Help, seamaster advice please

[gareth h]

Help..I've just noticed that the pin which holds the bracelet to the watch had started to fall out, I've pushed it back in but am worried it may drop out and I'll lose the watch. Would anybody know how it should be located in place?
Thanks
Gareth

[Chauch]

Gareth, make sure you get it properly repaired. I lost my Seamaster recently due to exactly the same issue, came off once, pushed it all back in and it come off again a week later and never turned up.

[BigAlinEmbra]

I'd second the advice in the 2nd post. For what it costs to get the bracelet checked by someone who knows what they are doing, it's well worth it for not losing your watch.
(If they charge you anything!)

[oddman]

ditto- pins coming out of mine all over the place.

I only wear it when excess wrist activity not expected.

T

[swanny71]

Mine did it all the time - I put a slight bend in the offending pins and push them back in. Never happened again.

[darreni]

Mine did this, a lot of the early (98-99) seamasters had a bracelet that was stamped "made in france", these tend to fall apart with the pins & sleeves coming adrift.
I sent mine back to omega uk for a service & requested that the bracelet be repinned. It was away for 13 weeks & when i collected it from the dealers, the bracelet fell apart in my hands, despite Omega claiming to have fixed it.
It was then sent back a second time, & 4 weeks later Omega claimed that they were unable to repair the bracelet, only replace, at a cost of £400. At this point i went mental & the watch was returned a week later with a new swiss made bracelet at no charge. (though no apology either).

[shadowninja]

darreni said:

Mine did this, a lot of the early (98-99) seamasters had a bracelet that was stamped "made in france", these tend to fall apart with the pins & sleeves coming adrift.
I sent mine back to omega uk for a service & requested that the bracelet be repinned. It was away for 13 weeks & when i collected it from the dealers, the bracelet fell apart in my hands, despite Omega claiming to have fixed it.
It was then sent back a second time, & 4 weeks later Omega claimed that they were unable to repair the bracelet, only replace, at a cost of £400. At this point i went mental & the watch was returned a week later with a new swiss made bracelet at no charge. (though no apology either).

It makes you wonder. Are Switzerland renowned for quality watches or just expensive watches that are hand-made and therefore take many man-hours to produce? This notion of servicing a watch is a bizarre one.

[darreni]

I agree, i was always told that the watch should only be serviced if not operating correctly. As it was mine kept perfect time & had done for many years.
I had asked that Omega Replace the hands & dial as the lume was poor, & they would only perform the work if i agreed to the £200 service. If you dont have the service, they will not open the watch.

Omega UK are shocking to deal with. The watch was sent to them Via my local dealer & in the end i was embarassed for him as he had to keep dealing with the problems.

I'm led to believe that the servivce from Omega Switzerland is 100% though. I'm not sure how easy it would be to have them perform any required work.

[g@ry]

omega switzerland is the place to go,minute finger came off on my seamster(my own fault got into helping my younger brother outside a pub with three guys ops
took about 8 weeks, i sent it direct .......came back spot on polished all correct,very impressed with service of omega switzerland

[cyberface]

shadowninja said:

darreni said:

Mine did this, a lot of the early (98-99) seamasters had a bracelet that was stamped "made in france", these tend to fall apart with the pins & sleeves coming adrift.
I sent mine back to omega uk for a service & requested that the bracelet be repinned. It was away for 13 weeks & when i collected it from the dealers, the bracelet fell apart in my hands, despite Omega claiming to have fixed it.
It was then sent back a second time, & 4 weeks later Omega claimed that they were unable to repair the bracelet, only replace, at a cost of £400. At this point i went mental & the watch was returned a week later with a new swiss made bracelet at no charge. (though no apology either).

It makes you wonder. Are Switzerland renowned for quality watches or just expensive watches that are hand-made and therefore take many man-hours to produce? This notion of servicing a watch is a bizarre one.

It's bizarre if you think of quartz digital watches, but not entirely odd if you consider mechanical watches. All mechanical watches store a large amount of energy in the mainspring, which is metered out accurately to turn the gears inside the movement. The mainspring itself and the gears directly connecting to it have to deal with a relatively large amount of torque, and the gears themselves are necessarily very fine and very small. So much of modern 'small' movement watchmaking is limited by metallurgy, and the ability of the materials used to deal with the torque required.

Of course, when you're talking of gears mounted in bearings taking torque and rotating, you have to consider friction, wear and lubrication. Good watches use synthetic ruby 'bearings' and clever alloys so that the pins on the gears don't wear down on the bearing surface, but they all still need lubrication with fine watch oil to prevent frictional wear. Lower quality watches have correspondingly fewer ruby bearings - I've rebuilt an old '50s English watch that had NO ruby bearings - each gear shaft was mounted on a plain hole in the base plate, relying on oil alone to prevent wear. In the 50 years without a service it had visibly worn down the shafts and was getting a bit loose.

Some modern materials (diamond pallet bearings, ceramic shafts, etc.) can get away without lubrication but the vast majority of mechanical movements depend on proper lubrication to work 'forever'. If you consider an expensive movement disposable, then ignoring the requirement to service the watch will result in a watch that works very well, then as the lubricant applied at the factory dries out, the watch will have to cope with greater frictional losses, changing the timekeeping, and eventually causing wear to the components making it unserviceable.

Having pulled some badly designed (plain metal on metal contact for 'bearings') and non-serviced watches apart, I definitely don't buy the requirement to service a top-quality Swiss watch every couple of years - they don't need it - but I'd definitely get an expensive mechanical movement stripped, cleaned and re-lubricated every 10 years, if I wanted the watch to last many decades. More frequent servicing than that really is just overkill, more money to the watchmakers and it has to be said that every time you service a watch properly, you are completely dismantling the movement and that carries inherent risks - if the watchmaker messes up, you have one broken watch or something needing new parts (which won't have worn at the same rate as the rest of the movement).

In most modern cases, servicing is usually done for aesthetic reasons, for example to polish out the scratches to the case and bracelet that are picked up through regular wear. Certainly I've only serviced my old Rolexes for that reason. However my Breguet is getting on for 10 years old now and could do with a polish - but since it's 10 years old I reckon it could do with a service as well, even though it's keeping perfect time.

A decent, well designed and properly assembled movement like the Omega speedmaster movements and the one in my Breguet should still be keeping good time after 10 years, it's a matter of preventative maintenance rather than required servicing, really. And those are chronograph movements, which by nature have more delicate, easily worn components (stopping and starting chronographs, especially the flyback on the Breguet, put the components under large stresses / torque) - a standard Seamaster mechanical should be a lot more robust and less likely to wear.

However regardless of the complexity or fineness of the movement, watch lubricants all evaporate at the same rate, and the older the watch, the less advanced the lubricant technology - older watches with the lubricant available at the time will not perform as well (i.e. evaporate / dry out earlier) than today's synthetic purpose-designed lubricants. So a 20 year old watch will probably have mineral lubricants in it, and a brand new Speedmaster will probably have the watch industry's latest synthetic oil in it, which will last a lot longer.

So if you buy a brand new watch now, the service intervals may be a lot longer. It also goes to say that buying an old pre-owned watch (much more cheaply) and then immediately having it serviced and lubricated with up-to-date oils should give the same performance, at a lower cost. Certainly I'm not considering buying new watches again, I'll happily enjoy pre-owned watches that I wouldn't be able to afford to buy new, knowing that with a quick service and lube the movement will last as long as buying a new watch. Also, getting the watch dismantled soon after purchase will show if the movement is damaged, in which case you can return it to the vendor as damaged goods.

Don't underestimate the forces at work inside a mechanical watch with a large power reserve... opening one up without letting the mainspring down can easily break things (and ping watch components up into your eyes and blind you). It's hardly 5 litre V8 torque, but the gears and teeth on the gears are much much finer. Mass produced movements like most people get to use are usually over-engineered for longevity, but the top-end of ultra-complications often run into problems with the mechanisms requiring more torque than the gear alloys can comfortably take - some watches are equipped with dual mainsprings to provide all this torque, and that affects the size of the movement since heftier gears are required. I'd expect the thinnest, finest dress watches to be those most at need of regular servicing, whereas the chunky tool watches will have heavier, more over-engineered gears and require servicing less frequently.