17 ms·
Mechanical Watch (2022)
- Aaronstotle 3y agoI have an Oris Aquis Date that I purchased for myself a few months ago, I love looking at the flywheel movement and hearing the tick when I put it up to my ear.
- KolmogorovComp 3y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 on May 4, 2022, 413 comments
- throw0101c 3y agoOther topics are gears, floating point, naval architecture, cameras & lenses, and GPS: * https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski
- Loughla 3y agoHoly shit this might be the most functional, clearest website I've ever used. I always wondered what all those bits and bobs inside as mechanical watch are.
- matsemann 3y agoYou should check out their other articles. I've previously read the Bicycles one and the GPS one, both great. https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThis guy's stuff is always a joy.
- JR1427 3y agoBeautiful.
- pyr0hu 3y agoThis post is what got me into mechanical watches as I've always wondered how the analogue clocks/watches work but couldn't bother myself to actually read upon it. But after the article, I even got myself a clean Seiko 5 automatic, not because I wanted a fancy watch, but I wanted to own a piece of mechanical wonder.
- lvl102 3y agoGrand Seikos are some of the best mechanical watches. Their quartz line is also exceptional. Very underrated and much prefer them over overpriced Rolex.
- neor 3y agoThe Spring Drive movement is amazing, very accurate, very high quality and that smooth sweeping seconds hand is mesmerizing. Availability is good, and the price is a lot better than the high-end Swiss brands. Rolex these days is a joke, even the authorized dealers will rip you off shamelessly. They will either refuse to sell you a watch they have in store, or they will force you to buy 30 grand in extra jewelry just to get the Rolex you want.
- DeathArrow 3y agoSince it has electrical components, I think Spring Drive isn't a mechanical movement.
- alpaca128 3y agoThat's true but it's still driven by a spring and mainly mechanical. I understand people who don't like it, but I also see it as a reasonable tradeoff and find them just as fascinating as purely mechanical models. In the end people wear them for the same reasons.
- gurchik 3y agoIt's a mechanical movement regulated by quartz. In a traditional mechanical movement, the escapement prevents the main spring from unwinding all at once. It is done with a fork which ticks at a certain rate governed by the balance wheel. In a Spring Drive movement, the escapement is replaced with an electromagnetic "brake" governed by a quartz crystal. So it still has many of the characteristics of a mechanical watch: it's still powered entirely by a main spring which can be wound or automatically wound by your body movements, it needs regular maintenance like other mechanical watches, and it isn't as durable as most quartz-only watches.
- samgranieri 3y agoThis was the most engrossing article I’ve read in a while.
- quakeguy 3y agoCheck the whole blog, the amount and detail of JS animations on all the different topics is awesome.
- dallyo 3y agoIncredible as usual. Like a visit to a science museum. Wikipedia should commission this guy to explain all the things in this intuitive, interactive, visual way.
- amitp 3y agoHe's not taking commissions, although maybe he'd make an exception for wikipedia.
- jamestimmins 3y agoDo you know where he says he's not taking commissions? Just curious bc I wonder who is trying to commission this kind of stuff, and what his reason is for not doing it.
- gwbas1c 3y agoMy favorite watch ever was a self-winding mechanical Swatch. I suspect they (Swatch) acquired the company that made it. Disappointingly, when the pins that held the band on started to slip, there was no good way to repair it. I've since switched to a smart watch, but I keep getting tempted to go back. I generally use my smart watch as a very gentle alarm, and for fitness tracking. I just don't want to be the geek who wears two watches. Maybe I should only wear it at night?
- ghostganz 3y agoA self-winding watch needs to be worn for hours each day to not run out of power. A manual-wind watch will be a better choice for a night-only mechanical watch.
- jgwil2 3y agoYou can get a watch winder to keep your automatic wound even if you don't wear it all the time.
- gwbas1c 3y agoI took off my self winding watch at night and it worked fine. > night-only mechanical watch I said that I was thinking of only wearing a smartwatch at night, because I really like the gentle alarm in the morning. What I didn't say was that I use a smartwatch for tracking my sleep patterns.
- massenpunkt 3y agoThe Swatch brand was founded 1983 by ETA CEO Thomke and his Engineers. ETA is a watch movement manufacturer. Speaking of Swatch and mechanical watches: the Sistem51 is an interesting watch, since it's the only mechanical watch ever fabricated in a 100% automated production line. The parts are welded together and held by a single screw. https://www.swatch.com/en-us/sistem-51.html https://www.swatch.com/en-us/sistem-51.html
- steezy13 3y agoI have been torn between wearing mechanical watches and smart watches. I don't need/want/like notifications on my wrist, but I really enjoy the activity and heart rate tracking of the Apple Watch. I have been reluctantly wearing a Samsung Withings watch that looks mechanical but is actually smart, but a mediocre compromise (you need to wear it higher up the wrist than I usually do, and I don't believe it gives accurate heart rate and activity measurements). 30 day battery life is pretty cool though. I may just start going back to my Vostok and Seiko watches full time at this point. (I don't like spending a lot of money on watches, anyone who is curious on getting into them should check out both brands as economical starters - the Vostok Amphibia has a storied history!)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mattkopecki 3y agoConsider something like a Whoop or Oura Ring which monitors health metrics but doesn’t rely on a watch? That’s what I’ve settled on so that I have the best of both worlds.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThose are subscription based though.
- 0xffff2 3y agoWow. I had looked at the Oura Ring before and thought it looked cool, but I missed that it basically requires a subscription, which is wild considering it seems like I get all of the same metrics from my Garmin watch with no subscription required.
- akshayrajp 3y agoTry Garmin Instinct? It's a digital watch (not analog) and more of a fitness tracker than a smart watch. You can disable any notifications you don't want.
- cloogshicer 3y agoI've been a long time admirer of the interactive animations on this site. What tool/library would you pick to create similar ones yourself? Looking at the source [1], the author seems to hand-craft them using the canvas API, but man, that seems really difficult! [1] https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js
- naet 3y agoBartosz does an amazing job of making custom interactives and animations to support his articles. It looks like he uses custom canvas with webgl for the 3d renders. There are 3d engines in JavaScript like three.js (https://threejs.org/ https://threejs.org/) that can abstract some of the 3d rendering work for you.
- amitp 3y agoI agree with naet that threejs might be the thing to look at if you want to make 3d animations. My own interactive diagrams are 2d, and I often use svg with reactive data filling in the parameters. [1] I've also tried hand crafting and it's not so bad for pages like this. They're mostly write-once pages, not software that's being maintained for many years. Some of our intuitions are out of whack when they tell us that we need abstractions and frameworks for maintainability. [1] https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/circle-drawing/ https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/circle-drawing/
- amelius 3y agoI was hoping this is based on an open source physics engine, but apparently it's all handcrafted.
- bejd 3y agoNice to see this again. Such a clear breakdown of a complex topic, presented beautifully. Tangentially related, the documentary The Watchmaker's Apprentice [0] is a captivating look at the dedication it takes to create a mechanical watch. It's amazing that it's possible for a single person to craft each tiny cog and spring from scratch and put it all together. [0] http://www.thewatchmakersapprentice.com/ http://www.thewatchmakersapprentice.com/
- lloeki 3y agoSame fantastic format, different topics: - bicycle: https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343495 - sound: https://ciechanow.ski/sound/ https://ciechanow.ski/sound/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33249215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33249215
- fellerts 3y agoThis blog is what got me into the fabulous hobby of watch repairing. Well, this blog and Marshall's awesome repair videos over at Wristwatch Revival: https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival https://www.youtube.com/@WristwatchRevival Watch repairing is a very rewarding hobby. It requires copious amounts of patience, but there's something fundamentally satisfying about disassembling something to its individual components, cleaning them and reassembling them meticulously. These things are designed to be taken apart, and it shows. I'm hard-pressed to think of other modern day objects that are meant to do this.
- sricciardi 3y ago> These things are designed to be taken apart, and it shows. I'm hard-pressed to think of other modern day objects that are meant to do this. A mechanical film camera (say, a Leica) is similar. They are also meant to be opened, cleaned up, lubed, etc...
- j4yav 3y agoEspresso machines, as well, and vintage stereo equipment. I have really come to appreciate the zen of user-serviceable physical stuff.
- ce4 3y agoI can relate - i took repairing espresso machines as a hobby since the pandemic. The parts are not complex at all and even 60+ years old E61-machines can be serviced easily (apart from not so cool stuff like asbestos as boiler insulation, leaded solder for boiler + fittings and mercury pressure switches). But even todays machines (depending on manufacturer and origin) are very serviceable. Especially italian made ones.
- j4yav 3y agoFor sure I have a La Pavoni and I can get parts lists, diagrams, and everything else I need to rebuild the whole thing if I needed to. https://www.lapavoni.com/en/technical-documentation https://www.lapavoni.com/en/technical-documentation
- elf25 3y ago[dead]
- Rudism 3y agoI have a relatively inexpensive Seiko 5 mechanical watch that I really like, but as much as I love the idea of mechanical watches I simply don't have the patience to tend to it. Accuracy is a big problem (at least with my specific watch). Half of the time it's magnetized and running a few minutes fast per day, and the other half (shortly after de-magnetizing it) it's running a few minutes slow per day, meaning I needed to remember to adjust it every morning and always had to assume there's at least a minute or two margin of error one way or the other any time I read it--almost completely defeating my reason for wearing a watch in the first place. For a while I wore a solar-powered Casio that self-adjusted every morning using the NIST atomic clock radio signals, and the peace of mind knowing that my watch was always accurate was such a pleasure in comparison. It was kind of cheap build quality and eventually fell apart, but I don't think I'll ever go back to a mechanical watch again after that.
- alpaca128 3y agoAccuracy can vary a lot even within one price segment. My Seiko 5 was pretty inaccurate too, while my current watch cost 30 bucks more and has less than 3 seconds deviation per day. So I set the time once every 1-2 months and that's perfectly fine for me. But it's definitely not the most practical tech. > almost completely defeating my reason for wearing a watch in the first place. Maybe it's just me but I don't need perfect accuracy on a wristwatch. If one minute more or less matters I'm already too late anyway.
- shimonabi 3y agoI'm the same. I had several Seiko 5 watches in the past and even modded one of them with a hacking mechanism. I would monitor the accuracy every week with a timegrapher app on the phone and try to make small adjustments. The convenience of having a modern Bluetooth-syncing cheap Xiaomi fitess watch is so great I don't believe I'll ever go back.
- WillPostForFood 3y agoHalf of the time it's magnetized and running a few minutes fast per day, and the other half (shortly after de-magnetizing it) Wow, that's bad. Do you know what is magnetizing it? A cheap Seiko 5 should be able to keep time within a few seconds a day. Minutes a day means it is broken. It isn't a just tuning issue, there is something else going on.
- rounakdatta 3y agoIt's almost about time that Bartosz releases his next illustration, excited!
- allsunny 3y agoThere’s no doubt that smart watches offer way more functionality than a mechanical watch which is appealing to most consumers. However, what you’re buying with mechanical watches is more a form of art these days, and, for certain watches (eg Rolex) a status symbol. As someone who has always been drawn to watches (of all kinds), I really enjoyed this article. I even took off my watch (Omega Planet Ocean) and peered through the exhibition case back to take a look at the balance wheel and double barrels. Thanks for sharing!
- ktt8788 3y agoFanstastic animations!
- ktt8788 3y agoFantastic animations!
- denton-scratch 3y agoA beautifully made web-page, fitting for a watchmaker. Lovely animations. I'm impressed!
- KaiserPro 3y agoThere are semi-electric versions of mechanical watches based on "tuning fork" movements. They are cheap and accurate, and are a stepping stone between mechanical and quartz from the 60s/70s I don't have the skills or machinery to make a wristwatch sized version, but I did make a _big_ sized version: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-clock/ https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/electromechanical-c...
- aidenn0 3y agoFor a clock, could a worm drive provide the necessary reduction without the microscopic teeth? Tamiya sells small drives with a 150:1 reduction ratio.
- dexwiz 3y agoI imagine the increased surface area of the worm drive may cause more loss to friction than desirable.
- KaiserPro 3y agoPossibly, its less the reduction, more the "stroke" of the vibration (ie how far the tuning fork moves backwards and forwards.) I think for a large tuning fork, you _could_ use normal watch gears. However I don't have the skill to try that, yet.
- aidenn0 3y agoThat makes sense; the backlash needs to be much less than the tuning fork travel, right?
- KaiserPro 3y agoBacklash isn't probably that much of a problem, the orignal movement has a locking "pall" that stops backlash: https://youtu.be/CPS7aNCAwAA?t=161 https://youtu.be/CPS7aNCAwAA?t=161 scaling it up you'd get something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48n-jvo5N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48n-jvo5N0 to make it practical on a tuning fork, that movement of the forks would need to correspond to the tooth size of the wheel. For a large tuning fork, its probably in the order of mm, so not beyond home shop manufacture
- nicholasjarnold 3y agoHugely popular original posting of this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533
- m3kw9 3y agoHard to beat this for explaining how a mechanical watch really works
- g9yuayon 3y agoThis reminds me of Dave Sobel's book Longitude, which tells a fascinating story on how John Harrison created the first reliable marine clock. Such stories humble me and make me deeply appreciate the ingenuity of mankind to conquer the seemingly impossible challenges to build the civilization we enjoy today.
- nobulus 3y agoGreat article!
- jstanley 3y agoMy project at the moment is to try to make a mechanical watch. The concept is that it will only have one hand (the hour hand), and the mainspring barrel will encircle the entire movement, you'll wind it up by rotating the bezel (and therefore the outer part of the barrel) clockwise, and the mainspring will drive the inner barrel clockwise. The hour hand is mounted directly on the inner barrel (which therefore completes 1 revolution per 12 hours), and the rest of the movement only exists to regulate the speed at which the inner barrel rotates. So the rest of the movement will be a series of gearings-down, with an escapement at the end. And to set the time, the movement will be mounted into the case with a ratchet, such that when you turn the bezel anticlockwise, the entire movement (and therefore the hand) rotates anticlockwise allowing you to set the hand. You'll only be able to set it as precisely as the ratchet (i.e. you'd need 720 positions of the ratchet to set it to 1-minute precision), but the watch will never keep particularly good time anyway so I don't think this is a problem. Yesterday I got an escapement at almost-watch-scale ticking for the first time, albeit erratically and requiring enormous drive torque: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNODOp6uBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNODOp6uBc (3d printed for expediency, the real one will all be machined; and I say "almost-watch-scale" because although it fits inside the 50mm diameter that I am aiming for, it is obviously too thick to go inside a sensible watch). I have more info in this post: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/the-watch-project.html https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/the-watch-project.htm...
- knodi123 3y agowow, that's really impressive for 3-d printed and being built from first principles!
- fuzzfactor 3y agoLooking at drawings 3 & 4, these linear vs rotational springs are analogous considering they are each at rest in the center of the user control slider. They can act like a spring in either direction, and are basically sitting there in the neutral or non-energy-storing condition (zero-sprung or zero-wound respectively) until you move the slider away from the center position. Take a look at the 9th or 10th interactive drawing, where you can move the slider to the right to wind the mainspring, then release the slider to watch the mainspring unwind. When the energy is depleted, all the bands in the coil are bunched up around the outside of the barrel. It's not much of a spring any more. This is the same type of torsion spring as in drawing 4 but with the mainspring being used for primary energy storage there is no desire for recovery to a neutral position from both clockwise & counterclockwise directions like you see in drawing 4. Instead you only need to ever draw energy from storage to use in a single rotational direction. Opposite rotation is used only to store externally applied energy. So you wind it in one direction to store energy then it releases the energy in the opposite direction. But without the precurvature shown in drawing 11 the torsion spring would tend to be exhausted when it was "zero-wound" like the one in drawing 4, with the coils widely spaced away from each other, free to absorb & recover energy from either rotational direction. And since we only need to draw energy in one rotational direction, that amounts to only half of the energy the spring is capable of storing for our purposes. Notice how about half the length of the spring is coiled similarly to drawing 4, with the upper half of the loose spring coiled less tightly and in the opposite direction. Because when our mainspring is exhausted, we want it to be bunched up along the outside of the barrel so we get the most out of it before it needs to be retensioned. And when it's fully retensioned we want to get maximum energy storage from the hardware so at that starting point we want the coils to be tighly wound, bunched up around the arbor. But not too tight. Or it could be overwound. As long as there is some space in between the coils, when recovering rotational energy you have access to what is stored along the entire length of the free portion of the coil. But once it's wound tightly enough for the coils to be in significant direct concentric contact, the free portion of the coil becomes so small it does not contain enough energy to drive the timekeeping mechanism. It could get so tight that it's not much of a spring any more. Closer to a solid cylinder with a slight tab hanging off. Which is more of a problem when both ends of the torsion spring are permanently attached to their substrates. Instead in these drawings, the color-coded metal strip is used to provide a friction grip between the outer end of the coil and the barrel, strong enough grip to drive the timekeeping mechanism but designed to slip counterclockwise within the barrel if manual winding proceeeds more than necessary, slipping before the coil can get wound too tightly. Basically, overcharge protection for a non-electric hardware device.
- asylteltine 3y agoThis guys blog is crazy how does he have the time and knowledge to make all these intricate animations
- incahoots 3y agoDid anyone notice the animated example was giving the proper real time, right at the precise second too.
- vietvu 3y agoDamn, when I decided that I don't want a mechanical watch anymore, you convince me otherwise with this.
- bvan 3y agoThese animations are just phenomenal - best I’ve seen by far.
- redbell 3y agoThis is the type of content that never gets old. The original post [1] was ranking #4 as the highest-upvoted story on Hacker News before it got kicked to #5 last August by Bram Moolenaar's death announcement [2], then to #6 after Altman's saga ranked #3 a few weeks ago. Over all, this story is classified as #1 in creative content that is not in the genre of news or announcements. _____________________________ 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324
- mikestaub 3y agoBitcoin is like a virtual Swiss watch, with the base layer being the center wheel and PoW mining being the mainspring. The third wheel is the BIP300 protocol and the fourth wheel is LN and other L2s. The nodes are the balance wheels. https://youtu.be/9_QsCLYs2mY https://youtu.be/9_QsCLYs2mY
- aswinmohanme 3y agoI bought a mechanical watch after reading this blog post and it's been my daily driver since. It always brings a smile to look at it and see what fine craftsmanship and mechanical intelligence can achieve.
- lldoraMay 3y agoDiving into watch repairing? It's like the DIY version of a puzzle game - tricky but super satisfying. Hats off to the internet for turning casual viewers into budding horologists. And for those who just enjoy restoration blogs, it's cool to be a fan without getting your hands dirty. As for beginners seeking an easy start, a watch repair simulator game sounds like a fun, stress-free way to dip your toes in. Whether you're a hands-on tinkerer or a digital-only enthusiast, every tiny screw and spring brings its own adventure.
- waltwalther 3y agoI worked at a local-owned jewelry store for years (starting out as on-call computer guy). The kind with an old fashion in-house jeweler who did all repairs himself (setting stones, resizing rings, cleanings, etc). We did everything EXCEPT most watch repairs. We changed batteries in the quartz watches, and replaced and repaired bands, and performed some minor repairs of mechanical watches, but we sent out most watch repairs to a watchmaker several cities away. The boss, who was an old jeweler who had started out in the business as a boy in the fifties working under a jeweler and watchmaker, always said that watchmakers are a dying breed, and could pretty much name their price. When I started working and learning the trade we had two watchmakers that we shipped to. Within two years one of those had retired, and we were unable to find a replacement for him. I loved working and repairing jewelry (even more so that my fulltime job in IT for local gov), and wanted to become a watchmaker, but my life took me elsewhere. Now that I am older and in a better place in life I often think of those three years, and have been considering obtaining the tools to start up a hobby in one or the other...or both. Thank you, OP, for an awesome post and link.
- hotpotamus 3y agoLike any hobby, there is a YouTube culture around mechanical wristwatch maintenance/repair these days if you want to learn more. If I remember correctly, there’s a channel called Wristwatch Revival that is quite good.
- yolkedgeek 3y agoOMG this was such a beautiful and interesting article. I was so impressed I HAD to leave a comment
- jmclaughlinhn 3y agoThanks for reminding me to wind my watch.