Real-World Regulation...

artphotodude · September 19, 2023

So this will sound like Weak-Sauce (Ketchup and Water ;0) to a lot of seasoned watchmakers, but I'm not sure I even want a time-grapher. Have been tinkering and doing moderate repairs (pretty good at case stuff and have even pulled/reseated balances to fix over-banking). During all of this, a few of the watches I've collected have been fully-serviced (like my 3133 chrono) and I've still wound up having to do minor touch-ups to regulation. There's an old idea in my original carreer of Photography called "The Splitting of Errors", where you need to find a middle-ground between all the different sets of variables (often used in collimating lenses). Everytime someone is doing a full-overhaul, they are timing the watch fully-wound, face-up. This, I've found is a recipe for a slow-running watch. Unless you are talking modern Omega or Rolex, positional variation can be massive, and at least, the watchmaker should be averaging between dial-up (where the watch will likely be setting at night) and crown-down to simulate daily wear. More to the point, presuming the mainspring is reasonably linear in its unwind, any time-grapher adjustments should be at the halfway-mark of a full-wind in about 12 hours. However, even these things completely fail to take in the actual wearer/user's lifestyle. I've been manually regulating for myself and others by starting in at least 3 postions and then topping-off with a full-week of day-to-day use. It usually takes two weeks to get a watch to within 7-10 seconds on average during daily wear. But the final polish is to see where it lands at the end of the wind-cycle, before a rewind. This often means an older watch will run a bit fast in the first half of the day (not usually a problem) but by next morning will be within 7-10 seconds before a new wind. At best, it seems like a grapher is most useful in observing a change in a watch, so if it typically needs to run +20 at the start of a wind-cycle to end on point, then the grapher would tell you if it had say slipped a few seconds - making a quick touch-up easier.

On two occasions, watchmakers I know have got pretty defensive when a newly-serviced watch turned-out to be running slow, and it seems to me that it shouldn't come as a surpise that any mechanicals you wear a lot will need some settling-in for a particular user.

Neverenoughwatches · September 19, 2023

12 minutes ago, artphotodude said:

So this will sound like Weak-Sauce (Ketchup and Water ;0) to a lot of seasoned watchmakers, but I'm not sure I even want a time-grapher. Have been tinkering and doing moderate repairs (pretty good at case stuff and have even pulled/reseated balances to fix over-banking). During all of this, a few of the watches I've collected have been fully-serviced (like my 3133 chrono) and I've still wound up having to do minor touch-ups to regulation. There's an old idea in my original carreer of Photography called "The Splitting of Errors", where you need to find a middle-ground between all the different sets of variables (often used in collimating lenses). Everytime someone is doing a full-overhaul, they are timing the watch fully-wound, face-up. This, I've found is a recipe for a slow-running watch. Unless you are talking modern Omega or Rolex, positional variation can be massive, and at least, the watchmaker should be averaging between dial-up (where the watch will likely be setting at night) and crown-down to simulate daily wear. More to the point, presuming the mainspring is reasonably linear in its unwind, any time-grapher adjustments should be at the halfway-mark of a full-wind in about 12 hours. However, even these things completely fail to take in the actual wearer/user's lifestyle. I've been manually regulating for myself and others by starting in at least 3 postions and then topping-off with a full-week of day-to-day use. It usually takes two weeks to get a watch to within 7-10 seconds on average during daily wear. But the final polish is to see where it lands at the end of the wind-cycle, before a rewind. This often means an older watch will run a bit fast in the first half of the day (not usually a problem) but by next morning will be within 7-10 seconds before a new wind. At best, it seems like a grapher is most useful in observing a change in a watch, so if it typically needs to run +20 at the start of a wind-cycle to end on point, then the grapher would tell you if it had say slipped a few seconds - making a quick touch-up easier.

On two occasions, watchmakers I know have got pretty defensive when a newly-serviced watch turned-out to be running slow, and it seems to me that it shouldn't come as a surpise that any mechanicals you wear a lot will need some settling-in for a particular user.

A tg obviously can't take account of all the variables of a wrist worn watch for different people's lifestyles. Apart from the diagnostic side , its just a quick convenient device to get you in the ballpark. After all these were originally just used by professional watchmakers to get the watch back on the customers wrist and the wmaker paid up quickly with a fair chance of returning an accurately running watch. Its only in fairly recent times that they've become cheap enough and available to everyone and their dog. Your time and effort to set up an individual's watch should yield much better averaging accuracy. So besides the fault finding which should help with preventing wear and tear much like the plug in diagnostic machine of a car to pinpoint arising issues, the tg is a quick convenient way to regulate time. I still would need mine to be prised from my cold dead fingers