Old "tools" like vintage watches, cameras, etc are pretty cool.
In my experience they were built to be more serviceable, but also due to less precise manufacturing, there were seemingly a lot more tolerances built into the designs. It's great watching people restore Rolexes, Leicas, etc.
Similar to the video here, I have my grandfathers Rolex. He wore it while trimming hedges and doing all sorts of yard work. Why not, it was his only watch and he needed to tell the time! If it's so good it ought to be able to stand up to the abuse! It's also not like he serviced it regularly, and after being in a safe for 20 years after his passing, I put it on, moved around for a day with it.. and it started to keep time about as accurately as specified.
These days you see the exact opposite behavior. Everyone has just become so precious about their goods. "It's really expensive so I need to protect it / use it sparingly / use great caution". Look at the entire ecosystem of protective cases for iPhones/Apple Watches/etc. On upscale cars you have the obsession with paint protection films, ceramic coatings, etc.
In some cases its warranted - we got my wife a (not Rolex) expensive watch 10 years ago, and the thing has had to go in for service every 2-3 years for weeks at a time to get it to keep time properly. Even if some companies like Tesla have notoriously thin paint, no ones cars are rusting in 5 years like they did in the 80s.
I have my grandfathers Rolex. He wore it while trimming
hedges and doing all sorts of yard work. Why not, it was
his only watch and he needed to tell the time!
[...]
These days you see the exact opposite behavior. Everyone
has just become so precious about their goods.
Well... Rolexes were a lot more affordable in previous decades!
In the 1950s a Rolex Submariner cost about $1,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars and were some of the most rugged watches you could buy because they were designed for actual diving use. Today Rolexes start closer to $10,000 and there are obviously far more rugged and functional choices, such a $50 Casio G-Shock.
So, I don't know. I see people wearing their pricey smartwatches for all kinds of adventure stuff. I'm not sure that people are babying their watches these days.
> and the thing has had to go in for service every 2-3 years for weeks at a time to get it to keep time properly.
You can stretch this out to 5 years and get away with it. Also, most mechanical watches need some kind of servicing (usually relubrication) along that time frame. Hence why before the quartz revolution, local watchmakers were both a staple of any community and a necessary service.
You should really see to it that the Rolex is serviced by a reputable watchmaker. 20 years is a long time, even for a Rolex. Rolexes can last decades upon decades if properly cared for.
My plan is to try making oscilloscope music (https://g.co/kgs/SmYmBL) and from what I read the old analog scopes make much better XY plots compared with new digital ones
>These days you see the exact opposite behavior. Everyone has just become so precious about their goods. "It's really expensive so I need to protect it / use it sparingly / use great caution". Look at the entire ecosystem of protective cases for iPhones/Apple Watches/etc. On upscale cars you have the obsession with paint protection films, ceramic coatings, etc.
what the wha??? i see people give their toddlers their mobile devices who then gleefully whack it on whatever surface is convenient. i see people just toss their devices around. case or no case. so many people don't even think of it as an expensive device since it's just a part of their monthly fees. seemingly, only the people that buy the phone outright are familiar with the actual costs. with insurance plans and cheap replacements, people care less about the fragility of the thing and just think of it as a kitchen utensil. so i guess the circles you and i run in are quite drastically different in this regard.
I think you said it yourself - case or no case.
Look at all the people who use cases on their phones, theres an entire ecosystem for it that never existed for startacs. I think its evolved over time but it seems like the majority of people have some sort of case on their phones.
Same for portable game systems like the Gameboy brick we all used naked vs all the cases on the switch, etc.
I only have a case so that the iPhone cameras don't stick out and I can lay it flat on the table without wobble.
I know other people who have it because they want better grip or they just want to customize the looks of their phone. Protection is not always the #1 reason.
Also apple seemingly keeps making the factory case worse. I use to never use anything on my phone with the old iphones that had the all metal cases. Would drop it all the time and never had an issue.
Now i drop my phone once and the back is shattered. Honestly getting pretty sick of the direction apple has gone with the iphone. I just want the iphone 7 with better battery life and some hardware upgrades.
Many manufacturers are headed that way. Why are we building things that are held, dropped, put into pockets, tossed, etc out of glass again? Even on the surfaces that don't need to be.
I seem to recall Apple owns part of the company that manufactures the glass. It would be kind of dumb to not use it everywhere and anywhere at that point.
Yeah, I find the surface texture of my 2nd gen SE to be hard to hold without a case. Also the camera thing you mentioned.
On the other hand, I routinely keep phones 5 years, and putting the case omit greatly increases the odds of it making it that long.
On the third(?) hand, cases themselves are kind of a crapshoot for durability. I cracked the corners of an Otterbox case, glued them, cracked them again, and finally switched to an aluminum Ghostek case that's holding up ok.
> there were seemingly a lot more tolerances built into the designs.
Tolerances for good(!) watches are in the range of 0.01mm to 0.001mm for some components. With polishing and a lot of testing this can be achieved on manual machines.
I do urge you to get it serviced. Even though its sealed, long service intervals wear down the teeth of the tiny gears and hurt the watch in the long term.
The bigger issue with a watch that old (esp if it has been in a safe for 20 years) is that the lubricants have broken down and/or the gaskets have dried out and the watch is no longer waterproof.
YouTube is such a nice medium for this kind of videos. I can watch at my own pace, pause and rewind when needed, I don't even have to squint because I can zoom in.
Some people might say that! For me it was a service, rather than a restoration. At least partly because there were no major faults, stripping cleaning, and reassembling was all that was required - and changing a couple of parts.
There was nothing wrong, it wasn't broken, so restoration feels like the wrong word to use.
That's exactly it, especially among vintage rolex collectors. They have a bunch of slang for describing different ways things have aged eg the tritium paint on the dial having faded into a desirable cream color (creamy lume!), the hand's lume matching (implying it is the original paint on both the dial and hands), the dial itself could have any variety of sun damage like spidering or spotting, and on the GMT's in particular the color on the insert can fade so you might find yourself looking at a "fuchsia GMT". There is also a huge aversion to polishing of any kind.
This also can end up creating a lot of drama with Rolex itself if they send the watch in for factory service with instructions that end up not being honored. If you poke around on forums you'll see some very angry customers who specified no polishing, no replacing of worn/patina'd components like hands or dials, who got their watch back with a bunch of factory new parts.
For those not involved in the watch hobby, I'd also like to point out that Rolex collecting is just one particular niche.
There are a lot of folks in the hobby who are really passionate about e.g. super affordable Seikos and Casios and don't "graduate" to super pricey stuff.
For years, I'd assumed that watch collecting was sort of a money spending contest. Not so. I've found it super welcoming, accessible, and honestly not necessarily expensive. (Though you can certainly spend unlimited amounts of money if you wish
My favorite YouTube restoration channel is My Mechanics - restoring metal objects with tremendous attention to detail and care (creating new parts as needed). I suspect many people who like the watch restorations will like this:
He is my favorite of the restoration channels. I don't believe anyone comes close to his attention to detail. I wish he put content out more frequently!
The attention to detail is almost surely the reason the frequency of new videos is low. Meanwhile, I'm getting my machining fix with Inheritance Machining
I don't know why, but I find watch mechanics super fascinating.
Few favorites for people with spare time (and lots of money if one wants to buy these):
Tourbillon: a watch complication where the main mechanism is mounted on a rotating wheel so that gravity doesn't affect the watch in a single direction.
Spring drive: A very recent mechanism that produces a perfect sweeping motion of the seconds hand. It combines both mechanical power (no battery) with a quartz crystal in a super cool way.
Minute repeater: a mechanical way for a blind person to tell the time.
And for about $100, you can still buy a mechanical Seiko with a see-through caseback so you can watch everything in motion. A gateway drug for many... but also a fine stopping point because Seikos are wonderful machines in their own right.
(Although, Seiko is doing away with their most affordable mechanical models, all the newer ones are $200+)
Been watching these videos for several months now, pretty relaxing to watch and fascinating too. I feel like this is the BMW equivalent: https://www.youtube.com/@M539Restorations
I bought a Seiko automatic that I wore for a while, until it stopped -- I think I got some sand in it.
The watch shop asked for more than the cost of the watch to service it, so I watched a few videos and tried to do it myself.
Make no mistake, those gears are TINY. Insanely so. I had imagined that I'd put them into place carefully, lining up the teeth... But they're so small it's closer to "well I dropped you into place and bumped you a few times and it seems good now".
I got the watch to run, but somehow messed up the date window. Fiddlesticks.
It’s extremely hard to get a decent mechanical watch without the ‘date complication’ - which I thought was odd as it’s a pain to adjust it nearly every month, so much so that you can’t be sure the current display is even correct.
It's definitely true that it's harder to find no-dates, but they absolutely exist. I think one reason they persist is that not every collector is well-heeled enough to keep all their watches on winders.
I know if I go to the safe to put on, say, my Omega, I might just put it right back in there if the delta between the actual date and the date when the watch stopped is too large. LOL. I've got some no-dates (mostly dressier, hand-wound), or I can roll the dice on one of the other date-window autos.
I'm especially glad in those moments that I don't have any day-dates.
When I was a kid in the 70s, the Success Token most of the upper-middle-class men I knew opted for (if they opted for one) was a Rolex. It was usually either:
- A Submariner in all steel (think 60s Bond); or
- A steel Datejust on a two-tone Jubilee bracelet with a champagne face (a color scheme aped by a million Citizens and Seikos); or
- An all-gold Day-Date on a gold President bracelet (think Tony Soprano).
My solution is that I literally just don't care about the day and/or date complication whatsoever, lol.
My brain just filters it right out.
I find it a valuable adaptation for folks who like to rotate between various mechanical watches and don't care to keep them all on winders.
(Which, let's face it, also adds wear and tear on the watches. Each of my mech watches gets worn maaaaybe two days per month and I expect this to really extend their lives. We'll see.)
But, watches are very personal. There's no right or wrong way to do the hobby as long as you're having fun!
I could totally get away with this, but my nerd OCD won't allow it.
This is doubly hilarious because I can no longer read the date window on most of my watches for one reason or another. The "cyclops" on my Rolex is scuffed, which obscures its date window, for example. Sadder is the fact that my resistance to progressives means the Seamaster's non-magnified date window may as well be theoretical to my 52 year old eyes. LOL.
(What's REALLY funny is the sheer TININESS of the date window on my wife's lady-sized Doxa dive watch. I have NO idea how anyone could ever actually USE it, and yet they ship it with a date movement.)
Hahaha. Yeah my eyes are kind of old too, which makes it easier to ignore the day and/or date.
I treat my watch as my "approximate time" device. I usually set it a few minutes fast on purpose. If I need the exact time or the exact date I look at my phone.
But don't worry. I have a host of other OCD behaviors around watches!
Depends on your definition of expensive, but you can find used Hamilton khaki field watches without date complications in the $100-$1000 range. Even some new ones are listed under $1k:
You might consider browsing the dedicated sites, such as chrono24, which sell used watches.
When people desire cheap watches I tend to recommend some of the old USSR pieces, they were made in the millions and so they're very available, and they're cheap and reliable too.
These days there are new options available, so you might consider searching for things made by Vostok, or similar.
(Half my watch collection is Swiss-made, the other half is mostly Soviet vintage pieces.)
I guess it depends on what affordable means to you. You can find quite a few Orient watches without date at really reasonable prices, a couple of Timex too. If you're willing to spend a bit more you can also get various no-date Hamilton.
It's always so fascinating when content creators put out such diverse content. I mainly recognize Marshall for his work as commentator of Magic: The Gathering tournaments (and other related sundry content), and it shocked me the first time I heard one of his watch-restoration videos -- his voice is so distinctive:
I'm always amused at how little cross-promotion Marshall does - he has decently large followings in two completely different contexts and most of them are completely unaware of each other.
Especially since this YouTube channel might be bringing him more money than anything else now. I only knew about this since LSV brought it up during an LR episode on Marshall's background
What I only realized today is that his watch restoration channel has more subscribers than the official Magic: The Gathering YouTube channel now. That's insane.
I've just gotten into this hobby and the pivots on these watches are around the 0.01mm range with the individual teeth coming in around that size too. So might be that 0.1mm brass cutting could do the trick, if you finesse it right. From what I've been reading/watching, lots of classical jewelry education focused on learning how to manufacture extremely precise tools to shape, mill, and manipulate various materials.
I had extremely limited success replicating a gear using a 0.3mm FDM Cartesian 3d printer, but even then I had to manually shave off every single tooth under a loupe.
Those ones are pretty thick, by watch standards, and the teeth aren't the smallest. I think from memory the thickness is about 0.25mm, but I would need to get the calipers out when I get home.
Accutron is where the really small engineering comes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XugX5zb1rG8 the wheel is about 25mm across (I think) but you can't really see the teeth with the naked eye. (https://www.watchdoctor.biz/accutron/ has more details) but the level of accuracy and detail needed to machine that far outweighs the stuff that rolex do even now.
These index wheels were mass produced, and I still don't know how they did it.
Thank you for your kind answer . Both from you and werewolf255.
> These index wheels were mass produced, and I still don't know how they did it.
Fascinating. My guess would be some form of etching process.
But that would make it some form of MEMS years before the first commonly recognised MEMS components.
Similar to the video here, I have my grandfathers Rolex. He wore it while trimming hedges and doing all sorts of yard work. Why not, it was his only watch and he needed to tell the time! If it's so good it ought to be able to stand up to the abuse! It's also not like he serviced it regularly, and after being in a safe for 20 years after his passing, I put it on, moved around for a day with it.. and it started to keep time about as accurately as specified.
These days you see the exact opposite behavior. Everyone has just become so precious about their goods. "It's really expensive so I need to protect it / use it sparingly / use great caution". Look at the entire ecosystem of protective cases for iPhones/Apple Watches/etc. On upscale cars you have the obsession with paint protection films, ceramic coatings, etc.
In some cases its warranted - we got my wife a (not Rolex) expensive watch 10 years ago, and the thing has had to go in for service every 2-3 years for weeks at a time to get it to keep time properly. Even if some companies like Tesla have notoriously thin paint, no ones cars are rusting in 5 years like they did in the 80s.