So... just how long will my quartz timepiece last?

[roba]

I didn't have a camera with me when I picked up my SD a couple of weeks ago. I wished that I had had one with me because I saw a wonderful piece of history. I went back today, straight to the Odakyu watch service counter and asked if I could photograph their desktop reference clock.



It's great being a crazy foreigner here, you can ask for all sorts of silly things like taking photos of a watchmakers tools. This one has been used as a reference for about forty four years - there's life in them thar timepieces, plenty of it.

[ausrandoman]

I notice that the second hand is between second/minute markers. Does the hand jump in 0.2 second increments?

[ToddG]

Awesome find, roba. What is the interhorn width, about 200mm?

[ronalddheld]

Could you provide more technical data on the clock?

[Bruce Reding]

Talk about a no nonsense instrument!

[Gino]

Ha!

I saw one of these at a camera fair some 15 years ago, when I had little interest in precision timekeeping.

He wanted £60 and I thought that was rather a lot for an old Seiko in a plastic case, so no sale.

Sometimes I sit and gently these days.

[Eeeb]

How long will a quartz watch will last is a good question...

Looking at mechanicals for guidance (since they have been around a lot longer) useful end of life comes from several reasons:

Reasons that can be fixed but may not be economical to do so:

1) the movement can no longer keep accurate time due to wear in the movement.

2) the movement can no longer keep accurate time due to friction problems (dirt/lubrication loss).

The first one is not likely to affect quartz movements, especially those that are highly jeweled.

My ETA autoquartz movments have 17 jewels. With the lower stresses of a quartz drive train, they will last forever. Those that have few or no jewels are still likely to have a very long life (but not as long!)

The second point goes to maintainability.

Some quartz movements are built similarly to mechanical movements and anything can be fixed. Some are not designed to be fixed (ETA even implys this in some of the documents for their cheaper movements). So these cheaper movements (nothing HEQ folks would bother with may have long life problems if their cases do not maintain integrity.

3) the case degrades to the point where the watch is no longer worth wearing.

Quartz watches have no advantage here.


And reasons that have nothing to do with economics...
4) the watch is of a style that is 'out of fashion' and won't be worn.

Fashion watches are more prone to this than those that appeal to HEQ readers... and fashion watches today tend to be quartz... well, the low end ones at least. (The love of diver watches we see today is a fashion trend -- how many owners do scuba?? hummm... well, come to think of it, anyone who wears a watch that can't tell them accurate time is wearing a fashion watch so I guess most mechanical watches are fashion watches.)

5) your cell phone tells you the time so you throw away all your watches.

(I confess I wore a Timex that had it's own phone number for a number of years... I was oncall 24x7 and didn't always have my cell with me. Then point 3 caused me to stop wearing it... that and the cost of maintaining a separate phone number for my watch.)

I work for the most technologically proficient cell phone company in the USA and I notice NONE of our phones display time accurately. They all know the time to about 2/10,000ths of a second (CDMA demands that) but none of the operating systems in the phones bother to update the seconds display (if they even have one) accurately... In fact, I know of none that even update the minute display accurately. My cell phone is often 10-20 seconds late when the time kicks over!!

So point 5 is of no consequence to HEQ readers...


So, I guess the summary is, quartz watches may have a lower life than most unless it is a HEQ --- especially if it is a HEQ that's so big you can't carry it around and loose it like is pictured in the first post in this thread!