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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

Half of the time it's magnetized and running a few minutes fast per day, and the other half (shortly after de-magnetizing it)

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.

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Yes, it sounds a degaussing and calibration. My simple Seiko 5 with 7S36C is within +/- 4 seconds per day, and I never adjust it except short-month skipping.

Given that is minutes off even after demagnetizing, makes me wonder if there has been water intrusion, or it is old and the oil is starting to gum up.

Seiko 5s have clear back covers generally, and a water intrusion should be pretty visble, in my opinion.

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.

Put it one a timegrapher and check amplitude, beat rate & beat error in different watch positions (watch dial up, dial down, crown up, crown down etc.). There are timegraphing apps on the iOS/Android app stores (using the microphone for detecting beat signals) for a very quick test. The watch's tick signal may be a bit on the weak side but i usually get some data in a reasonably silent environments with direkt contact of the watch to the phone's body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_timing_machine

Can you recommend any (Apple or Android). A quick search on the Apple store only returned things that looked scammy or terrible.

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