Timepiece repairs can be expensive and often take a long time, so you generally want to avoid damaging a watch. Here John Keil lists five common things you may not be aware of that can damage a watch and how to prevent them.
Hairsprings are miniscule. Generally no more than one centimeter in overall diameter when coiled, they are roughly 50 microns thick and 150 microns wide. Tiny they may be, but insignificant they are not. In fact, they are so significant that Rolex refers to them as “the guardians of time.” But what do silicon hairsprings bring to the table? Watchmaker Ashton Tracy explains why he went from skeptic to fan.
While GaryG thinks it’s all the more impressive that designers continue to delight us with new looks, many watches are often very similar. And trying to describe the slippery slope from vague resemblance to outright theft is not a simple task. So he begins down at the lower end of the grade with so-called homage watches and moves up the GaryG Styling Statute of Limitations from there.
The retrograde indication is one of Joshua Munchow’s favorite “Because We Can” (BWC) complications. Gears are an amazing invention and have allowed watchmakers to make incredible creations. Simple gear systems leave a multitude of openings for creativity. Look at some great retrogrades here.
As a collector, and a fairly visible one at that, GaryG has been paying attention to reports of muggings and thefts of watches and wondering whether it makes sense these days to wear valuable pieces in public. He polled a group of 20 watch enthusiast friends on their personal safety while wearing watches to learn what steps they take to keep safe.
It seems that watches are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, as a mainstream fashion category. With the good comes the bad, of course, and one characteristic is that it attracts a set of well-off, low-information buyers. GaryG shares his tips for navigating uncertainty in watch collecting in 2022.
It’s already time for the latest update in GaryG`s series of articles providing a completely subjective, unscientific, and unofficial history of watch photographs online. The big trend he has recently seen is the emergence of storytelling as a dominant theme in how watches are displayed. And while he lauds the rise to prominence of many more women among the population of online watch shooters and commentators, the emergence of boob shots with a watch hardly “empowers women” . . . or does it?
Ian Skellern has a solution that would not only eliminate flipping but would also decimate the gray market. Or at least it would significantly minimize them. Might it work?
Some think that a rapidly soaring price is proof of a watch bubble. They could be right. Or not. Financial bubbles are tough to identify when they’re forming. They’re even more difficult to declare finished as prices collapse. Financial expert Chris Malburg shares a few tips about recognizing and navigating a watch bubble, especially if you feel the need to buy during it.
Does anyone really care how many jewels their watch has? Watchmaker Ashton Tracy thinks that you’d be surprised how many people do as they’ve been duped by a vintage practice of announcing the amount of movement jewels on watch dials. What is the real story here?