What is Seiko Spring Drive and how does it work? Watch and Learn #24

hi this is mark from Long Island watch calm and welcome to another episode of watch and learn so today we're going to just follow up on the video we did last week which was solar and kinetic watches and now I'll hop on and I'll do a Spring Drive watch explain to what Spring Drive is a spring drive is psychos proprietary movement technology that they they basically pioneered no one else has anything remotely remotely like it it is truly an achievement in watchmaking Spring Drive came from the late 70s early 80s when the quartz revolution basically almost killed all mechanical wristwatches an engineer at Seiko had this idea for spring drive and it took something like 15 years several not several hundred think there's a two hundred and change patents for them to finally come out with a producible spring drive technology and they released it in the late 80s in Basel and it's it's spring Drive is found in Grand Seco Ananta which I don't think they're doing it on to any more creed or and various other the high high-end lines generally you know none of your affordable psychos and why is Spring Drive interesting well spring drive from a mechanical engineer like myself spring drive is true with a marriage of electrical engineering and mechanical engineering they were able to put both of them together and make a truly mechanical movement that has some electrical components and they come together to form this beautiful mechanically driven wristwatch and actually have electrical components that's powered by the watch so it's it's quite ingenious it's very simple to explain in design its obviously by the time and patents it took them very difficult to do on the scale of a wristwatch what's interesting for me as a as a mechanical engineer is that you know this is the true marriage of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering we have a mechanical movement with a couple of electrical components it's not like kinetic kinetic was you know you we take a rotor we charge a battery and then we power a watch now all known technologies you know a generator is known we know generators easy it's a motor that runs backwards and obviously battery technology - rechargeable battery it's still great but you know not not a ton of ingenuity spring drive is is total ingenuity so I will do my own wrist check and then we'll go over to the table I have a grand Seiko here with spring drive I will do my best to explain the technology I really didn't study up for this I'm going to tell you everything that I know off the top of my head so it may seem a little choppy I'm going to try I've tried to arrange my thoughts over the last couple of days in my mind I generally do not work off of notes I don't like them so we'll get over there and we'll take a look and let's get on with my wrist check real quick scrooge mcduck time is money watch and on the other wrist I'm wearing Meistersinger single-handed Otto cool watches on you can actually tell the time with a really frightening degree of accuracy you know within a couple of minutes considering it's only got an hour hand anyway let's uh let's check out spring drive so this is Grand Seiko model number SBG a zero zero one it is powered by psychos 9 RS 65 spring drive movement this videos can be more about spring drive less about the watch I'm not going to go into watch details too much but you can see it's obviously a very nice watch it's beautiful I fully made in Japan bracelet second to none class second to none dial is gorgeous fit and finish is impeccable I mean everything you'd expect so you can obviously see that the watch is stopped it's not running that's on purpose I want to wind it up and show you what happens when you start to watch it isn't automatic and it can be hand wound thanks to psychos spur on material it runs for around three days got a three day power reserve so if you wear it you know you take it off for a day or two and put it back on as opposed to you know your conventional 40-hour power reserve or even on your six r15 psychos your 50 hour power reserve this is like a full 72 hours now so that's a that's a good power reserve you can take this thing off like I said for you know for two and a half straight days and put it back on and then thanks to spring drive technology its accuracy won't waver let's talk about accuracy quickly I know Seiko says around 1 1 to 2 seconds a day accuracy and then they say around 15 seconds a month it's mostly hogwash most people report getting a couple of seconds a week it's generally an extremely extremely accurate watch but it's not a certified chronometer you know there's no certifications with it so maybe they say that you know just to be on the safe side but you know it's going to be a lot better than that so I'm going to pick it up we'll wind it and I'm going to show you something so the watch has a screw down crown so I'm going to unscrew the crown it's unscrewed and now I'm going to wind it and want you to pay extra close attention to the seconds hand do you see what's happening did you see that for around a few seconds you see how fast the second hand went that was not fast forward I have not touched a thing I have not edited or clipped anything together that is the movement of the hand unfettered by the spring drive technology their quote unquote try single regulator didn't click didn't kick in yet so the watch runs fast extremely fast you saw that got to be at least 2 to 1 for now maybe just a couple of seconds and ended and now you know full spring drive goodness is taking over and we're getting great accuracy and this will always happen that phenomena saw only happens when the watch is dead totally dead and you start it up so you can see that the as I turn it to the power reserve needle and move the hands out of the way ok so now the power reserve needle starts to go up as I wind it so we're getting a full wind ok so I will now seat the crown back down the watch is running so let us talk about how does Spring Drive differ from you know regular mechanical watch technology so if you watch some of my other watch and learns the one previous to this my believe it's watching my number 4 as well I talk about automatic watches how the mainspring power is an escape wheel and the escape wheel basically kicks a balance forwards and backwards very fast at around twenty eight thousand eight hundred beats per hour depending on the movement of watch it could be a little bit slower it could be faster that balance wheel limits the mainspring and how fast it unwinds it's basically beating and every Beate is a little bit of an unwinding of the mainspring and that's how a mechanical watch keeps its accuracy so a spring drive has no balance it really has no escapement to say it's got a mainspring let's flip it over see it's a full automatic I'll let you know it I'll open it up okay so I've opened up the bracelet so we can you know get a better look at the back obviously it's it's done very nice you can see the rotor which is extremely extremely free to move but from the back it really looks like a mechanical watch you can see the mainspring barrel right here by my thumb and that's what the that's where the mainspring is that 72-hour mainspring but then where the escapement generally is I don't like peel back the blue stick or a bit where the escapement generally is so if you could see it you see a set of wheels that are moving very fast now if you I don't if you could see that I'm trying to turn it to the light doesn't disturb it as much but you can see a series of wheels and they're spinning pretty quickly there we go I don't know I can kind of see it now in the viewfinder top one spinning a lot fast in the bottom one and that is the glide wheel and this is something new now so they've taken the escapement out of the watch so cycles replace the escapement with what they call the Tri synchro regulator it's going to regulate three kinds of energy mechanical which is the energy that's stored up in the mainspring electrical which there's some electrical energy things obviously going on here and also kinetic which is the movement of the seconds hand now you can kind of rename them however you want but that's more or less what it's doing so how does the watch work the simplest way for me to describe it is to get in your car and put your foot on the gas until you're going steady for to 40 miles an hour on a flat road and then apply the brake with your foot still on the accelerator apply the brake until you achieve 30 miles an hour and keep driving that way and that's the way spring drive technology works it's a constant braking wear on the automatic mechanical watch it's basically just trying to keep constant time this is constantly trying to slow the watch down to keep its accuracy so where's it gives accurate some accuracy from well believe it or not spring drive uses quartz crystals it's not a quartz driven watch by any stretch of the imagination I even hesitate to even say quartz but it truly has a quartz crystal it is a Seiko grown quartz crystal and it is the pick of the litter of quartz crystals so it's an extremely accurate crystal and that's what gives the watch its state at 15 seconds per month but really in practice a couple of seconds per month accuracy so the watch has a quartz crystal running and so you saw on the back those wheels that were spinning fast the wheels that you saw at the top here that we're spinning so I'm going to try to go through the whole thing now in in one swoop so now that you know all that you got the mainspring the mainspring unwinds it spins these wheels this wheel is more or less like a generator it's got a stator on it you know armature stator I it spins it produces electrical energy that electrical energy is used on an electromagnet to break BR a ke slow down the seconds hand to a certain speed eight times per second it references how much time the watch has elapsed on the glide wheel so it looks to say okay we've gone in eighth of a second and then at the same time it looks at the quartz oscillator and the quartz oscillator is ticking at the same time and it sees how much the quartz oscillator oscillated so that's five times fast and it compares the two and it either slows down or speeds up the seconds hand as necessary it is a closed feedback loop which is I think the first for any watch and still the same for any watch now they're the only ones that do it so it's I'll say it's a quartz referenced watch not a quartz driven watch it's truly driven by a mechanical spring but its course reference so imagine inside basically there's another little clock running let's say it that way there's another little clock running a very accurate clock and the mechanical clock speaks to the electrical clock the course clock eight times a second and says how am i doing in the quartz clock eight times second says speed up slow down speed up slow down and it constantly speeds up and slows down the seconds hand so that it can be in sync with the quartz oscillator I say speed up really speed up this means apply less break it is an electromagnetic break it's not a friction break it's not you know a brake pad squeezing it you know it's a magnetic field that's inducing to try to slow the seconds hand down so I said the try synchro regulator so it's it is regulating the mechanical energy from the mainspring about that it is generating electrical energy from that wheel that's spinning really fast that's electrical energy and then it's also using the electromagnetic brake another energy to slow the seconds hand down three energies the watt is basically one big power plant generates its own electricity it uses its electricity for all of its own functionality it's an extremely extremely small amount of electricity that it needs but that is why when we started to watch before when I started the video when we started it it ran for about 10 seconds because it was dead it doesn't have a battery it doesn't have any kind of storage cell so it ran for a few seconds without that brake applied and then after a few seconds when it got to around here you saw all of a sudden everything kicks in the circuits kick in and the braking force happens and it is now referencing that quartz crystal to slow the watch down to proper time it is truly truly ingenious like I said very simple in you know very simple in theory it's just to get all these little pieces to talk to each other amazing so some of the benefits obviously since it's a feedback you know I had mentioned before and I've mentioned other videos isochronism when your watch gets down to low-power watches tend to run erratic they like to run at full power this watch doesn't care it can be two minutes away from dead it'll still be accurate because the electromagnetic brake is constantly constantly referencing the quartz crystal to see how much break it should apply do I need less break do I need more break to keep the watch accurate it's a I guess that ingenious it's a breakthrough engineer I can fully appreciate the technology I guess obviously you might want to know what something like this costs well this is a grand Seco and you know most grants they go spring drives I would say this is an opening price $4,600 there's not many you're going to find for less than that at retail but like I said before it's it really is a really nice watch the fit and finish is fantastic see everything the bracelet is super amazing crown clasp everything about is perfect you know that's what you'd expect this is like the pride of Seiko the pride of Japanese watchmaking everything is here it's all embedded inside this awesome spring drive movement I didn't say this before but you know it's obvious the seconds hand does not tick at all there's absolutely no ticking it's smooth and extremely silent as a extremely silent because I don't know I can't hear anything I can put it up to my ear I can't hear anything if you put it on a time Grapher nothing registers because there really is no ticking everything is extremely extremely smooth this has been marked from Long Island watch comm showing you psychos spring drive technology if you liked this video please like it if you have not subscribed to our channel please do so at this time if you have any questions or comments please put them down below and I'll be sure to address them as soon as I can

Channel: Long Island Watch

Views: 465,340

Keywords: seiko, seiko watches, grand seiko, spring drive

Id: 1QSbheeMIHk

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2017