Boring Watch stuff

January 7, 2012 7:54 PM

My Mechanical Watch is suddenly perfect, after 11 years. My wife gave me a Hamilton Khaki Chronograph at our Wedding rehearsal in December 2000. It's perfect now.

It had been a tad slow originally. Being the geek that I am, I bought the tool to open up the case and adjusted the Valjoux 7750 movement years ago. I *think* I adjusted it to be as fast as possible many, many, years ago, but it still ran a bit slow. Over the last few years the watch has displayed a radically different behavior. It *very* often runs very fast, like many minutes an hour. I found out that this is a symptom of a magnetized movement and I devised my own method using a combination of refrigerator magnets (really!) to set it back to normal. I've been avoiding the inevitable, which is to take it to a costly jeweler to reset/clean it when suddenly something unexpected has happened. It's keeping perfect time. Since early November!. I'm just wondering what could have caused this. In past years, "normal" has been slightly slow. In recent years, it has gotten magnetized a bunch of times making it ridiculously fast. De-magnetizing my watch has usually brought it back to slightly slow. Now it's been spot-on perfect for months. I guess I'm not really looking for an answer, but rather a theory. Is it slightly magnetized to make it run on time or is there some other explanation?

posted by Rafaelloello to Clothing, Beauty, & Fashion (4 answers total)

I don't know about being magnetized as a calibration, but a family anecdote: apparently my mother has a measureable physical magnetic field, such that she souls crash early hard disk drives by walking past them - and would magnetize mechanical watches. When she took a mechanical watch my father had given her to be repaired long ago (it had stopped completely after never being reliable), the parts flew out when the jeweler opened the back. You might be cautious next time the back is opened.
posted by SpecialK at 8:14 PM on January 7, 2012

The problem with mechanical watches is that there could be about fifty explanations. Wear, oxidation, magnetism, deformation due to shock, etc. Or any combination. Without someone really knowledgeable about movements taking it apart, there's hardly any way to tell.
posted by introp at 9:08 PM on January 7, 2012

My theory would be a bearing that was initially a little tight, and has finally loosened up.
posted by gjc at 5:43 AM on January 8, 2012

I don't know the answer (theory: you left it in a different position than usual for those months), but you could always ask at a watch forum Watchuseek is huge, and even has a Hamilton section.
posted by symbebekos at 6:57 AM on January 8, 2012