Automatic vs Quartz Movements - Watch and Learn #4

hi this is Mark from Long Island watch.com and welcome to episode number four of watch and learn and today we're going to be discussing two different types of watch movements mainly your automatics your hand wines and your quarts or battery operated watches in episode number three we covered watch jewels and rubies it might be a good idea to watch that one since I went over a lot of stuff maybe that's almost like a prerequisite to this uh to this episode uh but that was a good episode that discussed how reduce friction in watches and now today we're going to discuss again just two basic types of movements your your automatics you know your mechanical uh self- windings if you will whether they're automatic or not makes no difference and your quartz watch is battery operated now there's more than this obviously in the watch world there's uh solar kinetic Mecha quartz and then you can get into different types of movements chronographs G bmts alarms Regulators etc etc uh but we're just going to focus on these two for now cuz I think it's going to be enough to talk about and maybe in the future uh we can uh bring in uh some other movements and talk about uh some other different watch functions automatic watches or mechanical watches you know are what you know primarily what what we sell what we focus on but of course you know there's many many different kinds of watches out there uh almost all of them though do for into the realm of either an auto or a quartz so when I started thinking about this video and how I was going to approach it you know I started saying well every watch pretty much even clocks keep track of time by measuring something and then when it reaches a certain number you know that's a second or that's a minute or that's an hour you know something that regularly oscillat something that can be uh counted the only exception that I could think of actually was a sun dial which obviously just uses the the shadow of something uh but you know whether it be a water clock from a thousand years ago grandfather clock with a pendulum a desk clock watch quartz atomic clock they all count something so I thought that was a good way to start the video off so in my hand is this is a Swatch actually both of these are swatches they're both mine I just thought they they're an interesting dichot you know an automatic Swatch and a quartz Swatch both skeletons uh the one in my right hand does not work anymore it's all corroded that's why the center of it is a little bit fuzzy and the one on the left is far older and it still functions perfectly it's a sealed uh a sealed automatic it's nonserviceable uh but anyway so like I covered in the uh in the in watch and learn number three you know we discussed the various elements of a watch uh so in an aut automatic mechanical what what have you it doesn't matter the only thing in automatic ads is you know a a rotor that winds the main spring it keeps it beat by this balance wheel that's oscillating back and forth at the top as this wheel moves back and forth it is regularly allowing and disallowing this wheel right here the Escape wheel uh to move and stop and that results in this you know what we call a lot of people say it's a smooth moving uh second T but it's not really smooth it's actually moving about eight times a second sometimes six times a second depending on the beat of the movement so it's starting and stopping and that's how uh it's keeping time going around the dial the minute hand is geared to this so the minute hand moves 160th as fast as this as a seconds hand and then the hour hand moves 160th as fast as the minute hand so everything is really you know this is this is the timer that is the thing that is being counted in mechanical sense to indicate the passing of time so what is a balance I have one here from watch and Lord number three I'm going to pick it up and it's a coiled up Spring and then on the bottom of it is this uh balance bridge but the balance itself is again this is garbage so don't worry about it the balance is really just a wheel let me bring this out so the camera can focus on it it's just a wheel it's got a jewel in the center uh and it rotates back and forth really fast you know based on uh this spring and so wheel will oscillate back and forth like this just like you saw in the watch and it does it eight times a second as I said six times a second uh depending on the beat of the movement now you'll hear movements referred to as 28,000 uh beats per hour uh 2,800 beats per hour or 36,000 beats per hour and when you correlate that down into seconds all that is is telling you how many times it's moving per second it would be easier if they just you know did what the whole world does and just base everything on Hertz so you know an 8 HZ wheel would be 28,800 beats per hour a 10 Herz like the zenithal promero 36,000 beats per hour it it oscillates 10 times a second uh but that you know the theory there is the faster the wheel moves the faster it oscillates uh any tiny changes between periods of oscillation will be averaged out in the long run and the watch will you know will be uh more and more accurate the faster the beat goes it's not always the case but it's the general theory behind it uh so you know more accurate time pieces or clocks the beat does go faster and faster up to you know atomic clocks where the beat is extremely fast so the heart of the watch is the balance wheel and that's what's going to keep most the accuracy of course this friction like we discussed in the jewel video there's the way it's geared uh there's a lot of other factors but imagine if you could you know ensure that this balance surely does go back and forth eight times every second guaranteed then you will have more or less a perfect watch you know you know not regarding friction uh but we don't have that we have manufacturing uh inconsistencies tolerances difference in positional accuracy if I hold it like this versus holding it like this gravity is acting differently on the balance wheel so things will change and the wheel will not always rotate oscillate with the same frequency one way that watchmakers get around this and this is a cufflink of mine an old movement but it illustrates something this is the nonfunctioning of course but if you look at the balance you'll see these little Nubs sticking out from the side uh they're screws and higher end watches extremely you know high-end watches will have screwed balances I actually was looking and none of my watches have screwed balances even my nicest pieces uh so with a screwed balance a watch maker can actually come in in and loosen and tighten these screws and what they're basically doing is changing the inertia of the wheel and getting it to rotate with a regular frequency oscillation so that's how your automatic watches work then in the 60s I'm going to bring up something I didn't have on screen before Bela came along and they came out with the acutron The Tuning Fork watch so a lot of you may have owned the oops it's upside down a lot of you may have owned these may have seen these uh this is the precursor to quartz you know quartz really was first invented excuse me quartz wristwatches the movements were first invented uh 69 70 they really didn't come into being until you know 70s and 80s uh but before that there was the acutron and this is actually a tuning fork it's a tuning fork Fork watch and if I hold it really close to the mic I don't know if you can hear it I won't know until I'm done editing but it is emitting around a 360 HZ pitch The Tuning Fork is here if you look at the metal Parts I'm going trace it with my tweezers comes down across back up and then over this magnet and the acutron works by exciting these magnets and getting this this tuning fork to resonate around 360 Heartz so remember before we were talking about these balances we were talking about you know 8 times a second 10 times a second six times a second now we're up to 360 times a second that's a lot of Beats so it gives a very smooth moving uh needle seconds and and of course this is before most integrated circuitry was uh developed so it's all discrete components I mean this is just a really cool watch this is one of mine I bought these years ago they're not expensive a couple hundred bucks if you like you know I obviously I love engineering and watchmaking this is just really cool I don't wear it much just a cool watch to have uh it's got discret components you know you can see the wiring the soldering you know old world craftsmanship I guess uh just really cool before they put everything on a chip and killed everything mechanical in the world batter is very easy replaceable because the batteries on these do not last long 12 to 18 months uh something interesting to note not really related to the video uh if you have an acutron or thinking of getting one they work on 1.3 volts as opposed to the common silver oxide batteries that we use today that which is about 1 and 1 12 volts I when these came out Mercury batteries were popular they were the button batteries uh and their chemistry put out 1.3 volts and now we've got silver oxide batteries they put out 1 and 1/2 volts and of course of course we can't use uh Mercury anymore dispose of it so silver oxide batteries have too high of a voltage so they still make batteries for this watch they're actually silver oxide chemistry and there's a diode uh that's stuck to the battery and it lowers its voltage to 1.3 volts CU if you put a 1.5 voltage volt battery in here it has it can run fast doesn't have to it depends on the tuning fork is designed but it has a tendency to either run fast or you'll just uh you know you'll ruin some of the circuitry because it's not built to handle that this is in between the mechanical watch and the quartz watch so then I'm going to bring up the quarty so now all quartz watches pretty much you know run the same use the same principles so they have a battery which is down here now of course uh on the watch I showed you before the automatic the power the power source was this spring that's all wound up in here you can see it I'm going to move it a bit you can see that spring wound up that's the main spring that's what holds the power so now in a quartz watch the battery obviously holds the power uh you have this little can up here this component is the quartz oscillator so really when you say it's a battery watch you really have to say it's a quartz driven watch because this is what keeps the bead or keeps the pace for the watch and then there's almost always a coil somewhere and that coil is what drives the motor uh to turn the wheels so again it's all the same thing uh the battery drives the quartz there's logic to count the oscillations and it it will it will index the secondhand once a second so now how does what is quartz so quartz is a you know a very an abundant mineral found second most abundant mineral found in uh on Earth and scientists discovered long ago that quartz is Paso Electric if you take a piece of quartz and you bend it uh it generates uh a voltage potential across its planes so because that happens the inverse is also true if you apply a voltage to quartz uh it will move uh it will oscillate so inside this little can believe it or not is actually a tuning fork cut from a quartz crystal it's very small and it's got little electrodes on its on the time of the fork and it uses battery power to excite those tin and to get the quz crystal to oscillate at its resonant frequency and being electrical engineers or Engineers pick uh things and powers of two usually so 2 to the^ 15 is the frequency oscillation of a quartz crystal in a watch around I think it's 32,768 Herz so remember about 10 Hertz 360 Hertz 32,000 Hertz so now we're measuring oscillations in up to 32,000 a little computer counts the oscillation of the tuning fork after it hits 30 after it overflows two to the 15 buckets one little bit pops out and we know that the stepper motor has to go 1 second this watch has no seconds hand but that doesn't really make a difference second hand is tied to the minutes hand is tied to the hour hand and even though this watch doesn't work I can still change the time and it's all if you can see through the plastic it's all geared so you would say on a watch like this the balance wheel is now replaced by the quartz oscillator so it's kind you know they're all they all kind of run on the same basic premise except you know we just see the players change a bit right so quartz watches are in inherently much more accurate than automatics I'm I'm going to you know not talk about the uh acutron anymore that was kind of just a stepping stone so now we're in 70s 80s technology and not much has changed really in the quartz realm or course course quartz wristwatch realm uh accuracy of a standard you know automatic watch nowadays plus 25 seconds minus 15 seconds a day accuracy of a standard you know unj unadjusted cordz Swatch roughly 15 seconds a month uh again rough estimates depends how good the movement is I guess the movement really is a piece of garbage you're probably going to get worse than that but you know 15 seconds a month a second every two days or so so obviously you know these are much more accurate but that's not why people own these automatics we like them because of what they represent and what's inside so let's talk about accuracy a little more in that chronometer so you may have heard the term uh certified chronometer uh cc is a company in Switzerland that certifies watch movements to chronometer status chronometer status you know encompasses many things temperature variation variations between positions uh but the biggest thing that people usually take out of chronometer status is that the accuracy is plus 6 seconds down to- 46 minus 4 seconds a day so the watch can be plus 6 to minus 4 a day and then it's a certified chronometer again in various positions various temperatures uh and also you know Ma there's different deviations uh between positionals uh but anyway that is what a chronometer is obviously a quartz watch beats that extremely easily just in his base state so there are no certified you know you don't certify a courts watch to the same chronometer specification uh but there is a court CC certificate very few watches ever get them it's really not necessary especially in the days of satellite navigation everyone has GPS which is uh the most accurate form of you know clocks that any of us can really have uh but Coos quartz watches are plus orus 07 seconds a day roughly 25 seconds a year uh which is obviously you know phenomenal accuracy so then with quartz watches of course then you can really upgrade the movement they can add jewels to the movement to lower the friction make it more accurate uh they can put in thermal compensated movements uh SEO has these brightling has these make the watch more accurate it is interesting to note that cour watch Es are more or less tuned to run on your wrist because as temperature changes excuse me as temperature changes the accuracy of the watch does drift uh so they're kind of tuned to more or less be around the temperature of your wrist uh excuse me temperature of it while it's on your wrist rather than being off uh on the dresser the last thing I want to discuss about quartz watches is uh just something you may not think about when you use a battery power flashlight say you know as as time goes on the battery as a battery Fades the the strength of the light obviously dims but with a quartz watch you couldn't have that let's say the let's say the battery went down by 5% if you lost 5% of your timekeeping think about how much that would be uh what an hour an hour a day it would be off so the interesting thing about quartz is that you know we discussed quz Paso Electric uh but when you apply uh voltage to it and it oscillates it actually in the same frequency of oscillation over a decent range of well button battery voltages 1 and2 volts you know plus orus 10% the illation doesn't change much so what that means you know this again this little crystal that's up here that's inside this compounding can uh as the voltage changes the accuracy of the watch does not drift which why some people say oh you know my watch battery died uh I didn't know it it wasn't even going slow it won't go slow it basically just dies cuz eventually uh the little motor powered by the coil just can't generate enough power anymore to turn the second's hand uh the quarts can still count but the rest of the system has just more or less broken down uh but it's just a it's a happy coincidence and maybe a planned a planned coincidence that you know quch works like that or else you know your watch would be accurate for the first day and then as the voltage drifted percent by percent uh your watch become extremely inaccurate which is not good for a watch so again this has been marked from long watch.com discussing the difference between mechanical movements and quartz movements with you I hope you enjoyed the video uh it came out to be a little bit long uh and that's why I didn't discuss uh hybrids uh such as solar Mecha quartz uh kinetics Etc that'll be another video If you like this video please do like it if you have not subscribed to our Channel please do so at this time if you have any questions or comments or you want to add any other little tidbits of information in the comment section please do you know in in uh preparing for this video I found a ton of information um I'll say I did know most of it but some of the things really uh caught me by surprise uh technology is amazing and the things we take for granted uh we simply shouldn't try to appreciate them and understand them a bit uh so thank you very much for watching bye-bye

Channel: Long Island Watch

Views: 266,739

Keywords: automatic watches, quartz watches

Id: 2STZxwnttgQ

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2016