Improve your watch accuracy by resting it in a different position - How to do it.

okay so this orient Polaris runs by about plus seven seconds a day when I've got it on my wrist but if I change the way I set it down at night if I set it down in a different way at night I can get it to run at around one second off a day which is a pretty big improvement in accuracy and today I'm going to show you how you can do it and if you can possibly do it with your automatic watches [Music] [Music] everybody this is Dave and welcome back to just the watch where I talk about you know budget watch collecting collecting affordable watches we do watch reviews I have a watch of the Month Club where you know I look at different watches in a certain category every month and later this month we're going to be taking a look at dive watches under $500 so if you're interested in that kind of thing if you're interested in looking at affordable watches or topics about where affordable watch collecting do me a favor and hit the subscribe button really appreciate it but today we're going to be talking about basically positional accuracy and how you can kind of take advantage of that to make your watch run a little bit more accurately now this is something that I had been seeing talked about a lot on forums and in my own comment section and I always wondered what the heck people were talking about they say oh you know if you set your watch down face down at night it's gonna run you know I can get it to run like you know less than a second off a day or something like that I mean you know if you guys know anything about automatic watches or mechanical watches you know that they tend to drip that you know they're gonna be off by you know five six seven seconds a day sometimes as much as fifteen sixteen seconds a day and what that means is you continue to wear it day after day you know after a week or two weeks it's going to be a few minutes off and you're gonna have to stop and reset it and that's a little bit of a pain and so it's always better you know we want to have watches that are more accurate and that's the myth one of the main benefits that quartz watches have over mechanical watches as the quartz watches are much more accurate you don't have to worry about changing the time and resetting them but what if you could get a similar level of accuracy or at least a closer level of accuracy out of your mechanical watches and that's we're gonna talk about today to understand what we're doing here you got to understand a little bit about what's called positional accuracy so what is positional accuracy well inside a mechanical watch obviously is a series of mechanical components you have a balance wheel you have a mainspring you have a rotor you have all of these things that are moving and in constant movement and it's these gears and springs and things that somehow all come together to display the time in a fairly accurate manner and in order to do that you know you you've got a mechanical process going on there that is subject to gravity and it's a very sensitive set of things going on in there and the the orientation of the watch can't affect how it keeps time so in other words hypothetically you might have a watch that if you have it you know face up like this it will run a little bit fast but then maybe when it's face down maybe it won't run quite as fast maybe if it happens to be on the side it might actually run slow maybe if it happens to be facing this way it'll run you know a little bit less slow so in other words all of these are gonna be different depending on the orientation of the watch how fast or how slow the watch works but on average if you have it on the wrist you know you're constantly in motion you know you've gotten you're gonna be looking like this to check the time it'll be flat a lot of times you have it at your side and the you know the crown will be facing down if you have a rest on your desk then you might have the the twelve o'clock facing down so throughout the day the orientation of the watch is changing and the effect of gravity is changing on the watch and so yeah you get the sort of sort of on average an amount that the watch is gonna be plus or minus seconds fast or slow at the end of the day but for a lot of people when you go to sleep you take your watch off and you set it down and it's going to stay in whatever orientation you set it down now depending on which orientation you set the washdown it's for the for the eight hours or whatever that you're sleeping it's going to be pretty constantly running at that rate of either fast or slow based on the orientation that it's in and that's where you can start to take advantage of this so this is orient Polaris when I'm wearing it on my wrist and at night if I set it down just you know like normal just set down face up on a table or something and let it run then it runs on average about plus seven seconds a day however if I set the watch down with the crown facing down it starts to run about three seconds slow per day so the way that you take advantage of this is you know so while I'm wearing the watch it tends to run fast and at the end of the day after wearing it all day it'll be a couple seconds fast and so what I can do is since I know that if I set the watch down crown down it will run slower it will kind of fix itself so at the end of the day we'll be a couple seconds fast I'll set it down crown down go to sleep while I'm sleeping the watch starts to run a couple of seconds slow and by the time I wake up you will have almost canceled out the inaccuracy of wearing at the day before and so on average over that 24-hour period I get a much better accuracy on this I can get it down to I think negative one second a day is what it was doing on that on my testing when I was testing it so what difference does that make well if the watch runs seven seconds fast for a day that means that after ten days it's going to be 70 seconds faster it's gonna be off by over a minute but in this case if I do it you know if I set the watch down crown down every night it's only gonna be ten seconds off you know it might be a few months before it gets to the point where it annoys me enough that I have to actually stop and reset it which is gonna have it performing much more closely to like a quartz watch um so if you have one watch that you wear consistently every day this is something that you actually really could take advantage of I was surprised that I kind of wondered if this would work but in some cases it actually does now like I said this isn't going to work with every watch and so I chose five watches in my collection to kind of test out and see if I could figure out what was going on and how this worked so and from those five it looked like three of them would actually take advantage of it so in order for this to work the watch has to be running in such a way that there is a position that is kind of the opposite of what it normally is so if your watch normally runs fast you have to find a position that you can rest in that will cause it to run slow instead of fast and not all watches have that some of the watches I tested would run fast no matter which position they were in you know in other ones you know they might not have they might have run a little bit slower along position but not enough to make up for the fast running during the day so it's not gonna work on every watch that's talking about Josh over at Swiss watch company about the swc divers that they send out because I know they're watchmakers they have in-house watchmakers and they you know know all about this kind of stuff and he's mentioned that the movement that they use in here is this it's a sleet SW 200 that is regulated at the factory and so regulation is something that you want done to your watch but not all watches especially budget ones are going to be regulated like that so in this case this one is regulated for three positions which means that they tested the three most common orientation so you're going to find the watch in and they adjust it so that it runs with in a certain spec a certain you know accuracy rating to try and get it so that you don't have to worry about having to set it down at different rates and he didn't tell me actually which three positions this was regulated in but after testing I think I figured it out so this swc diver you know it runs about 5.8 seconds fast when it's face up it runs about 4.8 seconds fast when it's face down dial down and it runs about 0.7 seconds fast if it's rested with a crown up so I think those are three positions they regulate in because this one this is one of the ones I think you could actually take advantage of a little bit but this one if you rest it with the crown down this one runs about 7 seconds slow so I think it was not regulated for the crown down position on which something you take advantage of but interestingly enough as I was rotating it through the different positions for the testing period over the course of the entire thing it bounced out to about 0.5 seconds a day over 2 weeks which is pretty incredible so that's another thing I learned is I like even then I wasn't trying to necessarily take advantage of this but just rotating the way that you rested the watch seemed to increase the accuracy because you're more likely to to get it into one of the positions that you know helps it balance out a little bit better on the other end of the spectrum I tested the spinnaker and this one has a Seiko an age 35 movement in it and this one is running about 13 seconds a day fast and it seemed to run about 13 seconds a day fast no matter which position I put it in so something like this it's just gonna run 13 seconds a day fast so if you want to take advantage of this or see if you can do this with your watch that's what you've kind of got to figure out you got to start by figuring out whether your watch runs slow or fast on the wrist and then you've got to figure out in which position you might be able to balance that out in and I think there's two ways you can do that I mean I think the there's an easy way that's gonna take some time but the the simplest way is simply to start measuring your accuracy of your watch and then set your watch down in a certain position every night for maybe like a week or something and see what the accuracy on average is when it's in that position and then after a week you know pick a different position to do it and do it for the next week and then over time you know you'll be able to figure out which one yields the best results in order to check your accuracy on your watch you can use an app on your phone I use I use a free one called watch check which I see a lot of guys doing it's very simple all you did you go in you've typed in the name you're watching you're recording the time for and it will check you know it will compare the time that your watch is running to the GPS or network time and then it will tell you if the watch is running fast or slow every time you do it so just kind of everyday once a day you go in and you wait for the the second hand to hit the 12 o'clock and you hit a button and then it will tell you you know how what the rate the watch is running out and it's something that anybody can do it's called watch check you can get it I think I'm using Android you can get for free in the Android app store so you can use that to figure out whether your watch is running fast or slow the other thing that you can do which is the method that I used is to take you know the watches that you want to test and then yeah just leave them alone in a certain position for 24 hours this this way will only work if you if you have hand winding feature on the watch because you're gonna have to wind it and then set it down in a certain position and let it stay in that position for 24 hours at a time so what I would do is I would you know I would wind the watch and then I would set it down face up and then everyday for like three days I would come in I record the accuracy on it was my app and then after a few days I would switch and pick a different position and what that allows you to do is it allows you to you know see exactly how your watch runs fast or slow in different positions so that you can then finally you know time the watch Walt's on the wrist and then you'll know exactly which position to rest it in to counterbalance the you know faster the slowness for the firm for the purposes of this testing I think there's really only four positions you need to worry about because unless you have a watch stand there's really only four positions that you can easily watch rest the watch in obviously the easiest is face up just setting the watch down like this or face down if you know put a cloth down first but you can rest it face down that might get you a different timing there and then if you have a watch pillow or a watch with a metal bracelet it's pretty easy to like put it on a pillow and to be able to set it either crown down or crown up and it'll stay that way if you want to try and do it you know twelve o'clock facing up or you know twelve o'clock facing down you're gonna need some other way to balance the watch and get to stay in that position I don't have anything like that so I just did those four positions and out of those I was able to find yeah some some spots where I could you know rest the watch and take advantage of this so this turned out to be a really fun little project I was kind of surprised that it worked you know I heard people talk about having done that before and you know been able to get really ridiculous accuracy out of their watches so it's cool to see that I do that on mine because I don't use watch winders I don't use anything like that but primarily this is going to be for people who use one watch kind of all the time if you are taking your watch off and setting it down usually what happens for me anyways is the watch will wind down on its own and I have to reset the time when I pick it up anyway so my watch is never get to the point where there are you know five minutes off because I'm not wearing them enough you know consecutively to the point where I never reset the time so for you guys who are kind of more into like the one watch and you have one watch that you really love and wear all the time and want to make it more accurate this is something that you know you can probably you know possibly take advantage of for people who have kind of more of a collection and they don't use watch winders this is something that you know maybe is more just a novelty but it's definitely interesting it was really cool to kind of get a little bit better understanding of how the watch runs and how it runs in different positions and I was thinking about it's like you know if you if you know how your watch runs you could you could like really nail it down you know keep you checking at night and you could know oh it's it's five seconds fast now so I need to put it in this position to compensate that but you know maybe today I wasn't doing as much action and so it's only about three seconds fast so I don't need as much so I could put it in this position stead but that's way too much trouble but like you could actually do that but this way you know if you figure it out on average basically all you're doing is changing the way you set your watch down tonight that's one thing that you can do that basically takes zero extra time so I think if this is again a one watch you're wearing all the time this is something you can learn how to do that could potentially make your watch a lot more accurate accurate without requiring any additional effort on your part which i think is really cool for the guys who do that thank you for recommending that and you know mentioning that to me again this is really interesting to go through and I had a lot of fun doing it but hopefully that helps you guys some of you guys let me know if you've tried this out how your watch is run and yeah hit me up with some comments but that will wrap it up for today thank you guys for watching we'll talk to you later and see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Just the Watch

Views: 47,868

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Id: fTSvD2zSjG8

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020