Mechanical Watch (2022)
ciechanow.ski
ciechanow.ski
Watch repairing is a very rewarding hobby. It requires copious amounts of patience, but there's something fundamentally satisfying about disassembling something to its individual components, cleaning them and reassembling them meticulously. These things are designed to be taken apart, and it shows. I'm hard-pressed to think of other modern day objects that are meant to do this.
A mechanical film camera (say, a Leica) is similar. They are also meant to be opened, cleaned up, lubed, etc...
But even todays machines (depending on manufacturer and origin) are very serviceable. Especially italian made ones.
I had a Dalla Corte mini as main machine but couldnt resist a great offer and upgraded to Ascaso Baby T recently :)
It's a great machine (got it refurbed and it's lasted nearly a decade already), but not at all easy to take apart. It's a lot of electronics though.
I take it the manual ones are easier to service?
If it wasn't for the computing power/software complexity required, hobbyist 3D printers could probably have been a thing in the 70s or 80s
So many other hobbies feel like they're just excuses to bikeshed or gear collect, or they rapidly become gear collecting hobbies, sometimes leading to some disappointment in yourself when you see the hoard you never use.
Plus, it's repeatable, so you don't have to build daily routines around something irreplaceable. Some people enjoy that, but it doesn't fit well in the high tech mindset where anything that isn't repeatable feels like a liability, especially if managing physical objects and keeping track of your stuff is already a major source of stress.
Files don't wear out either, so it's not like software, where you assume it will likely need maintenance at some point and could stop working in a system update at an inconvenient time.
It also doesn't need much space or expensive equipment, and doesn't take so long to learn that us modern screen addicts would probably just give up before making progress.
That statement completely ignores enormous quantities of engineering that have occurred.
Stepper motors, for example, had huge amounts of engineering thrown at them by disk drive manufacturers in order to get them where we are now.
Resin printers needed high precision galvanometers to direct laser beams. The control of that would have been ridiculous in the 1980s.
Modern resin printers rely on high-resolution monochrome LCD displays. That requires cheap LCDs (only remotely viable after 1990+) as well as enormous quantities of embedded RAM (4K monochrome takes almost 1MiB of RAM which was half the total memory of Powerbook 100, for example).
And modern printers rely on high-power UV LED sources to create uniform flux. Blue+ wavelength LEDs we're a decades long research task.
Revolutionary technologies appear when a series of engineering barriers drop that allow a synthesis of ideas.
The printing press is a good example. Lots of people talk about how the Chinese and the Muslims had the printing press, but that wasn't enough. The printing press needed engineering in paper, inks, moveable type, eyeglasses, an alphabet, etc. before it could take off.
'1337 watch-repairing skillz qualify you to work on nukes: https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-warheads-military-bomb-pl...
There are thousands of tiny parts inside each warhead,
so steady hands are key. That’s why technicians go
through a skills assessment that includes disassembling
and assembling a mechanical wristwatch.Kershaw leek is really a great knife.
Also keeping your pocket knife sharp is another example of it being directly maintainable and repairable. I often spend several hours a month sharpening my pocket knives though I probably have a few more than the average person.
Is there by chance a simulator of this on Steam if a good beginner hobby kit doesn't exist?
Buy some cheap movements off eBay, and dive in. Yeah, you'll lose parts and break things but you'll learn a bunch.
I have a couple Westclox watches from the 60s that I bought for $10/each on eBay, and they both now run at +/- 2 seconds a day.
The screwdrivers and tweezers should be of good quality though, at least get the ones that cost 3-4$ each from China.
And you don't even need a mechanical watch. Cheap quartz watches also have tiny interesting parts in them that you can try to disassemble and reassemble.
I know, not exactly the same as repairing fine watches, but I think it might be similar.
This is so true. I used to repair phones and other gadgets before starting with watch repair... and I was kinda scared to take apart something filigree like a watch because it surely would never go back togheter properly.
But no, everything goes back togheter fine without having to apply any kind of force. If it doesn't it's 99% my fault. E.g. even tiny screwholes are slightly tapered so the screws kinda fall in there automatically.
I've seen people's OCD around me or similar issues getting worse with arrival of smart watches and nearly constant interruptions from notifications. Yet those folks don't turn them off even if I mention visible degradation on their part, I guess then they would end up with charging-needy expensive-yet-soon-obsolete gadget without much else (sport monitoring is cool for some folks, again I simply don't get the desire for constant measurements and comparisons - for me it takes away most of the fun that sports should be in first place, I focus on being challenged at my current level, not chasing some meaningless numbers).
I guess if one is 'free' from such things the described effect is less bad, but why the heck would I ever wanted to be notified instantly on my hand when something happens? Peace of mind and clear focus are rare and precious things these days, and this destroys it for few seconds of dopamine kick.
Wealthy: Patek Philippe
True wealth: "I DGAF what time it is or what looks good with this jacket"
The concept is that it will only have one hand (the hour hand), and the mainspring barrel will encircle the entire movement, you'll wind it up by rotating the bezel (and therefore the outer part of the barrel) clockwise, and the mainspring will drive the inner barrel clockwise. The hour hand is mounted directly on the inner barrel (which therefore completes 1 revolution per 12 hours), and the rest of the movement only exists to regulate the speed at which the inner barrel rotates. So the rest of the movement will be a series of gearings-down, with an escapement at the end.
And to set the time, the movement will be mounted into the case with a ratchet, such that when you turn the bezel anticlockwise, the entire movement (and therefore the hand) rotates anticlockwise allowing you to set the hand. You'll only be able to set it as precisely as the ratchet (i.e. you'd need 720 positions of the ratchet to set it to 1-minute precision), but the watch will never keep particularly good time anyway so I don't think this is a problem.
Yesterday I got an escapement at almost-watch-scale ticking for the first time, albeit erratically and requiring enormous drive torque: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNODOp6uBc (3d printed for expediency, the real one will all be machined; and I say "almost-watch-scale" because although it fits inside the 50mm diameter that I am aiming for, it is obviously too thick to go inside a sensible watch).
I have more info in this post: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/the-watch-project.htm...
For a while I wore a solar-powered Casio that self-adjusted every morning using the NIST atomic clock radio signals, and the peace of mind knowing that my watch was always accurate was such a pleasure in comparison. It was kind of cheap build quality and eventually fell apart, but I don't think I'll ever go back to a mechanical watch again after that.
> almost completely defeating my reason for wearing a watch in the first place.
Maybe it's just me but I don't need perfect accuracy on a wristwatch. If one minute more or less matters I'm already too late anyway.
The convenience of having a modern Bluetooth-syncing cheap Xiaomi fitess watch is so great I don't believe I'll ever go back.
Wow, that's bad. Do you know what is magnetizing it? A cheap Seiko 5 should be able to keep time within a few seconds a day. Minutes a day means it is broken. It isn't a just tuning issue, there is something else going on.
Oil age maybe a factor, but maybe it’s dropped? I had a Swatch with an ETA movement (with shock absorption nonetheless), and I somehow managed to damage its balance wheel assembly by dropping to a soft carpet from ~80cm, because it started stopping when it was not in dial up position. They even opened it and recalibrated and oiled it, but it’s dead.
When it came to buying a watch for myself I also ended up also getting a solar powered Casio with NIST synchronization ("Waveceptor"), the type with hands (for the looks). I love the idea that it's technology without software updates or battery changes (hmm, does the battery you charge with solar wear out?), and always keeps perfect time to the second without any effort on my part. This one (price seems a lot higher than before): https://www.casio.com/us/watches/casio/product.WVA-M640D-1A/
Somehow, watching all those meticulous adjustments to make sure the mechanical watches kept good time made me prioritize that to the point I didn't even get a mechanical watch.
This single-use timekeeping device was literally the least accurate timekeeping device on my person, compared to my phone and computer.
1 second/day is 10 PPM. Reaching that accuracy with only mechanical means in a device small and robust enough to be worn on the body is something to admire, not to fault for its limits.
I use the Garmin to track my exercise - I don't care if the mechanical watch will last all my life if it doesn't do what I want it to do, and it's not even that great at the one thing that it does do.
There aren't a lot of normally-priced mechanical watches that get 1 second/day accuracy. That precision can be admired in mechanical watches, but as I said, it becomes a fun expensive hobby.
Quartz watches go years on a small battery, and keep better time.
Sure, it's admirable engineering, it's just most obsolete. And that's ok!
The role of watches as jewellery has kept mechanicals going far more than practicality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock
Lasting years on a battery is easy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Drive
Advertised at +-15 seconds a month, but in reality it's much better than that.
I get your point, but I can easily get >2 weeks out of my Garmin Fenix or over a month if I put it in battery saving mode.
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/tell-time-by-stars.htm...
There's something wrong with your watch.
I have been reluctantly wearing a Samsung Withings watch that looks mechanical but is actually smart, but a mediocre compromise (you need to wear it higher up the wrist than I usually do, and I don't believe it gives accurate heart rate and activity measurements). 30 day battery life is pretty cool though.
I may just start going back to my Vostok and Seiko watches full time at this point. (I don't like spending a lot of money on watches, anyone who is curious on getting into them should check out both brands as economical starters - the Vostok Amphibia has a storied history!)
A smartwatch is about data, primarily.
You can have both. Use the mechanical watch for occasions that require a formal attire and use the smartwatch as your daily driver and sport companion.
I think mechanical watches are much more about being jewellery than function, even though it's impressive engineering. But I'm not a very flashy guy (I don't even own any shirts that fit anymore, just T-shirts lol) so I don't really care.
But it's good to see everyone can get what they like. I'm personally really happy with how far smartwatches have come.
- Shows the time (and possibly date)
- Vibrates when I get a call (or maybe other notifications)
Other than that I'd like it to be small and have a long battery life. Is there anything like this?
I currently use a Garmin smartband, but there are so many features I don't use.
For what it's worth, the amazfit and Xiaomi products also have very great battery life (around 2 weeks) and some are very light. With the gadgetbridge or notify for Android apps they're really privacy conscious too.
It may not literally watch every breath you take while you sleep, but I haven't wanted that personally anyways.
Only real drawbacks are battery life is only OK (about a week or so depending), the IPS screen can be bright in the dark (though it's a nice flashlight) and it only has 1 meter of water resistance, though it seems well sealed enough to trust it if I fall into water momentarily. (And really, swimming/showering with watches is kind of niche anyways)
Consumers bought into Apple's shiny power hungry oled Apple Watch and yet they still complain about battery life to this day. Do you really need slick animations on your watch? Consumers will still buy what is shiny and cool looking over what actually works.
And don't even get me started on WearOS, Google's sorry excuse is such a disappointment, I swear I'd have to actually try if I wanted make as many bad UX & performance sucking decisions as they did.
I had an Apple Watch, but sold it, as I felt guilty not wearing it more, with all that it can do. I ended up getting the cheapest Polar watch option, that does everything on-device (I don't have an account or anything), and can wear that to the gym if I just want to check out my heart rate.
There's something beautiful to me about a mechanical watch being tied to my personal relativity. Compared to an NTP synchronized smart watch, nothing should update the time on my watch but me. The actual usefulness of this feature is merely philosophical but it makes me happy to consider.
The only thing I miss is weather at a glance on my Pebble. I used a watch face with the temperature on it and to this day I still look at my wrist when I'm thinking about the temperature lol
I'm not a collector when it comes to watches, and I can happily wear that Longines until the end of time, and will be happy.
Having a tactile watch with real hardware with no electricity inside brings me more joy than some capable electronic toy which needs constant tending and replacement.
If I was climbing mountains, maybe but mere outdoor activities I have a ProTrek. More than enough.
Any smartwatch will become unusable, polluting garbage a few years (months?) from now: a canonical example of planned obsolescence. Their self-tracking functions are a double-edged sword, a source of stress as much as relief.
Any well-built and well-maintained mechanical watch will last you decades. No dependencies on electricity and network connectivity, it's a self-contained and entirely autonomous piece of human engineering. Mine was built in 1975 and is one year older than me. In a world where everything fades away so fast, wearing it everyday feels like owning a precious relic.
Easy choice if you ask me.
This already veers straight back into the marketing territory that everyone in this thread remarks was an eye opener when they actually got a mechanical watch.
I have a mild prepper tendency and I had to eventually kill my romantic views of mechanicals when I realized it just time drift and wouldn't last long without regular maintenance from someone with the tools and knowledge/skill, not to mention someone in this very comment section mentions a mechanical watch suffering a death from drop onto carpeted floor.
Mechanical watches are cool, but I easily spend less time without my PineTime (which I'm surprised nobody else in these comments has even mentioned) working than my friend spends manually syncing his seiko back to time/maintaining it.
I sometimes call it my "soviet in a good way" watch, it ended up becoming my "function over fashion" watch, which means almost all day every day wear for a few years now.
pros:
decent battery life (1-2 weeks, i turn off bluetooth and gps on my phone overnights which helps both devices)
"good enough" design (durable enough for all but swimming/showering)
easily replaced or modified (even takes standard watch bands)
flashlight, notifications and all traditional digital watch functions
multiple community "OS" options
cons:
community development can be slow, buggy
water droplets particularly from natural rain can trigger the touchscreen, not amazing if you bike in seattle or something
anemic hardware
The charger is cheap and isn't that quick but again, the pinetime kind of excels in knowing the difference between good and good enough, as I once heard an engineer say (about something else), and I rarely find myself bothered by it's lack of luxuries.
What do you think is the PineTime's biggest strength when compared with a mainstream smartwatch?
Have you found the watch to be hackable? Is there any sort of customization that you've done to it?
Frankly, I think the combination of price/replaceability and privacy are the only things unique (besides niche FOSS modding) to it among smart watches; and I like the open aspect of essentially every detail.
It makes it the only smart watch I've used that feels like it respects my dignity, frankly. A minor philosophical quibble but one I take stoic pleasure in. It is a tool, and technology that serves me, not another.
> Have you found the watch to be hackable? Is there any sort of customization that you've done to it?
I actually got it hoping I'd have the inclination to tinker with it, but my only idea that wasn't already being worked on by the default "OS" is a red flashlight mode, which with the IPS screen is a moot point anyways, since the black pixels when turned on make for a low-light flashlight anyways, heh. A hardware drawback that ironically makes it a more accessible tool in my experience.
My watch takes 15 seconds to rewind each day, and 5 seconds to be time adjusted by one minute twice a week. Service is every 5 years, the last one cost me 88 €. It gets more valuable each year, and I plan to bequeath it to my son in a (hopefully) very distant future.
To each his own, I guess.
Admittedly, all the mechanical watch issues I've read tend to be pertaining to the automatic variety.
Admittedly, it is a rather pricey model (Omega Speedmaster). I bought it second hand for 1500 € a few years ago. Unfortunately, prices have since skyrocketed for many emblematic watches like this one.
What tool/library would you pick to create similar ones yourself?
Looking at the source [1], the author seems to hand-craft them using the canvas API, but man, that seems really difficult!
There are 3d engines in JavaScript like three.js (https://threejs.org/) that can abstract some of the 3d rendering work for you.
Tangentially related, the documentary The Watchmaker's Apprentice [0] is a captivating look at the dedication it takes to create a mechanical watch. It's amazing that it's possible for a single person to craft each tiny cog and spring from scratch and put it all together.
The boss, who was an old jeweler who had started out in the business as a boy in the fifties working under a jeweler and watchmaker, always said that watchmakers are a dying breed, and could pretty much name their price.
When I started working and learning the trade we had two watchmakers that we shipped to. Within two years one of those had retired, and we were unable to find a replacement for him.
I loved working and repairing jewelry (even more so that my fulltime job in IT for local gov), and wanted to become a watchmaker, but my life took me elsewhere. Now that I am older and in a better place in life I often think of those three years, and have been considering obtaining the tools to start up a hobby in one or the other...or both.
Thank you, OP, for an awesome post and link.
Rolex these days is a joke, even the authorized dealers will rip you off shamelessly. They will either refuse to sell you a watch they have in store, or they will force you to buy 30 grand in extra jewelry just to get the Rolex you want.
- bicycle: https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343495
- sound: https://ciechanow.ski/sound/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33249215
The original post [1] was ranking #4 as the highest-upvoted story on Hacker News before it got kicked to #5 last August by Bram Moolenaar's death announcement [2], then to #6 after Altman's saga ranked #3 a few weeks ago.
Over all, this story is classified as #1 in creative content that is not in the genre of news or announcements.
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I don't have the skills or machinery to make a wristwatch sized version, but I did make a _big_ sized version: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...
I think for a large tuning fork, you _could_ use normal watch gears. However I don't have the skill to try that, yet.
scaling it up you'd get something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48n-jvo5N0
to make it practical on a tuning fork, that movement of the forks would need to correspond to the tooth size of the wheel. For a large tuning fork, its probably in the order of mm, so not beyond home shop manufacture
I've since switched to a smart watch, but I keep getting tempted to go back. I generally use my smart watch as a very gentle alarm, and for fitness tracking. I just don't want to be the geek who wears two watches. Maybe I should only wear it at night?
> night-only mechanical watch
I said that I was thinking of only wearing a smartwatch at night, because I really like the gentle alarm in the morning.
What I didn't say was that I use a smartwatch for tracking my sleep patterns.
Speaking of Swatch and mechanical watches: the Sistem51 is an interesting watch, since it's the only mechanical watch ever fabricated in a 100% automated production line. The parts are welded together and held by a single screw. https://www.swatch.com/en-us/sistem-51.html
I always wondered what all those bits and bobs inside as mechanical watch are.
Take a look at the 9th or 10th interactive drawing, where you can move the slider to the right to wind the mainspring, then release the slider to watch the mainspring unwind.
When the energy is depleted, all the bands in the coil are bunched up around the outside of the barrel. It's not much of a spring any more.
This is the same type of torsion spring as in drawing 4 but with the mainspring being used for primary energy storage there is no desire for recovery to a neutral position from both clockwise & counterclockwise directions like you see in drawing 4. Instead you only need to ever draw energy from storage to use in a single rotational direction. Opposite rotation is used only to store externally applied energy.
So you wind it in one direction to store energy then it releases the energy in the opposite direction.
But without the precurvature shown in drawing 11 the torsion spring would tend to be exhausted when it was "zero-wound" like the one in drawing 4, with the coils widely spaced away from each other, free to absorb & recover energy from either rotational direction. And since we only need to draw energy in one rotational direction, that amounts to only half of the energy the spring is capable of storing for our purposes. Notice how about half the length of the spring is coiled similarly to drawing 4, with the upper half of the loose spring coiled less tightly and in the opposite direction.
Because when our mainspring is exhausted, we want it to be bunched up along the outside of the barrel so we get the most out of it before it needs to be retensioned. And when it's fully retensioned we want to get maximum energy storage from the hardware so at that starting point we want the coils to be tighly wound, bunched up around the arbor.
But not too tight.
Or it could be overwound.
As long as there is some space in between the coils, when recovering rotational energy you have access to what is stored along the entire length of the free portion of the coil. But once it's wound tightly enough for the coils to be in significant direct concentric contact, the free portion of the coil becomes so small it does not contain enough energy to drive the timekeeping mechanism.
It could get so tight that it's not much of a spring any more. Closer to a solid cylinder with a slight tab hanging off.
Which is more of a problem when both ends of the torsion spring are permanently attached to their substrates.
Instead in these drawings, the color-coded metal strip is used to provide a friction grip between the outer end of the coil and the barrel, strong enough grip to drive the timekeeping mechanism but designed to slip counterclockwise within the barrel if manual winding proceeeds more than necessary, slipping before the coil can get wound too tightly.
Basically, overcharge protection for a non-electric hardware device.