Looking After Your Automatic Watch

If you have just bought a mechanical movement watch, especially if it's your first one, then you just entered a new world of quality timepieces that will enthrall you for a lifetime. However, while mechanical movements are built to last several lifetimes, they do need care to get the most out of them and ensure they continue to give accurate and reliable performance through the years. Knowing how to maintain automatic watch purchases can save you a lot of time, money and frustration in the future. Here are some automatic watch care tips to help.

Setting the time and date

You can run into problems with your new watch just setting the time, and this is simply a result of how mechanical watches work. You should never set the date or time between 9pm and 2am. This is time on the watch, not actual time. 

The reason for this is that the date rollover mechanism on these movements engages at 9pm and disengages at 2am to maintain the correct day and date, and setting the watch between those times can lead to the delicate parts of that mechanism being put under undue stress when restarting the watch, even breaking them. 

Always rotate the hands forward when setting time, and then avoid that 5-hour time period on the watch to make the adjustments. 

Correct Winding Procedure

When talking about maintenance of automatic watches, most of the focus is on the winding of the watch. There is a reason for this, get it wrong and you could damage the movement, which is not only annoying, but can lead to expensive repairs. In a mechanical watch, there is no battery, instead power comes from energy within a flat spring as it unwinds. 

There are a couple of things to remember when winding your watch:

Take the watch off your wrist to wind it, it avoids damage to the winder stem

Get into the habit of wining before you put the watch on each day

Don't overwind the watch, too tight and you can break the spring. Stop when you feel resistance.

More automatic watch care tips

Keep your watch away from moisture, if it enters the mechanism it can cause ongoing problems. Similarly, magnets can affect timekeeping, while dropping the watch or subjecting it to other sudden shocks can know the movement out of alignment completely. 

Finally, with such precision movements and hundreds of moving parts, quality mechanical watches do need servicing every once in a while. This should be done every three to five years to maintain your watch at its best.