute if you need to get the day and date correct)

> Quartz watches are superior in almost every metric: [...] are far easier to repair.

Not at all. Repairing a broken quartz mechanism almost always means replacing vast swaths of it, if you're not replacing the watch entirely. In the case of quality quartz movement analog watches, the rest of the movement is mostly identical to mechanical watches.

Now then, for a compromise, I recommend solar powered analog watches. They have the best of both worlds, a perpetually powered and satisfying mechanism controlled by a quartz movement. I do wish they had faster beats (ticks of the second hand), but I get why they don't.

I have one (though a cheap one, Hamilton Khaki Field) which I love, I wear it once a week to enjoy it. Otherwise I wear a GW-M561 because it's much more practical and robust.

I think one aspect of getting into "vintage" technology in one way or another (vinyl, mechanical watches, fountain pens, etc.) is becoming familiar with the reasons that people developed newer approaches.

In my experience, it's a fun way to learn about design and technological progress. Sometimes you find the quirks or inconveniences outweigh the appeal that initially drew you to it. Other times not, and the imperfections of the item in question become part of its charm.

> Quartz watches are superior in almost every metric: they cost less, tell better time […]

This is true to a certain extent, in that an equivalent level of accuracy is generally cheaper with a quartz watch than a mechanical watch, but it’s not true across the board. I have a relatively basic mechanical watch that’s dramatically more accurate over a month than the Timex Easy Reader I bought for $25. High accuracy quartz watches are more expensive than you might think.

I bought a Seiko SKX007K as my intro to mechanical watches. I like it, but the inaccuracy is annoying. I've never really measured it, but I would imagine a couple of minutes per day.

I also have an Omega Seamaster from the 90's when they were producing a quartz variant which I really like, but before I got my cheap fitness tracker my go-to daily watch was a radio controlled, solar powered, digital G Shock. Always ready to go, indestructable, and perfectly accurate.

A mechanical watch is a piece of jewelry. As such, it subject of fashion whims, fragility and limitations. But, what a pleasure!

I enjoy beauty of my skeleton. The tourbillon is absolutely mesmerizing. The alarm adds utility to the third timepiece. And so on...

A lot of mechanical watches has automatic winding nowadays. Watch winder is an easy and relatively cheap solution. I also had more problems with scratches on quartz, than with sapphire crystal.

"For those of you who aren't into watches (consider yourself lucky), watches can either be mechanical or quartz."

Not quite. There are other types of movement, for example the tuning fork movement first used in the Bulova Accutron:

https://electric-watches.co.uk/movement-types/tuning-fork/

I think that it makes much more sense to think about a mechanical watch as art than a tool. Luckily (?), we have moved past the necessity of having a watch around since devices telling us the time are so abundant nowadays. That is why, in my opinion, one should look at a watch more as a piece of art that can be worn than a means for keeping time. That is at least how I like to look at them. :)

Ever since I was a kid, I knew that a mechanical watch has to be wound every day. That's why it was such a big deal when automatic mechanical watches came out, which, IMHO, solved this very well. I'm surprised that OP didn't know about this considering how much research they've done.

Speaking of alternative, power supplies for watches One day I'd like to see a paper thin watch that goes around your wrist and runs on the temperature differential between your body temp and air temp, using the peltier effect for example.

I think the appeal of a lot of these 'analogue' things is that they aren't as reliable as the newer replacements.

Much like a classic car hobby, the tinkering or swapping of items is a good part of the fun.

A mechanical watch owner here: One very important thing to keep in mind is that a mechanical watch needs to be worn always in order to avoid having a winder or the gears losing their accuracy. Therefore, I opted for a "field" automatic watch: Seiko SNZG15J1. Field automatic watches are meant to be worn all the time. The SNZG15 has the Seiko 7S36 caliber which doesn't allow hacking or manual winding. But both features are not really necessary if you wear the watch all the time and willing to accept < 60 seconds worst case difference with atomic time.