How to use a dive watch bezel - Watch and Learn #18

hi this is Mark from longen watch.com and welcome to another episode of watch and learn today we're going to be talking about dive watches mostly the dive watch bezel and how to use it I've got a bunch of different examples to show you these are just two of the eight or so watches that I have to show you this uh nice Seiko snzh53 I believe uh Orient mforce Bravo I got a whole bunch of other seos and Oran some for my Personal Collection C we're going to talk about how to use the dive watch bezel most of us you know know what they are we might use it to time our laundry or time our pasta but how do you use it in a dive and I'll go over a couple different ways that you can use it it is quite functional and you know it does have a lot of history I know there's a lot of conflicting information there's a lot of opinions on who actually started the dive watch look and the bezel uh but that doesn't really matter we'll go over that we'll go over decompression limits non- decompression limits I got a cool strap from an old watch that could show you with the table on it a lot of nice stuff but before we get into looking at the watches I guess I have to do a wrist check right so let's get in let's do that first uh brightling Aerospace titanium Annie Digi super light and then I'm wearing my father's uh datejust tapestry dial two-tone so before we get into the video and talking about the watches I wanted to talk about diving in general because the biggest misconception that I hear from people and that I've always heard is that and this is the way I learned it originally is that the bezel is used to time how much air is left in your tank and that's not true there's no such thing as you know a timer for how much air is left in your tank it depends on a lot of factors you know tanks have pressure gauges and that's how you that's how you know how much air is left but it's not a timer it doesn't say you have 6 minutes you have 10 minutes you have 20 minutes and you generally don't dive you know getting back to surface with no air left in your tank there's always a nice Reserve uh so the that whole conception is wrong and there's three major factors that determine how long you can dive on you know say a standard uh whatever it is 80 cubic feet of air you don't realize this but if you're a screw diver and you know it obviously but when you put a tank on your back on your back it's basically just a pressurized bomb just hopefully in a good container that won't explode you know you taking what 80 cubic feet of air I believe and you're stuffing it into a tank you know this big uh it's pressurized to a few 000 PSI uh but they're they're designed well hopefully by the engineers that did them and they don't burst uh but if they go off if you ever watched I I think MythBusters did something they go off like rockets there's three major factors it's how deep you're going to dive it's you know are you going to make decompression stops when you're coming back up to the surface uh and mo most importantly your physical ability now I scuba Dove once I loved it I did it uh many years ago about 15 years ago it was a great experience I went out with four people and a couple of instructors and they had said to us you know depending on how well you breathe or how how slowly you breathe and how calm you are you'll all get different times and we'll just tap you on the shoulder when it's your time to come back up to the surface we went out with four people and I don't know I was having fun and eventually I looked around and there was nobody there except the instructors and I look up and there they I see all their feet bobbing in the surface they were all done I hadn't even entered the yellow zone yet on my tank uh not that I'm a great you know great diver but I was young hopefully I still am young fit I breathe easy uh so it really so there's a lot of factors so you can't just say oh it's we got 30 minutes left in this tank that's not the way it works it's all based on the pressure gaug what the oh I'm not wearing a dive watch what the dive watch bezel is going to do it's going to help you keep track of everything uh stick to your dive plan how much time you spend you know what your bottom time is what your Ascent time is decompression stops Etc uh anyway like I said I'm not a diver I did it once um but I think I have a fairly good understanding of everything and if you do have any comments I'll say it later but you know put them down below and and tell everyone your experiences because I do love to read it all and I think a lot of people like to read the comments too anyway so let's get over to the table and check out dive watches so in front of you here I have three dive watches you may recognize them all the Rolex Submariner uh Seiko White Knight which is from my personal collection and an Orient Blu-ray too and if you look at the bezels you'll notice that the classic Rolex bezel has the minute markings from just the zero to the 15 and then the rest of the bezel is marked in five minute increments and then when you get to the Seiko this white knight also the 007 which I have one floating around here somewhere yeah I do I have a whole bunch of watches here by the way a lot of seyos a lot of orian uh you'll see that the bezel is marked in one minute increments all around and then if you pull up the Orient just for comparison so the Orient is marked like the Rolex 0 to 15 only and then the rest of the bezel is 5 and 10 minute increments now this kind of marking philosophy on the bezel is really a styling hold over from when these watches were first released you know original divers you know like the Rolex and a lot of these companies basically just followed the look I don't want to say they copied it I know there's a lot of discrepancies about who invented the dive watch or whatever but really every in everyone's mind at least most people's mind it's Rolex that kind of invented this look uh I'm not going to speculate or you know the Blanc pond maybe did it first what it doesn't matter um but this 0 to 15 just became iconic and then sometimes a 0 to 20 and I'll pull just a whole bunch of watches and just to show them to you know a lot of times you guys like to see watches in the watch and learn uh so this is the snzf17 they call this this the SE archant the SEO 5 this one is marked from 0 to 20 on the bezel see that Orient black moo 0 to 10 markings and then five and 10 all around I showed you the 007 marked in minutes all around it's a nice one this is like a 50 Fathoms kind of homage this Seiko uh snzh53 comes in black blue just like um a lot of these other watches they come in black and blue this isn't even marked in minutes this is all marked in fives and tens this is actually one of my favorite watches uh in in the Seiko 5 lineup I love this piece obviously because it's blue but you know the bezel is coated with that clear coating uh and it just really pops and shines uh but you know the point to take home here is that there are no minute markings uh so you don't get a a good feel for a lapse time in my opinion and then the last one is an orian mforce another isoated diver like the seo7 and the White Knight one minute increments and then 0 to 20 is in this orange orangish color and the rest of it is in white so I did talk before a little bit about diving and time underwater uh and how all that works now let's um let's do a quick example you to put it all into into perspective you know the way the bezel is meant to be used I guess really is a a matter of personal preference now I thought I knew how to use a dive bezel and then I went to research for the video and it turns out the way I thought you use it is correct but then what I also learned what I really liked about it a lot of people use it however the heck they want to use it I there's no there's no rule book you use it however it works for you what I read that a lot of divers said is that you know once you're underwater things go crazy you may not remember your timing and how many how many minutes you allotted for a certain thing so this is all a good backup you know nothing beats a good dive plan in knowing how long you're going to be in certain areas and how long you expect to be on the bottom for bottom time and and Ascent time so the way it's meant to be used is the first thing you're going to do is you're going to set the the triangle you know the zero marker to the minute hand when you're just ready to go down cuz bottom time starts from the second your head goes under the water till you begin your final Ascent to the surface so you're in the water and you're ready to dive so now what I just did in open air here with two hands you do when you're just about to go under the water so you're wearing gloves more than likely and you don't have two hands you only have one hand because it's on your wrist so a good comment that I pulled from one of the Articles somebody had said that the more the bezel is guarded against accidental movement the harder it is to use you know with gloves and possibly underwater so like the Omega PL Prof where you have to press the button and turn it it's cool and it works great but you need two hands to do it so you know the the unidirectional bezel where it only turns counterclockwise w't turn clockwise I'm trying to turn it the unidirectional bezel is great because you can operate it with one hand and if you do accidentally turn it as I'll show you you won't you know you have no harm to yourself so let's say you started your dive you go into water you know as I've been talking and time is elapsing so you can see about one minute has already elapsed because the orange hand the minute hand is now pointing to the first dot after the marker pointing at that dot so that's 1 minute so as time elapses obviously the minute hand will go and you can quickly read at a glance how many minutes you have so far into your dive so let's fast forward now and say that you've been at the bottom you know you've been doing let's say you've been doing 20 minutes so I'm just going to fast forward time a little bit and there we go and now time is still ticking away we can look at our watch now and know that it's 20 minutes and maybe now it's time for us to start our final ascent and then once you start your final Ascent time will keep going now here's where a lot of people differ on how they like to use it what some people like to do especially if they're doing decompression stops is they will now reset the bezel and this is your new zero so 20 minutes has elapsed and now I can see again I'm starting a fresh count for my decompression stops and I can see when 1 minute has passed when 2 minutes has passed I didn't have to move the triangle I could have just kept it exactly where it was but I'd have to remember where I was and how many minutes have elapsed since that point again I'm not a diver I don't know what goes through divers heads uh I have done it uh it is exciting but I do know that you know your mind is you know maybe if you're a season diver your mind's not on a lot of things but I'm sure there's a lot going on you got to keep keep track of a lot of different things and maybe you'd forget oh was it at 22 was it at 21 how many minutes have I been here this is something that you know you reset it to zero it works perfect and that's where the Rolex bezel comes into play same thing that's probably isn't running one second wind her up she is currently out of the rotation my Submariner and I only have winders for like three or four watches so she has stopped anyway so let's say this was the Rox and here's my minute hand if I was starting my Ascent I can reset the triangle to the zero and then I can read off how many minutes have elapsed now if I had started my dive 20 minutes ago let's say and I'm going to start my ascent and I want to time decompression stops I guess I could but I don't know what when has one minute elapsed or two minutes elapsed it's not an easy read yeah you could do it but it's not as simple as if the bezel was marked every minute like the iso divers are you know like this Orient or again the venerable 007 every minute is marked so you can easily see at a glance how much time has elapsed but not to knock the Rolex obviously they are doing something right and people still use them although I'm sure a lot of people use a cheap digital watch to dive as well and then just something that I did find in a drawer I'm sure uh people a lot of people have these if you don't have them memorized uh I found a strap with the no decompression time limits on them and this is really cool a lot of dive watches that we used to sell had them and this is so the diver can tell at a glance what depth and time you know maximum depths and maximum times that you can stay at those depths and not have to decompress so you have your depth in meters and how long you can stay there without having to go into into decompression steps so you're going to start more like you know depth of say 27 meters you can stay there so it's 90 feet you can stay there for 30 minutes without decompression and so forth and so on I don't know what these are based off of I know the tables have changed many times over the years from you know decades ago as we learn more about the human body and what it can withstand a decompression stop is basically you know if you're at a certain depth you come up to another depth that's shallower and you stay there for a minute or 2 minutes or 4 minutes and this is how you prevent the bends uh you know bubbling of the the gas in your in your blood all that bad stuff and that's why divers do all this so you get to the surface you break the break the surface and you could see how long you were diving for and that's it so like I said it's it is simple um I did read that you know some people just set the triangle once and forget it and that way they can see how long they've been underwater uh some people reset it some people use it totally different I was reading and you again you can do this however you want to do it let's say that you know that you're going to have bottom time now again bottom time is from when you first go down to when you start coming right back up so let's say you know you want to have bottom time of 30 minutes and you're going to allow yourself say 10 or 15 minutes for the ascent so if you're going to allow yourself 30 minutes of bottom time what they'll do is they will put the triangle 30 minutes ahead so I'll put the hand at 30 so after 30 minutes this comes around to zero I could start my ascent and I can time my Ascent steps basically the same thing we did before but kind of pre-planning for it and again what I like about this whole thing and I I'll keep saying it you can use it however you want to use it however it works for you is perfect and you could be timing laundry you could be timing pasta as most of us probably are doing you know you you know you could put your interesting uh uses for the timer for the bezel timer at the bottom but that's what most people do use it for now let's talk a little bit about unidirectional and what it means so let's set it back to zero let's use it the way I originally described we start our dive and we go under the water and let's say 5 minutes have elapsed okay so I'm going to advance the time five minutes okay and now let's say we accidentally brush against something and it wants to turn the bezel clockwise the bezel won't turn that's good now let's say we brush again something and we accidentally brush it counter clockwise so all that's happened now is that you think you're under the water for 10 minutes you've really only been under the water for 5 minutes so that's good you foreshorten your die for 5 minutes sure but you didn't lengthen it for 5 minutes inadvertently that would be bad especially if you know you know you have you're planning a certain amount of time uh for your entire dive you don't want to make it longer than you had intended for various reasons obviously you know running out of air might be one of them but just a lot of different things you know planning your decompression steps along the way back up that's where the unidirectional bezel comes in handy now of course you could turn it all the way over an hour and you could really you know muck yourself up you know and I guess you could make your dive longer if you turned it 58 minutes but you excuse me 62 minutes or whatever but that's not going to happen uh it's really just Against The Accidental movement that would brush against it and that's where unidirectional bezels you know are very important you cannot lengthen your time you can only forh shorten it or think you're under longer than you actually are so where does that leave watches like this I have no minute graduations whatsoever you can still use it it works fine it's still only unidirectional but you just don't get that refinement and I guess we'll be honest you know first of all this isn't a diver it's only 100 meters water resistant I mean you could use it to do um snorkeling uh you should not bring it scuba diving but it is these are mostly desk divers all of these at least if not in design in usual use most of us are not diving with them you know we're just you know we like the look but it's nice to know actually how they do work and another watch in the future I'm going to uh I'll pop maybe a couple of bezels off and we'll see how they work and how they maintain their unidirectional spinning but I didn't want to put that in here I don't want to muddy the waters I wanted to keep this video focused all on how to use uh the dive watch bezel because it's probably the most common bezel out there and definitely uh the one that most people can certainly relate to so this has been mark from Long Island watch.com with watchandlearn showing you how to use a dive bezel please like this video If you enjoyed it please subscribe to our Channel if you've not done so yet if you have any questions or comments please put them down below maybe tell us how you use a dive bezel uh I do enjoy reading the comments in the in the compass bezel episode I did make a mistake and somebody did alert me to the fact and after reading a bit more on it so I was wrong so I really like I really like that uh we all have something to learn and until next time thank you for watching

Channel: Long Island Watch

Views: 582,720

Keywords: dive watches, dive bezel, automatic watch

Id: 7SkMVAzxwew

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017