zOwie Omega Discussion Forum

You should take a note of difference from the set time in the morning and in the evening. That is how you will know what typically happens during the day and the night (for each nightly position!).

You should be aware of the "regulation" and the "adjustment" terms.

The regulation is related to the amount of the time differences your watch gives in various (basic 6) positions and possibly temperatures. Compare them all overnight. When you wear your watch, your accuracy will be some average of many positions. Watch can be regulated by the very good watchmaker, but normally you will not try to affect it since a good watch should keep time in all the positions within just a few seconds spread (say, 5-6 seconds as the single largest deviation). That means: good watch is well regulated.

The adjustment can be easily done by every watchmaker and in many cases, even by regular people with proper tools and patience. That you may want to affect.

New and well regulated watch should probably not enable you to compensate time for 6 seconds in one day by positional errors (differences).

Make a chart with typicall gains in a few days (morning-evening) and several nights in various positions. Look if anything cancels your daily loss/gain. Measure at least 5-7 days in each position.

Luckily for me, my Speedmaster triple date cancels practically perfectly my daily time loss. I did not have to reset it between two DST changes at all using the crown and it was -1 second off from the time I set it on the previous DST change (5 months ago). You must not think this means "my watch has lost 1 seconds in 5 months" since that is perfectly wrong.

It is very well regulated and excelently adjusted. My worse case 24 hr variation could be close to 6 seconds. If it was excelently regulated, it would not vary more than 1-2 seconds per 24 hours among the positions. Note: a watch could be near-pefectly regulated and gain every day +2 seconds without letting you slow the watch down -2 overnight. It would stil need adjusting to improve accuracy.

Example: my Omega normally loses close to 2 seconds over the day, and if I wear it 24 hours on my hand, it will lose close to 3 seconds. Over the night, it returns these 2 daily seconds back practically perfectly.

Funny thing is, when it "fails" to do as it normally does, it actually becomes almost perfectly accurate!? If I am very active during the day, it will lose almost nothing (less than 0,5 seconds). Also, there are some nights that did not do their "job", and my watch did not gain any time overngiht. While this first situation is understandable, I can not explain the second one (atmosferic pressure?).

So, it can happend that my watch will slide 4-5 seconds from the given time in any one direction. If it does not lose time during the day or it does not gain the time over the night, it will slide away on that day. This situation often repeats itself for 2-3 days. Given few days/weeks time, it will return that back.

If you find that you can not cancel your daily gain/loss with any overnight postion and you want more accurate watch, you should get it adjusted so that one of the overnight positions will cancel your daily gain/loss.

Important: This "cancelling" position should be one of the positions that is not used in your daily routine. Otherwise it would affect your daily gain/loss and you would not get any gain/loss cancelation.

My watch is worn over the day mostly in the "dial up" and the "crown down" positions, with a bit of the "crown left". My "correcting" nightly position is the "crown up". When that missfires, I leave it in the "crown right" as that seems to work when the "crown up" does not do anything I am still experimenting).

Hope this helps.