zOwie Omega Discussion Forum

I wouldn't worry about it being delicate. In almost twenty years of rough wear on automatic watches I've never had one damaged internally. I've never heard of one stopping due to shock. Of course the case and crystal can get pretty banged up whether its a quartz or auto.

Automatic watches are meant to be worn everyday. If you do that they should never need manual winding. If you don't wear one for a couple of days it will need to be wound and reset, but thats not a big deal. You would have to shake it for hours to fully wind it. Just unscrew the crown, give it a few winds and put it on, or give 30 winds and put it back in the drawer.

A well made watch should offer very little resistance when being wound, but you should feel it if you know what to look for. If you want to be sure, hold it to your ear while winding, you should hear it. I don't know how to describe the sound, its not a ticking, its more like a buzzing.

I've always wound a new one a bit and put it on and worn it. I understand from this forum that there is a break in period where the watch takes some time to settle down to a constant rate, but I don't check the time that closely. I check mine against the internet clock every week or so and set it then. I don't keep a record or even pay much attention to how far out it is unless it seems inordinate, say more than a minute off in a week's time. Face it, none of us need that much accuracy, if we did we'd all be wearing quartz watches. Mechanical watches are not as accurate as quartz, but part of the allure of a mechanical chronometer is knowing how difficult it is to design and build an extremely accurate mechanical time piece.

The only golden rules for automatics that I can think of:

1. Don't go swimming with the crown unscrewed.
2. Don't set the watch near a strong magnetic field. (don't wear it while using a tape degausser)
3. Enjoy it. Pick up and read some books on mechanical time pieces.