Reply With QuoteCant speak for anyone else but when I have manual winds I always enjoy the extra interaction that winding them involves. It gets to be a bit of a morning routine with a coffee.
Simple pleasure really in a life full of automation.
Im not sure mate, this website (https://www.wickedcoolwatches.com/ca...work-in-space/) says they will work but not as efficiently as gravity is not keeping the rotor pointing down but it will still charge it to a degree and astronauts manually wind their timepieces to counter this effect.Originally Posted by M4tt
But actually googling it gives just as many opinions one way as the other? Either way I’m sure it’s not of huge concern to anyone on this forum anytime soon hahaha
Gaz
Cant speak for anyone else but when I have manual winds I always enjoy the extra interaction that winding them involves. It gets to be a bit of a morning routine with a coffee.
Simple pleasure really in a life full of automation.
The force of the spring isn’t linear, which is why watchmakers don’t regulate watches at full wind. Giving up a little bit of power reserve by winding a bit less than full will improve accuracy, because it starts you in the sweet spot of the torque curve, assuming you wind it again before it falls out of the curve at the bottom.
Ideally, you want to keep the watch wound between b and c:
Traditional power reserve is 38-45 hours so winding at 24 hours means you will never be in the area "C-D" of the graph.
Get with the programme, Grandad
Everything is button start these days (my Golf still uses a key, actually, but push to start is the trend).
I always find automatics feel 'gritty' when wound compared to a healthy manual wind, not that is really important as the autos only need a few winds to start them up and then look after themselves.
I do like the cleaner look of a manual wind movement though
M
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Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Gaz. You may want to read your quotes before quoting them. This is what is included.
quote from that article - “The Omega Speed Master, which is arguably the most famous watch worn in space, runs on an automatic movement. It has worked and still works great even in space where there is very little gravity.”
my thoughts as a physicist: And it is inertial forces not gravitational force that makes the rotor swing - it is not a pendulum. So the rotor depends entirely on its wearer moving - not on gravity.
OP - personally I prefer automatic watches as it’s one less thing to remember in the morning.
Last edited by MartynJC (UK); 24th April 2019 at 08:27.
Microrotors can look neat too...
True, but tend to be expensive!
M
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Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
I remember when the Honda S2000 was released and all the motoring press slagged off the unnecessary start button. Looks like they were wrong.Get with the programme, Grandad
Everything is button start these days (my Golf still uses a key, actually, but push to start is the trend).
I always find automatics feel 'gritty' when wound compared to a healthy manual wind, not that is really important as the autos only need a few winds to start them up and then look after themselves.
I do like the cleaner look of a manual wind movement though
M
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As to movements, I don't have a preference, although manual winds tend to be thinner and the movement is more pleasing to the eye.
The graph of torque vs time for a mainspring is as I remember it. The increased initial torque doesn`t last for long enough to have a significant effect on timekeeping, although it dopes depend how much amplitude the watch has. If the amplitude is going above 300° for a significant length of time it could cause some strange effects. In reality, this would only be a problem if the watch was left dial up immediately after winding, in normal everyday wear the watch wouldn't be in a flat position and consequently the amplitude would fall back into a range where the timekeeping should be more predictable. This will vary from watch to watch, and I don`t see it as a reason not to wind the watch last thing at night.
Regulating a hand-wound to give best performance can be more involved, I always do it on the basis that the watch will get wound morning and late at night so that's what I recommend owners to do. As ever, my advice when checking the timekeeping of a watch is to determine what rate it runs at 'on the wrist' during everyday wear, then determine the dial-up overnight rate. This'll give a useful picture of what the watch is doing.
Some folks get really hung up about timekeeping, others are more relaxed, but it's always useful to know what a watch is doing. Having worn an Omega SMP cal 1120 for a 2 week spell on holiday it was interesting to see it had gained 40 seconds. That sounds a lot, but it averages at +4 secs/day and this included sleeping in it (which introduces more variability). I checked it for a few more days, taking it off overnight, and the gain was more like +3 secs/day. Armed with this info I could've regulated it slightly to give a smaller gain but in truth I couldn't be bothered removing the bracelet and taking the back off! It's very rare that I wear the same watch for a full week so I can live with the gain.
Absolutely. Also, since I wind my manual at about the same time every morning, I know how many winds it takes to top it off, so I just subtract a few and don’t wind until absolutely full, which negates, or at least cuts down, time in zone A. Of course, when in doubt, I just wind it fully, since being in zone A isn’t that big of a deal.
I'm glad this seemingly overasked question generated a decent amount of commentary. It seems that a combination of tradition, aesthetics, and simply being more in touch with one's timepiece are mainly why manuals tend to be preferred, and this all makes sense. I manually wind my automatics anyway, but the point is taken on thickness and tradition.
My original question came from whether there was something more than this that i was overlooking. For example, i have heard the Rolex reference 6694 (currently one of the underappreciated mass-produced 34mm vintage pieces, which happens to be a manual wind) spoken of as a potential future classic, chiefly because it is a manual wind (quite aside from being affordable vs steel sports). This naturally made me wonder if there was something i was overlooking! But I sort of see the point.
Thank you all for the insights and comments.
The good thing about manual wind watch is you don't have to worry if you have worn it enough hours for it to be wound 30thl enough etc
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I do like a manually wound watch, however what I’m not at all keen on is the combination of manual wind and a screw down crown, due to the potential for accelerated thread wear. The Rolex 6694 has an oyster case and screw down crown, and the manually wound Panerai Radiomir also has the same combination.
Dave
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To be honest I don’t enjoy manual wind....it’s one of the reasons I got rid of my Speedmaster, to begin with I liked winding it all the time, after a while I found it just became annoying. I have four automatics now, and no watch winder so often I do find myself winding a watch, just not all the time and not because I need to...
It’s just a preference from my POV...I’m glad to be rid of a manual watch.
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I'll just throw this in here for the hell of it:
https://forums.watchuseek.com/f20/fi...me-386870.html
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