Did anyone notice the animated example was giving the proper real time, right at the precise second too.
Mechanical Watch (2022)
121–130 of 168 posts
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#122My project at the moment is to try to make a mechanical watch. 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 complet…
wow, that's really impressive for 3-d printed and being built from first principles!
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#123I have a relatively inexpensive Seiko 5 mechanical watch that I really like, but as much as I love the idea of mechanical watches I simply don't have the patience to tend to it. Accuracy is a big problem (at least with my specific watch). Half of the time it's magnetized and running a few minutes fast per day, and the other half (shortly after de-magnetizing it) it's running a few minutes slow per day, meaning I need…
Even though my mechanical watch wasn't as inaccurate as yours (mine was only a minute or two off a week), the act of regularly adjusting it to match the true time slowly changed my impression of it from a "serious timekeeping device", the image cultivated by marketing, into "this is a silly hobby for people who have too much time and money". Doubly so when you look how much it costs to repair a mechanical watch. This…
Well, when the collapse happens and you have no batteries, satellites, etc., you can use the stars[1] to tell time and reset your mechanical watch to within a reasonable estimate given the circumstances. I own a relatively cheap mechancal watch I adjust every week. I bought a Garmin vs. an Apple/Samsung watch too. My Garmin battery lasts about 20 to 24 days depending on how I use the watch vs. 24 to 48 hours. It does more than I need, but has come in handy in my line of work.
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/tell-time-by-stars.htm...
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#124I have a relatively inexpensive Seiko 5 mechanical watch that I really like, but as much as I love the idea of mechanical watches I simply don't have the patience to tend to it. Accuracy is a big problem (at least with my specific watch). Half of the time it's magnetized and running a few minutes fast per day, and the other half (shortly after de-magnetizing it) it's running a few minutes slow per day, meaning I need…
I own a cheap seiko 5 as well. It's basically so close to perfect you need a specialized device that measures its error to a ridiculous degree to figure out its running slightly fast. It's like average 3 point something seconds a day.
There's something wrong with your watch.
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guns, small engines, and 3D printers are its larger modern cousins.
3D printers have very little mechanical complexity. It's all in the software. 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
Everything about 3D printing seems to be basically free of any kind of nonsense. Simple, highly reliable hardware (Sometimes you get a clog or something but nothing really fails badly for a very long time), made of cheap commodity parts, with software constantly being pushed to the limit of what's possible.
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.
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#126This blog is what got me into the fabulous hobby of watch repairing. Well, this blog and Marshall's awesome repair videos over at Wristwatch Revival: https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival 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…
I wish there was a good beginner level entry point with a kit or something. But most of what I saw was "you need to build your own tools and then you can start" and that's too high a barrier for me.
Is there by chance a simulator of this on Steam if a good beginner hobby kit doesn't exist?
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#127This blog is what got me into the fabulous hobby of watch repairing. Well, this blog and Marshall's awesome repair videos over at Wristwatch Revival: https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival 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…
I think that older film cameras have a very satisfying-to-use quality to them. I find that an Olympus OM-2 with a good lens feels sooo nice to use.
I know, not exactly the same as repairing fine watches, but I think it might be similar.
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal and subjective opinion ahead. 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 a…
>No dependencies on electricity and network connectivity, it's a self-contained and entirely autonomous piece of human engineering. 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…
The PineTime is still an electronic gadget that you won't use for very long.
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.
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even though my mechanical watch wasn't as inaccurate as yours (mine was only a minute or two off a week), the act of regularly adjusting it to match the true time slowly changed my impression of it from a "serious timekeeping device", the image cultivated by marketing, into "this is a silly hobby for people who have too much time and money". Doubly so when you look how much it costs to repair a mechanical watch. This…
It's also the only timekeeping device that will still work after three days away from an electric plug, and the only one you would wear all you life . 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.
> It's also the only timekeeping device that will still work after three days away from an electric plug
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.
Re: Mechanical Watch (2022)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guns, small engines, and 3D printers are its larger modern cousins.
3D printers have very little mechanical complexity. It's all in the software. 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
> 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
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.