As an owner of an SKX who doesn’t know much about watch longevity, how long can I expect it to last? Are there other automatics that will outlast a person’s life?It still blows my mind that you can take the SKX scuba diving, especially when you factor in the price.This may sound cynical but as I get older and see the world becoming more and more digital and connected, I find myself appreciating analog, mechanical things like watches and old cars more and more.

An SKX isn&#x27;t gonna outlive you and once it fails they&#x27;ll just replace the entire movement anyway.Mechanical watches are still indeed cool though. :)

I actually have an SKX013 which I like wayyy more than the 007. Basically the same watch but that 39MM size is perfect.

Still love my SKX007J though I don&#x27;t wear it as much once I got in the habit of step counting, maybe I should start wearing two watches...

Agree with you so much. It still feels absolutely magical wearing one. The SKX007 was my first automatic watch and I wore it daily for 10 years. Incredible thing.

&gt; Maybe it&#x27;s just knowing that you have this perpetually winding machine on your handIt&#x27;s a mechanical device which stores energy in a spring barrel, and consumes it through a set of gears to produce constant velocity motion.

A solar quartz fits this more. Those don&#x27;t even require movement or correcting as often as with mechanical watches. Just light

The parts last quite some time if properly maintained. If you&#x27;re worried about replacement parts availability, stick with the most popular movements such as the ETA2824&#x2F;SW200 series or Seiko&#x27;s NH35 series.

Parts rarely fail on watches from the 50&#x27;s on, especially the better made watches that are sealed. Even those that arn&#x27;t sealed very well, the parts seem to last.If a part does fail, it&#x27;s usually the old blue steel mainsprings.They can be replaced with modern White-Alloy springs. (That is just a brand name.)Watches are my thing. I don&#x27;t know why I like them so much, but do.Servicing does take awhile to learn though. That whole 10,000 hrs probally. Servicing a watch does not take that long to learn. I&#x27;m talking about making parts with a Jeweler&#x27;s lathe. And getting to the point where you know those parts well enough to visualize exactly what&#x27;s wrong with a timepiece by looking at it.If you did learn to clean&#x2F;oil your mechanical watch, it&#x27;s something that will be passed down to loved ones.Oh yea, Service a mechanical watch when it stops keeping good time. That is unless you take it in the water.I know a watchmaker who told his father he needed to Service his gifted wristwatch. His father got it 30 years ago as a present, and just wore it daily. The watchmaker was expecting dried up oil, but to his astonishment, the oil was still there. It was hermetically sealed. Oils do breakdown, but he couldn&#x27;t find any damage to parts using a 40x stereoscope.

They last longer if you wear them, say, several times a month - i.e. if you have a rotation with several quartz watches and several mechanical ones. They definitely will last decades that way.As others have noted, if you own a well-known brand like a Seiko you can easily purchase an entirely new movement for $50-$75 and this should take a watchmaker no more than one hour of labor or you can DIY. (Many non-Seiko brands use NH35&#x2F;36 movements, which are made by Seiko)

To that point - yes, but it&#x27;s less expensive than many people think. I got a vintage 1970 Omega Seamaster in very good condition some time ago, paid less than £1000 for it. It kept very good time, no issues with it, but I decided that since it turned 50 recently I&#x27;m going to treat it to a full Omega service with an authorized workshop, paid £495 - that included replacement original parts from Omega, which of course they still stock and make for this watch, because well - it&#x27;s Omega.I asked them how this works, and they said anything younger than 80 years Omega just sends them parts without any issue, anything older they have to send back to Switzerland for service, and yes, then Omega might have to manufacture the parts required on the spot - and yes, that then turns really expensive.

My grandma has a mechanical watch she only wears on sundays - to the church. Whenever I was visiting her she asks me to wind it up for her before the mass. She uses this same watch for over 30 years with minimal maintenance, and it&#x27;s not an expansive brand, just a good noname watch.

I have seiko automatic which kept great time when I first bought it, but not long after, it slipped off my wrist and fell on the tile floor. Since then it has been losing time but no so much as to be a huge problem. Would service easily fix this or is it just something to live with?

A mechanical watch needs regular service which is usually just cleaning, lubricating, replacing seals and springs. Eventually it will need replacement parts and that is probably the end of life for the watch.There are a some brands that will service every watch they&#x27;ve ever made, fabricating new parts as needed. Few of us can afford one of those.

&gt; It loses about 5 minutes a dayThis suggests it&#x27;s completely out of spec, and maybe beyond saving. However, regulating functioning Seiko movements is certainly within reach for enthusiasts using a timegrapher device, or software with a microphone. Persistently adjusting over a few days, it should be able to get within -10,+10 seconds per day.The timegrapher will also reveal the condition of the movement and whether further work is worthwhile. Servicing these movements is likely more expensive than replacing them.

It&#x27;s not hard to make the adjustment, but you need a timegrapher to measure the results in a reasonable time.I&#x27;ve adjusted a couple of my watches over the course of a week or two by making small adjustments, noting the time, wearing it for a day, and then noting how much the time had changed versus a &quot;known good&quot; time. It&#x27;s a pain but doable.There are mobile apps that use the phone&#x27;s microphone to measure the watch&#x27;s &quot;ticks&quot; and graph them for you. They aren&#x27;t anywhere near as accurate as a &quot;real&quot; timegrapher but they&#x27;ll get you close enough.At one point I had about a dozen mechanical watches. These days I have three, and only one that I wear almost exclusively. It&#x27;s a Maratac Mid-Pilot, which uses a Miyota 8245 movement. I&#x27;ve used the &quot;adjust and check later&quot; method to adjust it, and it loses about 10s per week - well within the acceptable range.The other two that I&#x27;ve kept are a Seagull 1963, which I wear as a &quot;dress watch&quot;, and a Vostok Retro 1934, which I sometimes wear when I want a change of pace. It has a white face and I have a variety of brightly-colored straps for it.One day I&#x27;ll step up and buy a Hamilton, but I&#x27;m still savoring the serotonin from looking at them and anticipating :).

I have an automatic mechanical watch - a Seiko 5. It loses about 5 minutes a day. It might only need an adjustment to calibrate it, but that would require a watchmaker. I think the last one in town just went out of business, and even if he hadn&#x27;t, the cost of his labor would be greater than the cost of the watch.

&gt; I suggest picking up a Seiko SKXSadly this advice is a little bit out of date, as the SKX has been out of production now for a few years and the price on uses examples has risen above what one is worth (except to collectors).The newer advice is to grab a Seiko 5*. There&#x27;s a million different choices, and all the current ones come with the 4R35 or 4R36 movement, which are better than the 7S26 which was in the SKX divers.* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seikowatches.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;products&#x2F;5sports&#x2F;lineup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seikowatches.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;products&#x2F;5sports&#x2F;lineup</a>

I feel the same way, I write software for a living and I&#x27;m sure an outsider browsing through the thousands of lines of code in my codebases everyday would be confused, but I get that same feeling when looking at a mechanical watch. To think that people were building the first mechanical timepieces 500 years ago, just a hundred or so years after the printing press is incredible to me. How did they even create parts that tiny so accurately?

It depends on the movement in the watch. Any COSC chronometer movement will hold +4&#x2F;-6s per day which worst case is under a minute lost per week. Typically the error is much smaller.

You can always get a spring drive from grand seiko - it&#x27;s mechanical (with an &quot;brake&quot; driven by an integrated circuit, but still no battery) but basically only gets a few seconds off per year. Lowest price point for those is like $5k though.

you can expect a quality automatic movement (imo seiko is lowest end of quality) to be off on the order of single digit minutes per month

This is of course a matter of personal taste, but:I usually set my watch a few minutes fast on purpose. I just use it to get an approximation of the time: &quot;oh, it&#x27;s nearly 5&quot;When I need the exact time I look at my phone, and naturally that&#x27;s where my calendar reminders and such live as well. So I&#x27;m not missing any appointments if my watch is off, and if I did rely on my watch I&#x27;d be a few minutes early.The two work well in tandem for me.Of course, I also know lots of watch owners who prioritize accuracy from their wristwatches. If I was one of those people, I really couldn&#x27;t imagine wanting to deal with a mechanical watch. They are wonderful, wonderful little machines and it&#x27;s a miracle they&#x27;re as accurate as they are... but, they are not as accurate as a $10 digital watch.

I keep considering a mechanical watch, but I think I&#x27;d find the accuracy a bit tedious - having to continually adjust it every week so that I didn&#x27;t arrive late to appointments.I like a watch that gets out of the way - it just works. I&#x27;ve got a Citizen watch a little like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citizenwatch.co.uk&#x2F;stiletto-ar1130-81a.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citizenwatch.co.uk&#x2F;stiletto-ar1130-81a.html</a>It&#x27;s a quartz watch, powered by solar power through the face. It has &#x27;just worked&#x27; for as long as I&#x27;ve had it. From an accuracy point of view, it loses negligible amounts over the several month interval between me being forced to adjust it anyway (daylight savings, international travel).

&gt; one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide.Checks out. Tungsten Carbide and Corundum (sapphire watch crystals, the hardest watch crystal in use) have the same Mohs hardness of 9 and will scratch each other.And I&#x27;d guess that a $300 watch probably doesn&#x27;t use Corundum but rather mineral glass.

&gt; I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week.Are these two things somehow related to one another?

&gt; I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week.There are antimagnetic watches. Or you can use a cheap watch demagnetizer.

I’ve got a cheap Seiko 5, the SNK809. Bought for $50 new in 2013, wore it for a few years then it moved with me in drawers for the past 5. I pulled it out last week, wound it up and it works perfectly, gaining just 4 seconds a day.

I&#x27;ve been using the same mechanical watch, more or less every day, for a little over 12yrs now. Miyota movement, stainless body, Sapphire window, about $300. In years of machine shop work the movement survived fine, and has one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide.Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn&#x27;t matter. I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week.

This rings especially true when you live and work in an ephemeral digital environment. I find mechanical devices of all kinds grounding. No batteries, no upgrades, no security vulnerabilities, no dependency hell.

Not to defend Apple watch or other smart watches, but they have  been my dream since my childhood watching James Bond movies. So I love both mechanical watches for their engineering and smart watches for what they bring to the table. We dont have to diss one to make the other feel better.

I have a couple of Seiko automatic watches, but I recently picked up an SNK809 as a new daily driver: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.benswatchclub.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;seiko-5-military-review" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.benswatchclub.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;seiko-5-military-review</a>. For £120&#x2F;$130, it&#x27;s cheap enough to wear every day and it looks great. The amount of mechanical complexity and engineering that goes into it for that price is mind blowing.

<pre><code> The minus side is that I don’t wear one of those two 
 every single day because … I gotten bitten by the watch 
 bug, and now I have a pile of other watches, and I wear 
 those too!
</code></pre>
This was a big part of the fun for me. Different watches for different days. It&#x27;s ridiculous, even embarrassing to admit this but -- I feel like the richest, luckiest man in the world when I look at a drawer full of watches from which I can choose each day. As a child I would never have dreamed of it.In reality they are all very modest watches, most under $100. The entire collection is not worth more than a nice laptop. But whatever.As a bonus mechanical watches, unless I&#x27;m mistaken, will last longer if not running 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365.

&gt; Also knowing that the thing will last forever, take care of it and it will probably outlive you. Can&#x27;t say that about an Apple Watch.I don’t know how many mechanical watches really will last a lifetime, but they will easily last longer than a so-called ‘smart’ watch.Six years ago I seriously considered purchasing a ‘smart’ watch. Eventually I realised that they were just another money sink and attention leash, and put the money into a couple of automatic watches instead. I still have them, and wear them regularly. Had I bought an Apple or Android watch, I would have replaced it multiple times by now.That’s the plus side. The minus side is that I don’t wear one of those two every single day because … I gotten bitten by the watch bug, and now I have a pile of other watches, and I wear those too! I still think that I am ahead of the game, though.BTW, I write ‘smart’ watch because I don’t think they are really that smart; if anything, they should be called unwise watches, because they are an unwise expenditure of resources, money and attention. Also they just don’t look good. I predict that in thirty years we’ll look back on them much as we do digital watches: as a fad.

As mentioned the SKX is no longer produced, and the replacements for it are inferior as the 5 series has increased in price beyond inflation and are not true dive watches anymore. Orient is better if you want a dive watch in the spirit of the Seiko SKX.The best current advice for beginners is probably on the Just One More Watch youtube channel, most watches are in the price bracket that the SKX occupied, and you will learn about micro-brands that exceed Seiko in quality, beat them on price, and under the hood have Seiko movements that are easily replaced &amp; serviced for decades to come.My Helm Komodo reccomended by Jodi of JOMW gets as much wear as my Rolex Submariner and at a fraction of the price. It isn&#x27;t the same price or quality, but I enjoy it just as much.

There&#x27;s something magical about mechanical watches. Maybe it&#x27;s just knowing that you have this perpetually winding machine on your hand (in the case of &quot;automatic&quot; mechanical watches).Also knowing that the thing will last forever, take care of it and it will probably outlive you. Can&#x27;t say that about an Apple Watch.If you want a good mechanical watch that won&#x27;t break the bank I suggest picking up a Seiko SKX (though prices have been going up), a Vostok Amphibia (might be hard with the ukraine conflict) or a Timex Marlin.

same with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;3blue1brown" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;3blue1brown</a>

He’s elevated technical explanations to a delicious art form

You don&#x27;t have to be  watchmaker, just need to read and learn about it and understand it.

I don&#x27;t make this comparison lightly but I&#x27;m reminded of Leonardo DaVinci. How much talent does one need to create something like this? It&#x27;s not enough to be just &#x27;good&#x27; at engineering, design, watchmaking, and writing... you have to be amazing at it ALL of it. AND have motivation to do it.I&#x27;m just in awe.

I read the GPS one a few months back, he absolutely amazingly explained the whole thing to a depth I never would&#x27;ve expected.

This man is marvelous. Even though I know how top-notch he is at writing interactive blog posts, he surprises me with his quality every time I open his new blog posts. Bartosz is a huge inspiration for me.

I almost couldn&#x27;t believe the quality of this while reading it. Not just animations, but simulations? That perfectly illustrate the concept being discussed? Incredible. Not to mention the incredibly clear and articulate prose.

The author calling this a &quot;blog post&quot; really undersold it!

There is absolutely a market for your LOTR example. I think a kickstarter made LOTR or Harry Potter Interactive applications like you are purposing could charge $1,000 maybe.And I 100% align with your 90&#x27;s prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn&#x27;t forget that we lost some things too.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0</a>

That was also my dream when I first saw the CD encyclopedia and seeing the first demo of AR using google maps of pointing your phone to a building and seeing information about it and then the introduction of google glass, then it all suddenly disappeared.

Last time I used Amazon Prime Video, around 2017, it would show info that Amazon deemed relevant for that bit of the show (apparently it&#x27;s called X-Ray). Back then at least, it wasn&#x27;t on the same level as what you described but still something.The danger was it made me want to pause all the time in case I missed something interesting, but by putting the user in control of what they get info on, you could avoid that.

Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more informationI remember the cable companies promising this when everything went &quot;digital.&quot;I also remember when the movie studios promised us one of the big advantages of DVDs over VHS was that we could watch the scenes of a movie from any angle?Yeah, that never happened.

There is a movie player that would highlight the character&#x2F;actor on screen at the moment you hit pause. There is a link to find out more that would take you to the appropriate web page with the info.I want to say it was google play, but not completely sure.

&gt;True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page.This reminds me of Microsoft Encarta.

True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page. The internet taking over turned everything back into text, and then as bandwidth grew the only thing we thought to use it on was higher and higher bitrate video.When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking&#x2F;tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there&#x27;s just no market.

He has one on the ICE actually, though I don&#x27;t have the link handy.

1000%.Sent this to my dad, and can&#x27;t wait to talk this weekend. When I was a kid we would tinker around with watches in the basement but, alas, I had different interests and never really got around to truly understanding these mechanisms. I don&#x27;t really know web development beyond setting up basic pages, but how the CAD was integrated into this is wonderful and I&#x27;d love to see more posts going through things like human joints or ICE, or maybe weapons ... other things where we kind of intuitively grasp how they work, but don&#x27;t know the details. This entire blog seems to do a lot of that. So cool.

I came here to write the exact same thing. Amazing content.

His post on how GPS works is equally excellent[1] (as are, I&#x27;m sure, the rest of his posts).[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;gps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;gps&#x2F;</a>

Came here to say the same thing. This incredibly well done, well written, well executed, well... everything. How does one find, not only the talent, but the patience to do such incredible work... Mind boggling.

According to his Twitter, he just uses bare canvas and WebGL. [1] What a legend. You can inspect the page and read the source js, it is unminified.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BCiechanowski&#x2F;status&#x2F;1484013009219375105?s=20&amp;t=8bN1SiOFjoWM3v1hB9Uehg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BCiechanowski&#x2F;status&#x2F;1484013009219375105...</a>

Does anyone know the tooling used to create these?

Came here to write the same - that was amazing...

I think that the person(s) that created the interactive visuals would find this to be a helpful comment. Radically impressive is a fitting description. I don’t think I’ve ever seen and interacted with anything like it, although I imagine people working with CAD software get to see and mess around with this kind of stuff pretty frequently.

Agreed! This is top quality writing AND interactive illustrations.

I usually get about half way through his posts, see how much is left and just give up. Nonetheless I get a lot out of them.

To be 100% honest I found it very intimidating to even begin reading it. It&#x27;s such a time sink (no pun intended) and a huge wall of text (with figures and interactivity nonetheless).

This might be the single best work of art on the Web I&#x27;ve seen since 1995.  Nothing else even comes close.

I wonder how long it took him to put together this blog post?

And in true HN style we react to such objectively awesome content by having a slapfight over whether the author wrote the code in the “right” way.

My first thoughts were &quot;This is what the internet was invented for&quot;.So impressive.

This may not be the most valuable comment, but my goodness, the quality of this writeup and it&#x27;s interactive descriptions of complex mechanical components AND their interactions is radically impressive. The treatment of complex topics in deeply visual and partially interactive ways, for me at least, is a remarkably helpful way to learn.

Mr Ciechanowski&#x27;s articles are themselves complete works of art. Another brilliant article and collection of interactive animations.My favourite escapement is the detent escapment. I saw a cutout model at the Imperial Science Museum in London. Even after staring at it for ages I could not figure out how it worked!

What a fanatic writeup. I’ve been fascinated with mechanical watches for what seems like forever. I browse YouTube at  night and see collections by Mr. Wonderful and John Mayer (mostly very high end collector grade Rolex, Patek, AP, IWC). I actually splurged and purchased a new Omega Seamaster Professional Diver 300 automatic and absolutely love it. It does have a see-through back making watching the caliber 8800 movement  hypnotic.

There&#x27;s also a subreddit for aggregating interactive explanations like these: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;explorables" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;explorables</a>

I hope Nicky Case puts this in his list of explorables :)

Looks like a fun website to spend a hour or two. Thanks!Regarding tolerances, your OPs article states that they were actually able to produce them before, but not at a satisfying quality. I don&#x27;t know what a &#x27;good enough&#x27; quality is, though. It&#x27;s a good story nevertheless :)

That depends on how many parts you want to make and to what tolerances.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gearpatrol.com&#x2F;watches&#x2F;a636135&#x2F;greubel-forsey-hand-made-1-watch-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gearpatrol.com&#x2F;watches&#x2F;a636135&#x2F;greubel-forsey-ha...</a>

Very hard. And it comes at an outrageous price. Independent watchmakers usually go one of four routes:1) Source a movement from a big manufacturer (eg; ETA&#x2F;Valjoux or a japanese&#x2F;chinese movement) and use it as is but design the case&#x2F;dial yourself
2) (1) but modify the movement adding functionality, replacing parts, or refinishing it to your own standard
3) Designing a custom movement around specialty movement parts from a supplier like Jaeger LeCoultre. They make some of the trickier parts (gears, balance springs). They can also manufacture special parts on a swiss screw machine.
4) Going through a bespoke movement maker like agenhor. You tell them what you want and they have both the machinery to make many custom parts and source the rest from elsewhere. They also provide movement design expertise.Actually machining the watch parts isn&#x27;t the hard part... the tricky part comes in things like hairsprings and escapements which are made from sometimes exotic materials like silicon. Some tiny watch parts are made using electrical discharge machining which costs $$$$$$$$ as well.

How difficult is it to bootstrap the ability to manufacture mechanical watch parts?It was only in 2017 that China joined the elite club of countries capable of making ballpoint pens. Is it that hard?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;worldviews&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;18&#x2F;finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;worldviews&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;01&#x2F;18...</a>

It&#x27;s like a clear hood on your car. On a nice enough car, it shows the beauty of the engine. But on a cheap one ... Skeleton watches can be uniquely telling of the price of the watch.Worth mentioning, most mechanical watches will have a sapphire back, so when you take them off you can admire the movement privately.

That&#x27;s it, this is gonna make me pull the trigger on a skeletonized watch. I&#x27;ve been wanting one for a couple years, but never really sat down and browsed, but I appreciate the mechanics so much more after reading this.

Sounds like something basic income could help alleviate.

I believe that for every Bartosz Ciechanowski (huge kudos and thanks to him!) there are 100 similarly abled people, who can&#x27;t create essays like this, because they need to do something else to keep the lights on. A collective loss.

Just imagine the utopia that would emerge if all education were conducted through web-essays like this. Bravo!

I love 1940s&#x2F;1950s instruction videos. Here’s one from Hamilton that shows how they work that I really like. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rL0_vOw6eCc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rL0_vOw6eCc</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220504151534&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;mechanical-watch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220504151534&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow...</a>

Amazing!  He&#x27;s done it again, I am blown away!  Thanks you very much for this unmatched level of documentation quality!

This page got the HN hug of death it seems. Absolutely deserves all the traffic he is getting, Mr. Ciechanowski&#x27;s blog is an absolute gem.

This is a most excellent writeup. Its so very clear, understandable, but also precise.A word of warning, diving into watches and clocks can be a time&#x2F;money sink.If you&#x27;re not careful you&#x27;ll end up building something like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.secretbatcave.co.uk&#x2F;projects&#x2F;electromechanical-clock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.secretbatcave.co.uk&#x2F;projects&#x2F;electromechanical-c...</a>

My late Uncle Vic taught me how to repair clocks and pocket watches when I was young. I let it go, and returned to re-learning it with this book. I still dream of completing my first, from scratch, pocket watch.

I was about to post the same book. Pretty much a must have if you get into watchmaking.

I&#x27;ve heard of that book before, it sounds really interesting too! Creating your own mechanism sounds extremely complex, is that what you&#x27;re doing?

Linked at the very end of the long, long page (which, incidentally, is long).

That is an absolutely amazing book - how to design and make the highest quality watches from scratch. At the time, all watch fabrication was by division of labor, no one made an entire watch from scratch.Daniels also wrote a riveting autobiography. He rose from the most abject poverty to world eminence, largely because of the British guild system.He also collected, restored, and raced old cars. He used to drive his Blower Bentley to his gentlemen&#x27;s club (!) in London[0]. All this is described in his autobiography.He needed to do business in Switzerland, so he simply drove his restored Rolls-Royce across the Continent.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bentley_Blower_No.1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bentley_Blower_No.1</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;George_Daniels_(watchmaker)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;George_Daniels_(watchmaker)</a>

I started with Greg Daniel&#x27;s masterpiece: Watchmaking.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Watchmaking-George-Daniels&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0856677043" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Watchmaking-George-Daniels&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0856677...</a>

You should considering enabling it for this site. I don’t see what the downside here would be.

Yep, that&#x27;s why the visualizations do not run on my hardened Firefox. I disabled WebGL.

I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times).But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “min” part from the URI, while the majority of end users will still benefit from pulling the minified js.

We need a ciechanow.ski explainer for how ciechanow.sky explainers are built

He made this in the spirit of watch making. Super impressive and interesting website!

The tradeoff is that there is basically nobody else that has the expertise or time to do the same thing at a similar level of polish. We&#x27;re not going to see more Ciechanowski-level posts unless new libraries and frameworks make it more accessible.

&gt; He does it &quot;the right way™&quot;. Use the platform. Don&#x27;t use any framework or generic library.Hard disagree. &quot;Use What&#x27;s Right For You™&quot;.Of course there is value in understanding the platform beneath your framework or generic library, but that&#x27;s just an extension of &quot;understand what you&#x27;re using and why&quot;.

I strongly disagree that this is &quot;the right way&quot;. I think that the platform provides low level primitives that are _designed_ to have abstractions built upon them.Doing it like this has the potential to be the most performant, but it does so in the same way as writing your programs directly in assembly is potentially performant.I also don&#x27;t think that the source code is particularly readable for me, and contains lots of magic numbers and very imperative code. I would personally find it a lot more readable if it was written in some sort of declarative way using a library, even if I have to look at a GitHub repo instead of view source.

&gt; Don&#x27;t minify or bundle anythingYeah in this case it doesn&#x27;t need to; there&#x27;s no extraneous or unused code or documentation blocks, and gzip (and comparable) compression is good enough, minification doesn&#x27;t actually reduce the downloaded code size by that much.

the obvious downside is that it&#x27;s a lot of work and takes a lot more time... so it might be &quot;the right way™&quot; for some cases, but it&#x27;s definitely not a rule of thumb...

He does it &quot;the right way™&quot;. Use the platform. Don&#x27;t use any framework or generic library. Go straight to the point and code what you need, when you need it. Don&#x27;t minify or bundle anything, and let the people who are learning and courious a straightforward way to connect the dots, without forcing them into a github repository with 90% of the code unrelated to the thing and existing just to glue 1000 pieces written by 10000 people together.
Every essay by Bartosz is so top-notch and a such breath of fresh air! He gives me hope in humanity and I am immensely grateful for what he does.

Three.js maybe, but it doesn&#x27;t abstract too much away in my opinion, it has a lot of functionality around more complex topics (textures for example), but since he doesn&#x27;t seem to use those it&#x27;s probably not worth the hassle.

Depending on one&#x27;s skillset, you could use a dcc tool like Blender + three.js to make creation of these visuals and interactions much simpler. Have a look at gltfjsx + react-three-fiber [1] combination, which themselves are abstractions over vanilla three.js.With that said, the raw webGL approach here is arguably more educational, so goal achieved I think![1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.pmnd.rs&#x2F;react-three-fiber&#x2F;getting-started&#x2F;examples" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.pmnd.rs&#x2F;react-three-fiber&#x2F;getting-started&#x2F;examp...</a>Edit: there&#x27;s actually a 50 LOC watch example with r3f: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codesandbox.io&#x2F;s&#x2F;bouncy-watch-qyz5r" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codesandbox.io&#x2F;s&#x2F;bouncy-watch-qyz5r</a>

Can you point to what libraries he could have used that would have made it simpler? I doubt anything like would benefit from any type of abstraction that currently exists, unless it was a more interactive application that would incorporate user input etc.

wget will do what you want, with the right flags. Try `wget -r <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;mechanical-watch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;mechanical-watch&#x2F;</a> --include-directories=js&#x2F;`, the resulting `ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;` dir should have it.Adjust the flags as necessary to crawl more of the site if needed (omitting `--include-directories` without an `-l {limit}` flag will eventually crawl the whole site, please be kinder to their bandwidth than that).

Apart from going to each post and manually looking at the JS codes, is it possible to get them all in one go? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;</a> returns 403 error.

&gt; Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?Yes. Almost no one uses it directly.

Why is &quot;codes everything by hand&quot; surprising?  Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?

Fun fact, the time and date on the model is correct as well.

Yeah, I&#x27;m sure a lot of it is copy&#x2F;pasted or #included from his other work.

There is repetition but it doesn&#x27;t look auto-generated to me.

I wish he&#x27;d write a post about how he developed these visualizations. How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?

I asked him. I was wrong.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BCiechanowski&#x2F;status&#x2F;1522067904522428417" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BCiechanowski&#x2F;status&#x2F;1522067904522428417</a>

Are you sure about the by hand part? There&#x27;s a lot of repetition, it feels like at least some of it must be generated.

I have a WebGL project thats been broken for a few years due to a browser deprecated api, it is not a relatively easy fix

I like that; it&#x27;s a lot of work but a lot of people seem to prefer to have to make libraries work together than to just do the work, and it&#x27;s timeless since it doesn&#x27;t depend on any future frameworks; any issues that might come up in the future with regards to browser incompatibility can be fixed relatively easily.Would antifragile be an applicable word to use here?

In my waking up state I read that as “some layer of distraction”. How fitting ;) But back to original post , yes his work and website is amazing.

When I was in college, I got really deep into OpenGL and worked through old textbooks about OpenGL 1.1. I think my favorite one was just called &quot;The Red Book&quot;? It was so much fun.After finishing that I found out that they were already several major versions ahead and had fancy things like shaders... it really is an amazing tool.Recently I started messing with some Three.js stuff and it does have some nice abstractions... main benefit of it for me is the ecosystem around it. Being able to just plug in some physics and interactivity and not have to deal with digging up old screen-to-world conversion code is nice.

I wrote interactive 3D graphics programs in SGI IrisGL, the proprietary predecessor of OpenGL. At that time I considered it super easy because it was so high-level. Even so, as an experiment, I networked an Iris to a Lisp machine so I could write graphics code in Lisp and let the SGI machine render the output. Good times.History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.. Later he went on to found Netscape.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;James_H._Clark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;James_H._Clark</a>

I&#x27;m observing that developers these days are quite surprised to see anyone write code for OpenGL &#x2F; WebGL directly instead of using some layer of abstraction on top, such as Three.js or Unity etc. Few seem to know that OpenGL already is an abstraction of the computing model underneath.A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I showed them and they liked it and their young devs asked which library I was using. When I told them I used OpenGL they couldn&#x27;t believe it. To them OpenGL was the &quot;black magic box&quot; and using it akin to having secret conversations with the GPU in some arcane cryptic language.

&gt; I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn&#x27;t most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them?Most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days.

There&#x27;s little benefit to writing your own asm these days[1], yet we need people who know asm intimately to write compilers.It&#x27;s the same here. Without people who deeply understand a tool&#x27;s input and output, we won&#x27;t ever write a better tool.[1] don&#x27;t @ me, cryptographers and kernel programmers.

&quot; Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL&quot;You really have to admire people who do stuff like that (I can&#x27;t imagine that I would ever have the patience to do that).What I&#x27;m mildly curious about is why would anyone want to do it? Is there a demand for such stuff? I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn&#x27;t most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them?I&#x27;d reckon most would be like me in that they&#x27;d pulled enough watches apart in their younger years to already know their ins and outs (I&#x27;ve long lost track of the number watches and clocks I&#x27;ve either fixed or disassembled by the time I was a teenager).

Frameworks change and get in the way when a new version is released.  It is most annoying.  The underlying WebGL changes much more slowly, and in a much more controlled way with a focus on backward compatibility.  So I do the same whenever I can and ignore frameworks to get rid of a dependency.  The boilerplate overhead can be encapsulated very well into homemade JS functions that only change when I change them.  And JS + WebGL is not really low-level.

Absolutely the best use of web tech I have seen. The best way to put it, is magic.Great great great work!!!

I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;watch.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;js&#x2F;watch.js</a>

yep, i&#x27;ve considered that one; insane engineering for sure. but the watch&#x27;s aesthetics don&#x27;t do it for me. also, it does feel a bit like cheating ;), if an EMP were to go off, i dont think the Spring Drive would come out okay like a purely mechanical watch would.another crazy one is Zenith&#x27;s all-silicon oscillator:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masterhorologer.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;zenith-defy-lab-the-worlds-most-accurate-mechanical-watch-equipped-with-a-new-oscillator-that-beats-at-108000-vph-15-hz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masterhorologer.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;zenith-defy-lab-the-w...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monochrome-watches.com&#x2F;zenith-defy-lab-revolutionary-oscillator-technical-review-video-price&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monochrome-watches.com&#x2F;zenith-defy-lab-revolutionary...</a>

If you want absurd accuracy in a watch powered by mechanical energy (without just resorting to a battery-powered quartz), look into Grand Seiko&#x27;s spring drive.  It&#x27;s super interesting technology, and the result is a smoothly sweeping second hand (as in it&#x27;s actually continuous, not merely a higher number of beats per second).

i put on some decent headphones to listen to this and can tell you that at least on my 8800 movement (and the common ETA 2824-2 in another watch i have), this clip misses some important nuance.both movements have an audible &quot;twang&quot; of the hairspring at each tick -- you can hear it in this video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lNYCujza8JU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lNYCujza8JU</a>. the sound is somewhat different for each watch, since the 8800 has a Si14 hairspring and the cheaper 2824-2 is metal. if you want another rabbit hole: [1]what&#x27;s interesting is that if you leave the watches on a hard flat surface, like a table or nightstand, the entire surface amplifies this twang, so you can hear it from several feet away.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;watch-insider.com&#x2F;reportages&#x2F;omega-defeats-mechanical-watchs-enemy-no-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;watch-insider.com&#x2F;reportages&#x2F;omega-defeats-mechanica...</a>

Ha! I followed a rabbit hole and found this gem : Listen to how 3Hz sounds like. It&#x27;s hypnotic 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omegawatches.com&#x2F;en-au&#x2F;watch-omega-speedmaster-moonwatch-professional-chronograph-42-mm-31130423001005" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.omegawatches.com&#x2F;en-au&#x2F;watch-omega-speedmaster-m...</a>(Search for 3 Hz and click the Audio icon)

Interestingly, I met George Daniels a number of times (creator of the co-axial escapement). He asked me to record a video on my phone of a model he created to illustrate how the escapement works:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PVhSQ_Azkr8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PVhSQ_Azkr8</a>Not the best video you&#x27;ll find on it now, but he was a fascinating man.

i&#x27;m continuously astounded by how accurate the Omega Aqua Terra is. it will be within 90s over a 30 day period after 4 years of daily use with no servicing. the fact that something mechanical and so tiny operating at 3.5hz can do this is mind blowing to me.it has a cool [8800] co-axial escapement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kapoorwatch.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;through-the-scope-the-omega-co-axial-escapement-for-dummies&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kapoorwatch.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;through-the-scope-the-omeg...</a>

Every post from this site is gold. I&#x27;ve learned so much from it.

Nice! Now show us how a mechanical watch with a 3-axis tourbillon works: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5TveIl2whXY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5TveIl2whXY</a>

Well, he just got one more. What an absolute treasure.

Signed up to HN just to say that I signed up to Patreon to support him. Thanks for sharing.

This guy deserves way more patreons than he has: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski</a>

Words aren&#x27;t enough to describe Bartosz&#x27;s work, every one of them is a masterpiece.Twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BCiechanowski" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BCiechanowski</a>
Patreon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski</a>

I got this wooden clock for Christmas a while ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;ROKR-Mechanical-Building-Supplies-Best-Birthday&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07HSZ9LYJ&#x2F;ref=mp_s_a_1_5?crid=14TB49Y2YCNVG&amp;keywords=rokr+clock&amp;qid=1651684699&amp;sprefix=rokr+clock%2Caps%2C147&amp;sr=8-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;ROKR-Mechanical-Building-Supplies-B...</a>Definitely helped me to understand how clocks work. And it’s fun to watch it.

I shared this blog post with him and he said &quot;That&#x27;s the coolest thing I&#x27;ve ever seen&quot;. I can&#x27;t say I disagree with him.

Love Marshall&#x27;s stuff! I also suggest their Magic: The Gathering podcast [Limited Resources](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lrcast.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lrcast.com</a>) for those int TCGs.

Depends. The ETA-2824 is a fairly common movement with inexpensive Chinese clones, so dials and hands are reasonably cheap and common. If the target case also uses the same ETA movement then it’s simple: Unscrew the back, remove the crown stem, drop the movement. Assembly is the reverse of removal.Where it gets tricky is if the target doesn’t use the same movement. In that case, I’d just buy an AliExpress watch with the same dial size and an ETA clone movement. Otherwise you have to ensure your target is the correct size and you’ll probably need to 3D print a movement holder.

That really depends on the sizes, if the face and movement are the same size I expect it should be easy enough. You will need some tools and fine motor skill, but no where near as much as you need when taking apart a movement.Looking at the two watches you mention, the navigator has a Quartz Harley Ronda 373 movement and the diver has a ETA 2824-2 movement. The 373 I can&#x27;t find the specs for, but from an ebay auction it seems to be a 11½’’’ diameter. The 2824-2 is the same diameter. However, all 11½’’’ ronda quartz movements I can find are 3mm thick where the 2824 is 4.6mm. So what I&#x27;d expect is that it will fit, but you might not be able to secure it properly. It really depends on how the movement is held in place. Perhaps you can fabricate&#x2F;3d-print a spacer for that.Another consideration is the lug stem, that might not be the right size. To long is solveable, to short means buying a replacement. I am also not sure wether the stems can have a different thickness, to thin and it wont be waterproof, to thick just won&#x27;t fit.You could probably try without destroying anything (no guarantees ;)), you are not really touching any of the fragile &amp; tiny parts. But you will atleast need tool(s) to open the cases, they might be different, and a tiny screwdriver to release the lug. And I wouldn&#x27;t count on it remaining waterproof, not sure.

If you wouldn’t mind answering a question, how difficult is it to swap a dial&#x2F;handset&#x2F;movement set into a different case?I saw a custom mod watch that paired the face&#x2F;movement of a Marathon navigator with an O&amp;W diver case*. Is a combination I find desirable (as the Marathon bezel is too chunky for my use), but the maker won’t respond to emails.Is it possible that the combination could be “ drop in” or is it likely to require significant modification?*<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;westcoastime.com&#x2F;m16typidivbe.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;westcoastime.com&#x2F;m16typidivbe.html</a>

My favorite video series of this sort is this guy building Antikythera Mechanism from scratch, including making his own era-appropriate tools.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...</a>

I was recently gifted an 1850’s Waltham that a buddy restored. Pulling it out of my pocket is now my standard answer to “What’s your TikTok?”This little site really helped me cement in my mind what’s going on inside of the watch.

&gt; A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it&#x27;s really hard, expensiveWrist watches are pretty hard and expensive. Pocket watches are less so. When I was interested in getting more intimate with watch repair, I went to eBay and bought up a whole bunch of old pocket watch movements. I&#x27;ve got about 150 of them in various condition, most of them Waltham (easy to get, inexpensive, and I happen to have spent the first 25 years of my life spending a lot of time in the old Waltham Watch Co factory building because my father&#x27;s company leased out space in it).Basic tools aren&#x27;t too bad, just a nice set of tweezers, screwdrivers, and a good magnifier is enough to do a lot of repairs. But you can fall down the rabbit hole pretty quickly with the desire for increased quality tools and things like a staking set so you can replace balance wheel arbors.I tried to move from the pocket watches into wrist watches, and while the technology is largely the same, the reduced size and increased complexity made it less enjoyable for me. Instead I ended up moving the other direction and now have a nice collection of 18th and 19th century 30-hour and 8-day clocks (more commonly known as &quot;grandfather clocks&quot;).

I probably already went overboard a bit when staring out. My cost where mostly in a stereo microscope and the consumables (mobius oils, cleaning liquids). Oh and maybe I didn&#x27;t need a timegrapher before having a functional movement hahaAlso, almost everything I had to import in to the EU. Importing chemicals is expensive for some reason I discovered. UPS charged me like 3 times the usual amount.There is a lot of advice that says &#x27;don&#x27;t cheap out, just buy good stuff&#x27;; which is great if you are going to make this really your hobby for years to come. But I feel starting with some cheap tools on a junk movement is a fine start.

I was able to get into this with a $60 set of screwdrivers, a $20 crappy movement from eBay, and another $20 toolkit of random watch repair stuff that wasn&#x27;t really necessary. And maybe like $20 of lube. I would never attempt to service something I wear&#x2F;use, but for the $20 crap movement off eBay there&#x27;s no harm no foul.

His videos are a delightfully interesting AND relaxing.  Always a joy to watch and very little patreon&#x2F;shill filler.

When I saw this, the first thing I did was Ctrl + F to see if anyone else dropped Marshall&#x27;s link. I have no desire to do it myself, but it&#x27;s so satisfying to watch him repair them. His videos are great.

Huh, I recently got into it and, as is my way, I did things on the cheap. All told, including tools and practice movements (and a couple inexpensive whole watches I restored) I&#x27;m in for maybe $100.Here&#x27;s a tip on buying watches to repair or restore - avoid the big brands at first. Many watches use the same or similar movements (ETA is a big one, but you&#x27;ll find Seiko movements hiding in watches from the 60s and 70s, too).eBay is your friend (don&#x27;t fall for too-good-to-be-true items from India or Pakistan)Hang out on watchrepairtalk.com and&#x2F;or watchcrunch.com and ask lots of questions. It&#x27;s a very friendly community.

To those interested in becomming a Watchmaker I can offer this:1. The school route is great, but after the two year program you still won&#x27;t get a parts account from anyone. You will have no problem finding a job though.2. Self-taught. It will take awhile, but it&#x27;s a rewarding hobby&#x2F;career.Every budding Watchmaker should have books. Books by DeCarle, Fried, and Daniels are great.There are old correspondence courses that are good to. Try to get Chicago School of Watch Repair, and Bulova School of Watch Repair. Hunt around for the best price.The quality of internet videos on the internet are spectacular. You are lucky to have them. When I started their was only one guy who taught Watch Repair.Tools:#2, #5 Dumont tweezers. (any tweezers will do, even the cheap ones.)Watch back removal tools. You will need various types, including Rolex, and universal tools.small ultrasonic bath to clean parts. A mason jar filled with cleaning fluid, and rinse will suffice to hobbiests though.oils. Moebius are recommended, but expensive. Personally I think they are overpriced.Presto #1,#2 hand removers.some Radico.A mainspring tool. These can get pricy. Look for a old set of Marshall mainspring removal tools.Decide if you want to work with a loupe, or a 10-40x stereoscope.a band remover.A staking set. (Look around. No need to spend more than $250.00A jewelers lathe, mill, etc. come way later. The biggest mistake newbies make is buying every tool they thing they might need. Then again you wealthy boys can go crazy.Too tired to go on, but I&#x27;m in the Bay Area under &quot;I buy Watchmaker, jeweler, amd some Machinist&#x27;s estates. I&#x27;m gearing up to do repairs. I hope to have a website soon. I&#x27;m thinking about teaching, but not sure if there&#x27;s a market for it.

Wow very comprehensive &amp; well done.If mechanical watches tickle your fancy, there is a ton of watch repair video on YT. I particularly enjoy wristwatch revival (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCD80T1s2Za4K682CQDGwEKQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UCD80T1s2Za4K682CQDGwEKQ</a>).A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it&#x27;s really hard, expensive (I spend close to €1k and that is with b-quality stuff. Good stuff is 5-10x more expensive.) and can be rather frustrating. Finding parts to buy can be complicated depending on your locale, loosing parts is very easy and destroying parts, even when gentle and careful is par for the course.I hat to put my repair hobby on halt after running out of practice pieces. All now have broken or missing parts. your milage may vary ofcourse :)

As usual Bartosz with another extremely high quality post, I have one question, in this bit:&gt; However, when the driving gear can’t rotate because it’s blocked by the rest of the gear train, the cannon pinion can overpower the friction of that tight fit and rotate on its own. This lets us set time without interfering with the gear train, which could break the delicate parts.How can the cannon pinion (green) both overpower the friction to slide freely and also be attached to the driving gear (blue) when functioning regularly?Does this imply that the driving gear and cannon pinion wear each other out every time you adjust the time?

The author has a Patreon, so we really can pay for his content. =)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski&#x2F;posts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski&#x2F;posts</a>

I&#x27;d gladly pay for content like this. It&#x27;s so informative. I&#x27;ve watched yt channels of people who disassemble and fix automatic watches, but never understood all the intricacies in such detail. This is what journalism, or writing in general, should be about. Explain things and go into details.

I am absolutely astounded. This is incredible craftsmanship, on par with mechanical watches themselves.This creator is absolutely among the best at his craft. I lack the words to properly describe my admiration.

He didn&#x27;t do planes yet but he did the internal combustion engine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;internal-combustion-engine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;internal-combustion-engine&#x2F;</a> and boats: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;naval-architecture&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;naval-architecture&#x2F;</a>I could post more but just go to the archives and see. Every single one is a treasure and there are few enough that you can read them all: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;archives&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;archives&#x2F;</a>

As someone who has been into mechanical watches since I was kid, this article is beyond amazing and explains everything about how a watch is powered with excellent interactive diagrams and cool animations. The author should try to go after other areas of mechanical movement like operation of a car or a plane. So well done!

Crazy to see this thing with the spring is constantly rotating so furiously all the time all so just that the second hand would move ever so slowly once a second.

What an insanely cool demo of the workings.  This is so informative. I mostly dismiss such stuff thinking I won&#x27;t understand it but this one was easy to follow even for me. Loved it

This is what the web should be all about.

I always thought a compass that floats in water, and is also a sundial would be neat. Not super accurate but very good for military, offgridders and preppers, wherever there&#x27;s limited access to power.

What great work.  The only thing I had to read twice was how energy is restored to the oscillation.  The text doesn&#x27;t discuss the role of the slope on the jewel fork teeth.  But everything else was so clear as to be transparent.  What a loving gift.

This is such an easy to follow understanding on mechanical movements. WOW! From someone who tinkers with watches all the time and has to explain a simple mechanism over and over I&#x27;ve found my resource to send to friends now.

cached version of the page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220504151534&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow.ski&#x2F;mechanical-watch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220504151534&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ciechanow...</a>

There are many centuries of engineering behind this. I went to the Museum of Horology in Austria. It has examples of the first mechanical clocks, up to today&#x27;s timepieces. It is fascinating looking at the giant, wrought-iron town clocks that kept shitty time and bent and rusted, and seeing different parts of the clock evolve over the years, especially as engineering &amp; metallurgy improved.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.watchtime.com&#x2F;featured&#x2F;watch-spotting-at-the-vienna-clock-museum&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.watchtime.com&#x2F;featured&#x2F;watch-spotting-at-the-vie...</a>

Amazing animations and incredibly well explained. Best ELI5 of a mechanical watch EVER

It&#x27;s so insane how they figured out all of this. The self winding one way gears are even like a mechanical full bridge rectifier.How was any of this even manufactured at such miniscule scales...

I didn&#x27;t know I sas going to learn about watch mechanisms today, but I couldn&#x27;t stop reading!

Enjoyed this one very much. I am hoping to get a blue dial Orient Bambino to wear for my wedding. I&#x27;ve always loved that watch. I&#x27;ll have to refer to this article to explain the &quot;but why mechanical..&quot; question.

This is breathtaking, couldn&#x27;t stop reading until finished. It&#x27;ll be my go-to example of the best possible educational material.

If this makes you think mechanical watches are cool but you don&#x27;t really want to wear one.. you can go the other direction. Ebay is full of old mechanical driven (be it pendulum or wound springs) wall clocks that are looking for new owners.

This is mentioned in the article. The pallet fork gives the balance wheel a small push after unlocking, giving it a tiny bit of extra momentum.

To add to the other answer, that friction (and the intertia of the balance wheel) is actually factored in when regulating the watch. The pallet fork gives the balance wheel a nudge on every &quot;Tick&quot; then the pallet fork stays stuck until the balance wheel swings around and back and jolts it in the other direction (the tock). Basically a little bit of energy is released from the mainspring via the escapement to the pallet fork to the balance wheel on each tick&#x2F;tock.

Same question. The balance wheel&#x2F;hairspring has to be losing energy overtime to friction (however miniscule). Otherwise we have ourselves a perpetual motion machine

The balance wheel gets a small energy push through the escapement on each tick. The barrel&#x27;s mainspring has enough force to just kickstart a stopped balance wheel. The balance wheel doesn&#x27;t really need much &quot;winding&quot; - it&#x27;s equivalent to the pendulum of a grandfather clock.It&#x27;s really fascinating seeing this mechanism alive, even in a simple mechanical kitchen timer with plastic gears. When wound up, the balance wheel starts to swing a little and quickly accelerates on each tick.

I couldn&#x27;t quite figure it out from the (excellent) writeup but when you wind up the watch, you wind up the barrel AND the balance wheel, right?

&gt; I write interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering. It&#x27;s a weekend hobby of mine, so I only end up making a few articles per year.Superman it is!

I think that&#x27;s a different guy because his twitter profile (from the website) says he lives in California.

A cursory search indicates that he&#x27;s a game developer in the UK which explains the WebGL chops.

They made anywhere from £470 to (using a rough sharp-tail model) £1666 per article.Whilst I agree that the amount of time required do this doesn&#x27;t professionally cover that, it&#x27;s a very nice hobby which makes somewhat real money (very much depending on how many sharp the tail of £54&#x27;s are) and garners some serious traffic whilst building a very solid credability in the industry.Plus I signed up, so now they make £2.50 more!

Does anyone know how the author supports themselves? They have a patreon, but it’s not enough to make a living: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;ciechanowski</a>The hardest part for me when doing open source work full time was giving it up and getting a day job. I was fortunate that my wife was the breadwinner, and that I got to see what it was like to be a stay at home husband. I’ve often wished to go back to it. Did the author figure out a way, or is he wealthy?He could also be a Superman, being able to do this with a full time job or contracting work.I spent a few days studying their blog. The work is so good that when I retire, I’ll make a conscious effort to copy their style as closely as possible. It seems like the optimal way to transmit knowledge.I wish there was an equivalent to YouTube sponsorships for blogs. If this had a 3 minute preroll ad, they would be rolling in money.

This was fantastic, for the first time in my life I actually understood what jewel means and what n jewels refers to when it comes to a mechanical watch.If Bartosz is reading this, I&#x27;m genuinely curious how much time did it take him to create this post. It looks like an insane amount of work with all the knowledge acquisition, write up, animation and so on..

Did not read, but I did play with all the slidey things. They were fun.

Well, you can also hack away at a tree with an axe.

&gt; when we pull the crown all the way out to enter the time setting mode, that stop lever blocks the balance wheel, which stops the watch in an action known as hackingwhoa, is this the origin of the word &quot;hacking&quot; in the &quot;throw something into the wheels to make it work&quot; sense? very interesting.

If I was born 20 years before I was born I would be able to enroll in clock-making faculty in University of Technology I graduated. They discontinued this faculty, and the only remaining part was a course of precise mechanics I received..This article is pure gold. It makes me thinking how much of know-how is already lost and how much can we find in some old book stores... I&#x27;d buy a book about clock making.

Flash, ShockWave, WebGL, Java applets, and Silverlight was great when it worked.

Your definition of &quot;old web&quot; includes WebGL?Stuff like this is a smaller percentage of the web these days, but in absolute terms there&#x27;s more of it than ever before and a lot of it is higher quality too.

Interesting content, interactive, ad-free, and social-media free. The entire site is a great example of how the old Web was better than it is today.

I&#x27;d love to see a picture of your watch!

One of my isolation projects was to put together a watch using an ETA 2824-2 movement from EBay. You might want to consider buying the parts you want individually. Match a case to a movement or it&#x27;s clone. Find a dial that matches the movement complications and the case diameter. Find hands that match the movement and the case diameter. Most of the work is in the identification of parts, putting the watch together is really just like slapping a small sandwich together (minus putting the second hand on, that... is a test of dexterity, perseverance and commitment, the shaft you have to set it on is ~0.25mm).Often a seller will be a small time watch maker and their components will all fit together, a good way to save on shipping.Result: it&#x27;s become my favorite watch, I wear it every day.Next project was to use a bunch of cheap clone parts and a 3d printed dial, still working on that one :)

This bumps up my desire to build my own mechanical watch using one of the kits here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rotatewatches.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rotatewatches.com</a> (something I&#x27;ve had bookmarked for a while as a possible rainy day project)

A few months back I stumbled upon a YouTube video of a watch maker servicing a mechanical watch. This started a mild obsession with watch making and I&#x27;ve been watching these videos ever since. For anyone interested, here&#x27;s an awesome video [1] of a guy putting together a watch and explaining how all 60 parts of a typical mechanical watch work together (by the way the tools he uses are as cool as the movements themselves). It&#x27;s surprisingly easy to follow for a noobie.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hkK6e4tb5Qk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hkK6e4tb5Qk</a>

nah, people trying to make enough money don&#x27;t create Facebook. people trying to have enough to live comfortably don&#x27;t create Amazon.monsters create those companies, and monsters grow them.growing larger and more profitable at any cost is called metastasis, and that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening. lives get worse for most while the cancers grow and grow, almost unabated.

People trying to make money is actually what drives rather a lot of the innovation that you enjoy every day.The “capitalism bad” trope is a tired one indeed.

I&#x27;m not talking about people like you who make apps like yours.I&#x27;m talking about companies that make everything they touch demonstrably worse if it earns them any money at all.there is a very clear line between you and the companies I&#x27;m talking about. you provide a service; the companies I talk about are late-stage capitalism monsters who exist solely to provide value to shareholders, and they don&#x27;t care if they create a dystopia by doing it.

What is wrong about trying to find ways to produce a nice stuff and keep being to able to pay the rent and raise kids?I run a small and nice visual weather app for Apple Watch and iPhone (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;weathergraph.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;weathergraph.app</a>). Some people in reviews object to price, but if I wasn&#x27;t able to charge a subscription (because weather data costs money continuously), there would be no app. And if I wasn&#x27;t able to make (about 50 % there right now) a living, I would work for a corporation like I did before, and I wouldn&#x27;t be able to dedicate enough time to make it great ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯.

Normally I would crap (pretty hard) on web tech, because normally, it&#x27;s only ever used to make websites harder to follow in the name of design, or to create new ways for ads to be served to me.This site, and the most recent blog entries on this site, are excellent examples of why web technologies are not all bad. People seeking new ways to make money make everything bad, eventually, and thankfully there are bastions of utility without sales still to be found, sprinkled around.

Mechanical Watch