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Mechanical Watch

ciechanow.ski

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Re: Mechanical Watch

#241

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

boesboes wrote: post #72

Wow very comprehensive & well done. 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 b…

Huh, I recently got into it and, as is my way, I did things on the cheap. All told, including tools and practice movements (and a couple inexpensive whole watches I restored) I'm in for maybe $100.

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.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#243

Post by dan_quixote »

tgmatt wrote: post #231
boesboes wrote: post #72

Wow very comprehensive & well done. 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 b…

When I saw this, the first thing I did was Ctrl + F to see if anyone else dropped Marshall's link. I have no desire to do it myself, but it's so satisfying to watch him repair them. His videos are great.

His videos are a delightfully interesting AND relaxing. Always a joy to watch and very little patreon/shill filler.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#244

Post by selcuka »

throwaway2214 wrote: post #190
10000truths wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times). 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 “mi…

minified js is not greatly smaller than gzipped js, I think the whole minification thing is a swing and a miss and now we have to deal with source maps and shit, and build pipelines and etc $ 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--…

True, but it also removes the comments and the whitespace, leading to slightly better performance and memory usage. There are also less bytes to gzip on the server side.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#245

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

_fat_santa wrote: post #54
criddell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of watch fans are happy when they see a watch brand use an in-house movement. I’m exactly the opposite for the reason you say - the popular movements are going to be easily and inexpensively serviced for much longer. That said, a lot of in-house movements are little more than tweaks and high end finishing applied to existing commodity movements.

I'm with you on this. I see a ton of custom watches that end up using a Seiko automatic movement or an ETA. A bit like Lotus using Toyota Camry engines.

Not just custom - Seiko used to (still does maybe) provide manufacturers with bare movements, even with the company name on it. That means you'll find "no name" watches from the 60s onward with Seiko movements. That makes servicing, repairing and replacing them much easier and cheaper. Same with ETA.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#246

Post by mananaysiempre »

wumms wrote: post #227

Bug report: on page load, the play/pause button for the stop lever interaction [0] shows the play icon albeit the animation is already playing. (The div needs the class 'playing' added, e.g. [...] instead of ) [0] https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/#stop_lever_interacti...

OK, if we’re piling up here :)

> 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.)

Re: Mechanical Watch

#248

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

CydeWeys wrote: post #124
Ancapistani wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to make the adjustment, but you need a timegrapher to measure the results in a reasonable time. 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…

> but you need a timegrapher to measure the results in a reasonable time. 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...

Tickoprint is another app for android that works great

Re: Mechanical Watch

#250

Post by sparker72678 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #2

There's something magical about mechanical watches. Maybe it's just knowing that you have this perpetually winding machine on your hand (in the case of "automatic" mechanical watches). 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 (thoug…

This rings especially true when you live and work in an ephemeral digital environment. I find mechanical devices of all kinds grounding. No batteries, no upgrades, no security vulnerabilities, no dependency hell.
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