How to Regulate an Automatic Wristwatch - Watch and Learn #25

hi this is mark from Long Island watch calm and welcome to another episode of watch and learn today we wouldn't be tackling regulating a wrist watch a lot of people have asked for this and I keep meaning to do it I finally had some time to do it regulating wrist watch is quite easy it's quite easy to also ruin the watch because you're really close to the balance and balance spring but it is a quite a simple procedure once you know what you're doing if you're not shy or scared about opening your watch then you know this is probably something you can do with your mechanical or automatic with relative ease you may want to invest in time graph or you don't need one you can just time your watch from day to day versus an atomic an atomic source to get how it's really operating but really you know regulating a watch is speeding it up or slowing it down it's very different than adjusting I don't adjust watches watchmakers adjust watches factories are just watches the big difference in regulation and adjustment adjustment is getting the watch to run the same way whether it be in a what they call here's a sample dial up configuration dial down and then you have crown down crown right crown left crown up usually watches are regulated to Subic I already did it so that usually watches are adjusted to five positions crown right being the position that they usually do not adjust in oddly enough this is the position that a watch is always shown in it's in a magazine or obviously in the showcase but if you're a righty and you wear your watch on your left wrist to get the crown to be like this you'd have to hold your watch like this for a prolonged period of time and that's the crown right position it's a very abnormal position you know when you're walking your crown is down or up depending if you're a righty or a lefty or you may be where am i both wrists like me so they usually regulate to the dial you know adjust I did it again they usually adjust to the dial up dial down and then it's three of the crown positions those are your five positions but a lot of watches like the Seiko is just adjusted to run in it's it's flat position to get to get watch that are adjusted in multiple positions is expensive so they adjust for position they can also adjust for temperature and those have nothing to do with regulating the watch that is playing with the balance maybe it has a screwed balance you can they play with the spring they do all their crazy watchmaker tricks to get the watch to run the same in all the different orientations that is adjustment regulation happens after everything else is finished the watch is done it's complete it's fully adjusted then you regulate because once you if you regulate and then adjust well then you've thrown off all your regulation so regulating is the last thing that we do so I said there's different positions that they adjust them in but when you go to do your own watch and as I'll explain later you're going to see how you perform day to day with your watch see how it performs for you how many seconds fast or slow it is and then you can use a time Grapher to gauge your progress it's a very sensitive measurement so if you're not steady with your hands as with anything with watches if you're not study with your hands I would advise against doing it so I am going to use a time graphic that I have but I'm not going to go into the operation of it I think that's going to be another watch and learn because as an engineer it fascinates me but the way that time Grapher works is it's listening to certain points of the escapement it listens to when the impulse pin strikes the palate fork and then it listens for when one of the palate teeth locks with the escape wheel I I believe it's like hit one and hit three because really like five major sounds that in escapement will make its listening till they stay for the first and the third and from that it can calculate everything well just from the first one it can calculate what the rate of the watch is but you need the third one to figure out what the amplitude of the balance is how much it's spinning and also if there's any beat error it is important to note that I'm using a time graph I'm not a watchmaker I this is time graph is almost like an idiot tool a watchmaker may have a time graphic but more than likely they use something that's far more expensive maybe on the order of ten times as much money because then they can use more like an oscilloscope function they can listen to all the sounds they could see this nouns on the screen and then by looking at the various traces that the sounds make watch Baker can diagnose a movement doesn't need lubrication it is a is one of the palette stones sticking does need to be cleaned blooper here whatever so it's important to know the time graph was a great little tool for the hobbyist all sakes I am I am indeed a hobbyist just like probably most of you I guess I'm not a watchmaker so it's good for telling how fastest all the watch is going or maybe you're in the buying and selling you go into a flea market you know something like that I've seen you know I know people do that as well they'll time it before they buy it anyway let's get I'll get on my own risk check I'm wearing a Yonkers Bauhaus chronograph and then on the other wrist I've worn this in a while my ulis Nord Dan maxi marine chronometer feeling like a blue day today favorite color looks great totally adore this watch anyway so let's go get over to the table and check out how to regulate a wristwatch so in front of you here I have my time graph for setup it consists of the clamp I put a watch on it it's got a sliding clamp as you can see you put the watch in it oops not with the tag under it you put the watch in it and then you've got a display which also acts as the processor for everything else so these two are hooked into each other and what this is doing is there's a little microphone in it it's picking up the noises of the movement certain noises it's really in that information too little processor and then the processor you know uses the clicks to determine what the rate is going to be and then if you went to the lift angle of the movement in if you know the lift angle it can calculate the amplitude and the beat error I touched on this briefly before amplitude is basically how much the balanced spins one way as it goes back and forth you know how much of a 360-degree arc it makes beat error is how centered it is is it is the tick the same length as the talk more or less and you want to have a bead error they say of half a millisecond or so a from half a millisecond to 1 millisecond you may want to try to put the watch back in to beat but we're not going to cover that now the time graph will also shows you the beats per hour of the movement and it figures this out automatic or you can program it if you know it you know it figures it out just by listening to it and it can figure out that oh this is a twenty one thousand six hundred feet per hour walked or two twenty eight eight so it takes some of the guesswork if you don't know what the movement is it takes the guesswork out of it and it figures it out for you then obviously inside there is a quartz oscillator that it's counting the beats of as well and that's how it figures out if you're running faster slow it does it instantaneously if you think about years ago there and have things like this could have the time to watch over 24 hours to see how much it really gained your loss so quite an advance in technology and and now they are quite affordable I'll talk about lift angle really quick lift angle is the angle that the impulse pin interacts with the pallet fork and from that angle and listening to the noises it that's how it calculates the amplitude and it also calculates the beat error right but we're not talking about that now maybe that's a future watch and learn I'll show you how all that math works out we're gonna be looking at this far left here that the seconds per day and then you can watch your graph so time graph er let's start it up the time graph er makes two lines basically one for the tick and one for the top and as I'm talking you'll see some stray dots here that is me talking it wants to be in a relatively quiet environment so I'm kind of messing up by a bike talking but you're seeing the back-and-forth of the balance wheel and the two line should be fairly parallel and they should be on top of each other and the closer to beat error is zero they will indeed be right on top of each other so I'm gonna stop talking for three seconds I'll stop talking for a few seconds and we'll let it do a clean a clean sweep so you can see it cleans up nicely once I start talking it obviously picks up again so this walk is running around 14 seconds per day fast the time Grapher these numbers here is it's averaging how it did over the past four seconds or so but you this is the instantaneous rate it's doing about 14 seconds per day I watches as I said behave in different rates at different orientations so if we were to just flip this down and be quiet for a second you'll see now the watch is slowed considerably you see that the curve went flat so now it's looking at you know about 3 seconds per day watches generally will generally run slower when they're in the vertical position why old gravity is acting on it gravity is pulling on the balance wheel it's pulling on all the friction points a little bit differently so things do slow down a bit so what's really important to note is that you can put it on the time graph er and you know I could have adjusted it in this position when it was plus 14 and I said okay I got to get that down to 0 and then when I would have went to this position I would have been slow and any other positions I put it in so what you really need to do as a user what you really need to do as a user is you need to record how your watch is performing for you on your wrist you know over a couple of days you know look at it every morning and see how it's doing is it you know it's a plus 30 seconds the plus 20 seconds you know because at night you put it on the dresser it's dial up and then when you wear your lefty or righty the Crown's in a different position everybody is different and we're assuming you're not you know if you're not gonna be regulating a Rolex which has been adjusted to five positions you know these aren't you know these barely these are basically just adjusted into the one position that they regulated in and then you can use the time graph ur just as a flat reference to you know as an absolute reference to lower or raise the rate and not worry about what it's doing in different positions so let's say after wearing it for a day you know day in day out after three days you're averaging you know 15 seconds a day well then you'd want to come in and try to soul to watch down by maybe 10 second today no matter what the rate shows it is on here you'd want to slow it down by that much wear it and then see what happens and then you can come back and do it again you know as many times as you want if you time you watch day in day out and find the today's plus 15 tomorrow to minus 20 the next day is plus 30 then forget regulating it you're gonna be chasing your tail the watch need service something's up with it so let's get into regulating the watch I'll pull it off the clamp we'll take a look at it I'll show you what you want to touch and what you don't want to touch and again this is the Seiko 7s 26 a lot of movements are very similar to it the EDD is a little bit different I'll bring ed up later and to show you how it is regulated but you know all watches pretty much have a movable Weaver that you can regulate with and we'll show you how to do that now so obviously the back of the watch is off and I'm obviously not too concerned about dirt and everything else but you should be I'll just rotate the wheel out of the way and you can see there's the balance and on the balance or the balance bridge there is an an etching of a plus and a minus they really could make it much easier and that plus and minus makes the watch go faster and slower and then if I really try to pull in close there's a little indicator here and it's tied to this Weaver you can move this lever backwards and forwards if I move it this way I'm going to slow the movement down if we move it this way I'm going to speed it up plus and minus some watches have a and our r is for retarding the movement a is for advancing the movements so fast and slow I this one here this is what brings the watch in and out of beaded adjust the bead error you probably shouldn't touch it never touch it unless you really know what you're doing and if you know what you're doing then you're probably not watching this video anyway so you're going to play with this lever now what is you know a do a question why why do they have regulation livres own watches well watches are all made a lot of this watch at least in my hand is mass production and after all the pieces are put together hopefully it runs you know if when it's centered hopefully it runs you know like it's supposed to within a within its specified plus 25 or minus 15 seconds a day but you know obviously it's not always because manufacturing tolerances and everything differs so this is an adjustment that they do at the end to bring the watch into specification that's why watches have it not all watches have a moveable stud carrier here to bring it in and out of beat some of them are fixed and if they're fixed that's obviously a much greater deal to try to bring it into beat but they almost absolute every one I've seen has some kind of adjustable right armed they're swans neck regulators there's all different kinds fancy schmancy ones now this is just a run-of-the-mill so what is the range of adjustment well if you were to bring this all the way to - and then all the way up to plus you're going to be running it I think it does like eight or nine minutes or so from from min to max because a really wide range if you imagine if this is eight or nine minutes from here to here the slightest nudge is going to change this to a pretty high degree so you you know the order of the day here is gentleness and being very soft with it small adjustments putting it back on the time Grapher and seeing what it does so you want to move this arm with anything it can be the edge of a tweezer it could be a toothpick but whatever you do be very careful because right here with the balance spinning and then right below that is that is the spring the balance spring which is extremely extremely extremely delicate if you pluck it it's probably be a tangled and then you just need it you know you need a new balance so this is where you can turn it into a piece of garbage like I like to say so let's just say you know before we were running what I think plus 14 or something so I'm just going to come in and I'm gonna I'm going to move it I'm going to exaggerate it but I'm really going to move it so I move you to maybe a sixteenth or so of another of the turn now what did I do by doing that I move the end of the spring and I've basically made the spring a little bit tighter and that will speed it up it's called change in the effective length you're obvious not changing the length of the spring because the light this spring is a piece of metal but what you're doing is you're changing a number of coils in the spring your increase in the number of coils or your decrease in number of coils by extremely small amount but the system is very very sensitive to the number of coils in the spring that's all we're doing so let's put it back on the time Grapher and see where we are so now we're back on the time Grapher and look at the rate I mean I moved it you could see it but it's now it went from fourteen seconds it's now well what is that two and a half minutes almost three minutes a day that I've sped it up by notice the B Dehradun change doesn't really change that much the amplitude nothing's really changing that much it's just the rate I've really that little nudge that I made set it up that much so obviously that's way too much so I'm going to take it off I'll slow it down a little bit and then we'll put it back on okay so now I'm going to go in I'm going to slow it down just a bit hit the balance because I this is obviously not the way you usually do it in front of a camera but I hit the spring and it stopped but if you just take it and just just push it ever so slightly I moved it a little bit and you do this back and forth and back and forth ideally you could do it while it's on the time grepher I just can't because it doesn't I can't get my head over there but we'll put it back on the time reference I'll go back and forth and when I get it to a happy place I will start filming this start filming again so now I'm back on the time Grapher and I've got it going now - you know - two seconds zero seconds per day but that's just because it runs like that in the flat position doesn't mean that when it's on my wrist all day every day it's going to run you know with that kind of existence II but you know I've gotten into a good rate and the idea here is now I would wear it for day two days see what happens throwback on here maybe I gotta adjust it by you know another half a dozen or dozen seconds or so and so it's an iterative process back and forth because again it depends on the wearer so let's stop this now and I'll show you some other regulator on in Edda movement just so you can check it out so here's an edit move montano wrist Oh watch and you can see by the balance see it's spinning away there instead of you know having a movable arm we have a screw and plus or minus is there as well and this is an eccentric screw and when you screw it clockwise or counterclockwise you're moving this little piece here and it's you know changing the effective length of the spring it's the same thing if this is just you know a lot more refined you know bigger movements cause less variation so maybe you can tuned in a little bit better but still it's the same idea you're just changing the effective length of the spring that you know those number of coils are going up or down so because a lot of you are watching people I threw my got master on here just so you can see I'm going to meet the speaker it bothers me just so you can see what an adjusted movement will do so this is obviously a chronometer it's a rolex chronometer they call it superlative so it's actually tighter than the plus six minus four seconds a day but importantly it's adjusted to several positions so you can see you know it's running flat five seconds which I don't how much credence I put in to the extreme accuracy of the machine but you could just see when I move the position and let it settle back in the rate of the watch it's not ten the rate of the watch you know doesn't really change that much that's what adjustment means you move it from the horizontal to the vertical crown up ground down crown left crown right dial up dial down the watch beat doesn't change so I don't you can see that if it's out of frame move it a little bit I let it settle back in and the rate of the watch really rock rock solid barely a movement so that's what it means when we say your watch is adjusted to a certain number of positions so these those four those Spurs that you see at the plus sixteen that's just when you touch it and the microphone is picking up my hand and it is taking all that into consideration and it's obviously it's calculated as extraneous noise so it thinks it's going fast and there really is that it after I get take my hand away it settles back in so you can see you know obviously it runs quite quite well this is one of the reasons you pay so much for a watch like this because they get the movement running like this now to see a flat movement now obviously flat means it's running you know really close to zero the two really close parallel lines just you know running like a top you know difference between a high end movement and you know a slightly lower and movement there's nothing wrong with the Seiko movement but you know it's like driving in a lower-cost car or a higher cost car with a better suspension it just feels better it just rides a lot smoother so here the the rides a lot smoother on the time Grapher so I think that's about it and we will wrap it up now this has been marked from Long Island watch calm showing you how to regulate a Saeko at 7 s 26 movement but you could really expand that to regulate almost any movement I guess if you wanted to if you're brave enough you could regulate the Rolex I personally would never take the back off even though I have the tools to do it I am just too chicken anyway please like this video if you enjoyed it please subscribe to our channel if you have not done so yet if you have any questions or comments please leave them down below and I'll be sure to address them as soon as I can thanks for watching

Channel: Long Island Watch

Views: 522,872

Keywords: automatic watch, regulate watch, timegrapher

Id: hsOR8GzmCzw

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2017