[time-nuts] How good are mechanical watches

Majdi S. Abbas msa at latt.net
Fri Apr 20 18:35:11 EDT 2007


On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 10:12:32AM +1200, Dave Brown wrote:
> Still have my father's Waltham.  Hamilton and Elgin were fairly 
> popular watches in railway circles as well.
> Used to see ads for Hamilton in the National Geographic- waaaay back!
> No idea if any of these are still being made-I think it unlikely.

	Not the railroad models.  Hamilton was the last, the 992B was
still made until 1969.  I have a 992 from 1931, that, as I currently
have it adjusted (and I haven't done any more tweaking, but it could
probably do a bit better than this), is no more than 2-3 seconds fast
per day.  If I keep my cellphone in my pants pocket adjacent to my
watch pocket, it will run about 3 seconds slow that day, so by 
alternating cellphone pockets I can keep it pretty close.

	Standalone, it's good to 15 or 20 seconds per week, and that
is consistantly fast, so with some careful adjustment I could probably
do better, but I find this is good enough for my walking around needs.

	Generally speaking, to be a railroad movement, they had to
hold within 30 seconds a week, but it's possible to do much better
with them.

	--msa



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