Ok, so I haven't increased my price on battery replacement in almost ten years, but lately I have been considering pricing certain jobs higher than that because of PITA factor. People often ask me 'How hard is it to change a battery?' and the answer is sometimes it isn't hard at all, other times it is a nightmare. Curved cases require special dies and presses to close the case backs and some watches, like Bering and Skagen, are difficult to work with because the whole front of the watch is glass or sapphire.  Really cheap watches, you can close the case with your fingers, but anything decent q ..read more

I get asked from time to time about counterfeit watches. These are really no different than counterfeit shoes, clothing, sunglasses, etc. There are some really awful counterfeits out there but there are also some that are surprisingly good quality. I'm not going to get into any kind of judgement here, if you buy one of these knowingly, depending on what you paid for it, you might not want to cross an international border with it. Horror stories abound. The guy who paid 5 grand for a fake Rolex Submariner, or the lady I met in Calgary who had a solid gold Rolex that was an undetected fake for 4 ..read more

This is a question I get a lot, so for those that have wondered about this you probably have correctly assumed it has to do with the alloy. Pure gold is soft and is not used in modern jewellery, so what we usually see are alloys containing Silver, Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Palladium, and in the case of Green gold, Cadmium. Cadmium is toxic and is no longer used, but Rose gold contains Copper, and White gold has Silver added to it. White gold also often has Rhodium plating, so you aren't even seeing the lustre of the underlying metal. As an alloy, the metal is susceptible to reaction with environme ..read more

Just a word of caution about watch winders. The reason these are sold and used, is to keep an automatic watch fully wound when it is not being worn. A lot of mechanical watch aficionados have more than one auto, whether vintage or modern, and it is just more convenient to put the watch on without having to start it up, set the date and time, etc. Especially on vintage watches that do not have quick set date functions.  Makes sense. However, there has been increasing evidence to support the theory that watch winders can harm your watch. There is even a warning inside the instruction pamphlet to ..read more

I'll make this one short and sweet. I've touched on this before, and those visitors to my shop will have heard me say this repeatedly also. OVERWINDING IS A MYTH. Your watch or clock cannot be overwound. If it will not run when it is fully wound up, that is an indicator of something seriously amiss. Extreme wear and tear, lack of lubrication, crud,  magnetisation, and about 200 other things will stop a mechanical watch or clock.  Overwinding is not one of these.  As you were. ​R ..read more

I've been getting more inquiries about this, and were seems to be some confusion as to what happens during clock service. First of all, in the case of all mechanical clocks, they require service every 8 to 12 years. Since this NEVER happens, the clock will run for decades until metal-on-metal wear cause it to fail, sometimes spectacularly. If the power of a wound mainspring is unleashed suddenly, as is the case with a broken wheel tooth or pinion tooth/stave, the backlash can destroy the clock movement. Basically, for a mass produced clock this is game over, unless you want to spend an absurd ..read more

Just a quick word here about the meaning and usage of the word 'Rare' as it pertains to watches and clocks. Everybody's favourite auction site does tend to over-use the word 'rare', if you were to go by what you read there, 99% of all mechanical watches are 'Rare', or 'Unique.' Unique means one of a kind, and obviously, should only be used when describing exactly that.  So what about 'Rare?' Most companies that produced mechanical watches in the last 150 years made a LOT of them, sometimes millions per year. Depending on what country you are reading this in, what we see everyday may differ fro ..read more

Regular readers of this sporadic writing have heard me warn of the Achilles heel of Quartz watches- Magnetic fields, along with heat and leaky batteries, but the Mechanical watch has one also. The staff of the balance in your mechanical watch has pivots that are very small, and they are hardened. They sit in a shock-absorbing assembly designed to protect them, but a good whack can and does shear them right off.  The most common cause of this type of damage is dropping the watch, but it can also be from striking the watch inadvertently against a door frame, for example. Now the above describes ..read more