Watchmaker Breaks Down Swiss vs Japanese Made Watches | WIRED

my name is Ryan Jewell I am asada and CW 21 certified watchmaker working in New York City today we're gonna break apart these two watches made by carpenter watches the one on the Left m15 it has a Japanese movement in it the one on the right m2s has a movement made in Switzerland the carpenter watches with the Swiss movement in it is eight hundred and twenty five dollars and the Japanese movement retails for five hundred and ninety five dollars I am putting on what we call finger cots the acids in your skin will actually permanently etch into the plating and finish you always want to have a tool or something between you and the movement to get started obviously you are going to want to remove the straps to do that you first want to use your spring bar tool spring bars are the two metal bars that attach the strap to the case next we need to remove the case back the case back is normally incredibly tight I kind of loosened it just a tiny bit before we got started so I can open it with my fingers I'm gonna remove the oscillating wait the moving Halfmoon that will allow for automatic winding the Swiss watch can operate as a manual wound watch or as an automatic watch the automatic winding system is modular as opposed to integrated right now I'm removing the screws of the casing clamps for the movement ring the movement ring sits inside the case and keeps the movement nice and centered you typically will find these in watches where the movement is somewhat smaller than the diameter of the dials so it kind of fills it out keeps it centered and secures it in there right now I'm removing the movement ring and removing the stem in the crown that's what you use to wind the watch if you're manually winding it since the stem goes into the movement you have to pull that out before you remove the movement from the case with the automatic winding watch you wear it every single day you typically never need to wind it but with the manual wind watch it doesn't have that automatic winding mechanism so you typically have to wind it I normally recommend once a day setting the case aside and the movement is now fully exposed I'm gonna put the crown in the stem back in to be able to move the hands in order to get them in a good position to remove them later on if I need to hold the movement I can hold it by the crown as well to kind of move it around I typically like to put the hands at 12 o'clock to remove them use a piece of plastic to keep everything secure and you do it very gently with the Lummi on certain hands it can scratch the other hand so you have to be very gentle you can't just pry them up very fast otherwise you could possibly scratch the hands or cause damage to the hub of the hands now that the hands are free from the posts I'm removing them with a pair of brass tweezers and setting them gently in the parts tray I use brass and then the other pair is made out of nickel because they are both softer metals than steel and so there's a chance that they'll do less damage to any anything that you touch loosening the two dial foot screws I was able to easily just pull the dial off from the movement and now the movement is completely separate and I can put it in the movement holder to start this assembly the movement holder will keep the movement flat there's little pivots and things that are sticking out that you don't want sitting down on the table and if you tried to work on them without something keeping it flat then it would be very difficult and probably cause damage with the Meo de 821 a the Japanese movement you need to start on the calendar side the dial side of the watch but the Swiss movement you want to start on the watchmakers side the bridge side right now I'm removing the plate that's holding down the date ring kind of secures the date ring and a lot of the calendar functions down on the movement everything will be held down by a series of screws typically you want to loosen all the screws and then go and grab them all reason for that being is it's faster and more efficient than setting down your tool every time you loosen one screw picking up another tool putting the screw way then going back and forth the thing that people really like about watchmaking is that it's kind of the incorporation of art and science it is a craft and there is creativity involved but then there's also times where they're very strict guidelines that you have to follow the date jumper spring basically keeps the date in a certain position and when the date wheel comes around to move to the next date and make sure that it holds it in place to where it's centered in the window for the date that is the date jumper spring now I will be removing the date disc and this is simply the little disk that has all of the days of the month on it has teeth so you can go from date to date working with the jumper to keep it centered an imposition the hour wheel is the wheel that the hour hand is mounted directly onto and so it has a rotational speed of one full rotation every 12 hours I was working in non-for-profit arts art house cinemas film festivals art museums and I had about every cool job you could have in that field and I loved art but I didn't like the day-to-day work and so I decided I was going to quit and I realized that every day when I went home I wanted to do something with my hands restoring antique furniture or taking things apart and seeing how it works in putting it back together and so I looked into a few different things watchmaking ended up being the one that not only was the most interesting but actually there is the greatest need this is the intermediate date wheel that's part of the Train which moves from the hour wheel to the date wheel the jumper is what locks it into position one position to position three first position for winding second position for the quick change of the date third position would be pulling the crown all the way out that's for setting the time the part is on a post the movements never been taken apart and I've never worked on this move before so sometimes you kind of have to know the right way to go it apart to remove it otherwise your tips of your tweezers which are very small will just kind of slip right off some parts are a little harder to get off the others this is the setting leverage spring here I'm removing the yoke the yoke interacts with the sliding pinion and it slides back and forth on the stem to either put it into a whining position or put it into time setting position and this is a little plate that holds down the intermediate setting wheel and the minute we lit basically just keeps everything nice and secure and in place this is the minute wheel this engages with the Canon pinion and it bridges the gap between the minute hand basically in the hour hand this is the intermediate setting wheel it basically just kind of transfers the power from the sliding pinion to the minute we land the can opinion this is a cannon pinion and this friction fits on to your Center wheel this is what you are actually pushing the minute hand on to and in so it rotates one time and it engages with the minute we land the hour wheel that we have just removed and here I'm removing the date wheel date wheel is what actually tells the calendar when to jump when it's at midnight one key difference from the Japanese movement on the Swiss movement this part is actually made out of plastic in the Japanese movement which you will not find any plastic parts of the solisten this is the stripped-down dial side of the main plate we're gonna have to flip it over now and disassemble the bridge side or the watchmaker side as it's also referred to this is the side where the magic happens for the watchmaker this is where we're doing the majority of our work all the adjustments and stuff that we have to do in a typical service normally happen on this side of the movement you'll find your power source here the barrel and the mainspring the gear train is here the balance the hair spring all the parts that really make the watch tell time all happen on this side of the movement the first thing that I'm going to be removing is the balance bridge with balance attached it all comes out as one part even though they're different components that is what they call the beating heart of the watch the balance with the hair spring and that is attached to the balance bridge with a stud so that's the thing that's spinning back and forth the hair spring kind of expanding in and out regulating your time this is the one bridge on the Munim movement they call it the barrel bridge that's what my Oda calls it with a lot of other movements including the Swiss movement you'll actually have a series of bridges you'll have a barrel bridge you'll have a separate bridge that's covering the gear train and then you'll have a module that sits on top of all of that for the automatic module for the Swiss movement with this movement the automatic components are actually underneath this bridge with everything else so once you remove this bridge nothing will work I just want to give you a shot of the watch with the bridge removed and this will show you the gear train the barrel the automatic components all of it now I'm gonna start removing the smaller individual components underneath starting with the pallet fork that is held down by the pallet fork bridge so I'll remove that first and then remove the pallet fork which is part of the escapement the escapement is basically designed to allow the power to be released in very small measured incremental bursts and this little impulse a jewel that's friction fit onto the bottom of the balance wheel and send it off into one direction that mainspring once it reaches its max the spring will let it go the spring will pull it back towards that pallet for and the pallet fork will impulse it the other way and so it keeps getting pulled back into that pallet fork back and forth and that's how the watch keeps running this is the pallet fork which is one of my favorite parts and a watch it has two jewels that can be depth by hundredths of millimeters which can drastically change the way that a watch runs it basically is kind of what makes everything work in a watch it's what's impulsiveness odda Khalil etting out the power that you've been winding up in in the barrel it's kind of just where everything comes to a head this is called the escape wheel and it is the beginning of the escapement and the end of the gear train this is called the fourth wheel this is now when we're getting into the gear train the gear train is going to be your series of wheels that transfers the power from the barrel and the mainspring to the escapement as well as dividing the time and here I'm removing the third wheel this is an intermediate automatic wheel now I'm removing what I would call the reverser and this is actually part of the automatic winding this is part of the gearing that goes from the oscillating weight to the barrel to wind the watch with the motion of your wrist and this is the barrel or the barrel complete it's actually comprised of four different parts which would be the barrel drum the barrel cap the barrel Arbor and the mainspring the barrel is the power source for the watch and now I'm going to disassemble the barrel and show you the mainspring which is basically pent up in there kind of like a snake in a can so you got to keep it all nice and closed or it'll explode out everywhere your winding up this mainspring inside the barrel around that Arbor very tightly obviously like any spring it wants to expand it wants to unwind and that motion of wanting to expand is what causes the barrel to turn that barrel turning is then sent into the gear train which is transferring the power dividing the time every time you service a watch you normally want to open the barrel and replace the mainspring you want to give them a new mainspring every time you service to watch they come pre coiled and you can just kind of insert them into the barrel and push them out of their little polder this is the mainspring in a relaxed state inside the barrel drum I'm just getting the tip of the the mainspring out and now I'm basically uncoiling it one coil at a time so it doesn't pop out and injure somebody once in watchmaking school I wasn't so careful and it popped out and smacked me right in the eyeball and it was not very comfortable and that is the mainspring that is what stores and distributes all of the power that you build up either by winding it by hand or with the motion of your wrist and the automatic mechanism in all mechanical watches that you find today they have what they call rubies or jewels they're actually a synthetic corundum a lot of people think that the jewels are precious which is why the watch is expensive the truth of the matter is they only exist for friction reduction there are nine on the Mohs hardness scale the only thing harder than that would be a diamond which is a ten and so they take a very very high polish and they are very strong and and so where you'll find jewels is anywhere that you'll find friction and the goal is with the the hard polished surface of the jewel and lubrication that's used in watches the friction is reduced so much that you're getting the most amount of power through the gear train without losing any of that power due to friction this is a bridge that's holding down a center wheel typically the center wheel will rotate one time per hour and the cannon pin you'll be affixed to the underside of it and that's where you'll mount your minute hand as the wheel rotates once per hour your minute hand is rotating one time per hour as well this is the second pinion this is driven indirectly off of the gear train if you bump your wrist or something you'll actually see a second hand kind of stutter a little bit due to the slop in the gears and the indirect drive of the second hand and the Swiss movement it's a direct drive of the second hand and so you don't get that kind of bumping and now I've removed the center wheel when you're disassembling movements one thing that I always keep in the back of my mind is that in a lot of cases Watch Company will develop something and patent something and so other watch companies have to figure out how to try to do the same thing by creating a totally new way of doing it and a lot of times you'll find some very creative and frankly inefficient way is to do the same thing but that's all they can do because the other more efficient way is patented the basic design of how a watch works really hasn't changed a whole lot within the past two or three hundred years the main advancements that have been made have all been in the materials that are used this is the click spring now I'm going to remove the crown and stem again as the disassembly of this movement is almost complete and that will allow us to basically strip it all down put it all in the ultrasonic cleaner to clean the movement this is your sliding pinion Yoda the Japanese movement does it slightly differently than what I'm used to with a lot of Swiss movements and so the sliding pinion and winding pinion kind of are smushed together in this one as to where in a lot of other movements there are two separate parts now we've completely disassembled the Japanese movement and all that we're left with is the main plate this is a completely disassembled Miata 8:21 a so now we're moving on to the Swiss movement the Swiss movement actually does a lot of the same things in fewer parts the watchmakers side of the movement with the automatic module still attached I can remove that whole thing and you'll still have a functioning movement and one of the big differences between the Japanese and the Swiss movement is that this movement has bi-directional automatic winding which means either way that the oscillating weight moves it will wind the watch the Japanese movement only winds in one way the other way it just kind of spins freely without doing much of anything right now I'm loosening the screws on the automatic bridge which is its own separate bridge unlike the Japanese movement it's going to have an upper bridge which you see on the top and a lower bridge which keeps all of the wheels of the automatic winding system in one place it's all part of one module I'm going to go ahead and set that down and disassemble the automatic module Swiss has long been considered the preeminent watch making place and it is a place where the majority of fine watchmaking happens in the world today funnily enough actually America I used to carry that mantle back in the pocket watch days when it came to standardized mass production America made some of the finest movements that existed with companies like Hamilton wall from Elgin but those obviously all went out of business in the 1960s and 70s but Switzerland has just got a long tradition of watchmaking and so while Japan isn't necessarily known for their watch making companies like Seiko especially with their Grande Seiko Lian have really been trying to kind of give the Swiss a run for their money the way that the bi-directional winding works is in this one there are two reversers and the other one there is only one reverser the reverser allows it's kind of a ratcheting system where if it turns one way it allows it to slip and if it turns the other way it kind of forces that power down to the ratchet wheel winding the watch since this one has two reversers one of the wheels is always going to be locked and winding the other wheel is going to be slipping and depending on which way the oscillating weight turns it changes which one is slipping and which one is locked and here we've fully disassembled the automatic module so now we're going to disassemble the rest of the watch making side as you can see the automatic module has been removed and we've got three different bridges we've got our balance bridge which holds the balance wheel with the hair spring attached to it we've got the gear train bridge under which the gear train obviously would be and the barrel bridge you'll find that watchmakers are not very creative in their naming of components now I'm removing the balance bridge very similar to what you saw on the Japanese movement the reason that little wheel is bouncing around so phonetically is because it's attached to the hair spring now I'm removing the fork bridge and the pallet fork the technical name for this type of escapement is called the swiss lever escapement this escapement was actually invented in the 1750s by a english clock maker named thomas Mudge and while there are newer escapements that have been introduced especially in the 1970s with George Daniels and the coaxial escapement and some other ones this is the type of escapement that you will find in approximately 95% of the watches that are on the market today now I'm removing the gear train bridge this just holds down the third wheel fourth wheel and escape wheel on the Swiss movement as to where there was one bridge holding everything down on the Japanese movement these are all the components that make up the gear train there's only one wheel I believe on this movement that you need to remove the bale bridge before you can get to it but this secures all of the components of the gear train which will transmit the power and divide the time watches and watchmaking were a very viable trade up until about the late 1960s early 1970s and at that point what happened was watchmakers referred to as the quartz crisis quartz watches were introduced into the marketplace they were exponentially cheaper and they were 300 times more accurate than mechanical watches so that's great and all for consumers and everybody bought a quartz watch but for watchmakers it was terrible because you get paid to completely disassemble these intricate machines and reassemble them clean them adjust them and it takes some time but now all of a sudden you have this watch and all you need is every year to 5 to pop open the case back pop out the battery pop in a new one and you're done every once in a while they'll use reversed threads that ensures that as that wheel rotates it's not going to unscrew your screw and send it flying out into your movement to cause all kinds of damage and havoc if anything it's going to tighten the screw even further you had a lot of people that were getting out of the profession because they said they couldn't make a living anymore because of quartz watches they said that watchmaking was a dying art of course like everything is cyclical about 20 years ago mechanical watches started making a big comeback and really really picked up steam within the last 15 to 20 which was great for all the watch companies except for the fact that there's been two generations where nobody's been training to be a watchmaker now I'm removing the barrel bridge this holds down the barrel with the mainspring inside and I believe the second wheel which is the Great Wheel this is the barrel and we're going to disassemble this one as well there's really no difference between these two barrels you'll have a barrel Cup a barrel drum mainspring inside that wraps around an arbor which the arbor kind of comes out the top and the bottom and that's what sits between the bridges and the turning points of the arbor rarely when you're sitting there disassembling a movement and making all these adjustments to very small pieces are you pondering the existence of time and how it relates to you but more importantly it's kind of a special thing to know that the work that you've done throughout the day is preserving pieces that people are going to pass down from father to son for generations that are gonna be collected and cherished and the people will kind of where as something that is a reflection of themselves it's how they express themselves by the watches they choose I've actually never worn an electronic watch and that's really for the simple fact that I feel like I'm already kind of attached to my phone enough as it is I don't really want to be any more available than I am with with my cell phone and so having a watch that just tells me what time it is and has kind of a link to history and the way things always kind of run is something that appeals to me this is the Great Wheel if it were in the center it would be called the center wheel but it's not in the center so it's called the Great Wheel the Swiss has a hacking mechanism and the Japanese movement does not when you pull out the crown it's basically a very small l-shaped spring that will be pushed into the balance that will stop the balance from spinning back and forth therefore stopping the time this is the watchmaker side of the bridge side that has been completely stripped of parts there's very little in the difference between and the Japanese movement and the Swiss movement on the dial side of the watch you're going to have a setting mechanism you're going to have a setting lever and an hour wheel and a minute wheel a date wheel that tells the calendar when jump a setting lever jumper but the design on how those components work is gonna be the big difference this is the hour wheel this is what the hour hand is mounted on this is the intermediate date wheel I believe the Swiss movement the setting mechanism is a lot less dependent upon these really tiny little annoying Springs I have no idea what they are it seems like there's a lot of stuff going on in the Japanese movement as to where the Swiss movement is pretty simple of a mass-produced watch the highest that they have is a 36,000 beat watch that was made famous mostly by Seiko and zenith with the el primero which was a 36,000 beat chronograph there are some really boutique ii like one-of-a-kind watches that run at really crazy speeds 50 60,000 vibrations per hour with the difference between something small like even 28,800 220 1600 or even the slower beat which is 18,000 which you'll find with old pocket watches typically run at 18-thousand vibrations per hour you're not gonna see a big change in price based on that alone the date disc the Japanese one is made of plastic the other is brass this is the date wheel and as you can see the Swiss movement is made of brass and has a spring-loaded finger so literally the clicking over of the date might be a little bit more quick in the Swiss moment than you would in the Japanese movement the rest of these components are very similar in the way that they work together and what they do in addition to the vibrations per hour there are some differences that you will not see even if you're looking at the gearing one of those would be the power reserve the power reserve means that if you wind the watch up to full wind how long will it run before you have to wind it up again because it's run out of juice on the Miata movement the Japanese movement it has an advertised power reserve of 45 hours which means that full wind it'll run for almost two days before it runs out of power the Swiss movement the Edda movement has a power reserve of 40 hours so not a huge difference but a 5 hour difference between the two while they say it's an advertised power reserve that's normally kind of low-balling it they like to under promise and over deliver in that regard and so typically it'll run longer than that they advertise basically kind of lower expectations and this is normally determined by the length of the mainspring the size of the barrel and a lot of other factors will kind of determine how long a watch will run before needs to be wound up again this is the fully disassembled etta movement the 2824 from the carpenter into s and finally here the two completely disassembled movements side by side [Music] station this is wired how do you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,924,614

Rating: 4.8661799 out of 5

Keywords: carpenter watch, swiss watch, swiss movement, japanese movement, swiss vs japanese movement, watch break down, breaks down watch, watchmaker, watch movement, watch maker, ryan jewell, ryan jewell watchmaker, watch breakdown, deconstructed, watch expert, watch, watches, wristwatch, wrist watch, wrist watch break down, japanese watch, watch maker breaks down, cheap vs expensive watch, swiss vs japanese, swiss vs japanese watch, swiss made vs japanese made, wired

Id: 7hSZFO5QUmE

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/BubiBalboa]

That's honestly a bad video. Not once does it show how the parts interact with each other or where exactly he pulls them out of. Could've just skipped the disassembly part and just shown every part individually because that's all it amounted to. Also, where is the vs. part?

[u/eightapostrophes]

Is there any difference in quality for metal vs plastic parts? I know that in sewing that machines with hard metal parts are often regarded as better.

[u/DCMak]

Yes. This is a cheap Swiss movement compared to a cheap Japanese movement. The Swiss can make cheap crap too. Compare it to a Patek just so you can get some reference. https://youtu.be/FdxbysUSSAM also, there was a video on here a while back about the making of a Nomos watch. It's what got me hooked on watches.

[u/dr_chop]

This video is awsome if you are having problems falling asleep.

[u/valhg]

There's a lot of detail missing from this video that I would have liked to see. It's not a bad video, but it left me wanting more

[u/Epocast]

Nice finger condoms.

[u/od_wyer]

What’s the long stringy bit of metal called/used for?

[u/2oosra]

very satisfying

[u/fingers]

just came in to say hi to my brethren