Explainers

If the stem came out with it, the watch is open. Act today. A crown that pulls all the way out with the stem attached is alarming, and the correct response is more urgent than most people assume. The case is now open. There is a hole straight into the movement where the stem used […]

Gravity pulls on the balance differently depending on how the watch lies. If your watch keeps good time on your wrist and drifts overnight on the nightstand, nothing is wrong with it. You have noticed positional variance, which every mechanical watch has. Gravity pulls on the balance wheel differently depending on how the watch is

Copper reacting with sweat. Harmless, alarming, and easy to stop. A green mark under a watch looks like a reaction to something toxic and is neither toxic nor a reaction in the medical sense. It is copper. Copper in the case or bracelet reacts with the salts and acids in sweat, forms copper salts, and

The rotor spins on a bearing. On some movements you can hear it. Shake an automatic watch gently near your ear and most of them make a noise. New owners find this alarming and it is nearly always the watch working correctly. The rotor is a weighted semicircle that spins freely on a bearing, and

The heart cam is what snaps a hand back to zero, and it can be reset. A chronograph hand sitting a few seconds off zero looks like damage and is usually a sequence problem you can fix in ten seconds. The reset pusher only works when the chronograph is stopped. Press it while the chronograph

Dried salt in the teeth is abrasive, and abrasive is what wears a click spring. A dive bezel that has gone stiff, gritty or completely solid is one of the most common watch complaints and one of the easiest to fix at home. It is almost never a broken part. It is almost always dried

The mechanism is fine. It has simply been told the wrong twelve hours. If your date flips over at lunchtime instead of midnight, nothing is broken and nothing needs a watchmaker. The watch is running twelve hours out. A mechanical watch has no way of knowing whether it is morning or evening, so it changes

Before assuming it is broken, work out which hand you are looking at. A stopped seconds hand looks like a dead watch and very often is not, because on a great many watches the large central seconds hand is not the running seconds at all. On any chronograph it is the stopwatch hand, and it

Wrist time, not wear, is what keeps an automatic running. An automatic that has stopped by morning is the most reported watch fault and the least often an actual fault. An automatic winds from wrist motion, and a desk job does not produce much of it. Most of these watches are simply never reaching a

A spring near the end of its wind delivers less force, and less force runs slow. A watch that runs slow is a different problem from one that runs fast, and confusing the two sends people to the wrong fix. Gaining is usually magnetism and costs nothing to correct. Losing is usually energy or wear,