Watch Repair

[Jamie Pillers]

Chris… CRAZY coincidence!! I have a Seiko Automatic (looks very similar to yours, but likely newer… I bought mine new just a few years ago). Like you, I love the watch, the way it looks, and the self-winding feature. Sometime in the past month, I noticed that the watch was gaining roughly 20 minutes every eight hours. Yesterday I took it to a repairman who ‘rebalanced’ it and now it’s back to perfect. 😄 I’m impressed that you would attempt the repair yourself!

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Chris… CRAZY coincidence!! I have a Seiko Automatic (looks very similar to yours, but likely newer… I bought mine new just a few years ago). Like you, I love the watch, the way it looks, and the self-winding feature. Sometime in the past month, I noticed that the watch was gaining roughly 20 minutes every eight hours. Yesterday I took it to a repairman who ‘rebalanced’ it and now it’s back to perfect. 😄 I’m impressed that you would attempt the repair yourself!

If your watch was running that fast, it was almost certainly magnetized. I don't think a watch can be so far out of adjustment that it would be that far off! If the hairspring in a watch gets magnetized, the coils can stick together, shortening the effective length of the hairspring (adjusting the hairspring's effective length is how you adjust a watch's timing rate. Shorter spring = faster running). Magnetized hairsprings can cause EXTREME errors like you had with your watch. Its a simple fix; there are demagnetizers you can buy for about $30 to do this. That's probably all your guy did to the watch.

Watches get magnetized often now because there are so many strong magnetic fields they are exposed to, like the emissions from cell phones, computer tablets like the iPad, microwave ovens, etc. If a watch is held close to one of these sources of magnetic fields, it can get magnetized after a few minutes. I've had it happen from holding my Microsoft Surface Pro tablet with my left hand (the arm I wear my watch on) and from holding my cell phone in my left hand for a long time.

The hairspring is the thin coiled spring on the watch's balance wheel (the wheel that oscillates back and forth). On most watches, this is made of steel. On some higher-end watches made now, the hairspring is made of a synthetic, non-metal material that makes it immune to magnetic fields.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I just finished repairing this beautiful Benrus watch. I serviced the movement, cleaned the case, replaced the scratched up crystal, and gave it a nice new strap. This one is going to be worn a lot!

I know it was made in the 1960s, because it has an ETA 1281 movement; that movement was introduced in 1960.