Setting Your Watch Properly, by the Book
How do you set your watch? An obvious question for some, but setting a watch follows a set of golden rules that are never worth skipping.
Owners of self-winding mechanical watches should not take the easy route: a watch will keep better time if it is first wound properly by hand.
I’m not questioning the ability of the sceptical readers’ wrist movements to wind their timepieces sufficiently (with the exception of the unfortunate sufferers of Parkinson’s disease), but nothing beats a good manual wind at the outset—or after the power reserve has been depleted—so that the magic of automatic winding can do its work under the best possible conditions.
The crown and its positions
The crown of an automatic watch generally has 3 positions:
- Position 1: winding
- Position 2: date change
- Position 3: time setting
Winding is done—unsurprisingly—clockwise, by turning the crown from 6 o’clock towards noon. 30 turns will be enough for an automatic watch.
In the case of a hand-wound mechanical watch, you will simply feel when the movement is fully wound.
Date setting falls into three categories.
A “dragging” date change describes watches whose date change takes a long time. You can then see, in the date aperture (the window showing the date), half of 19 and half of 20 midway between the 19th and the 20th of the month.
Jumping: around midnight, the new date “jumps” into the window, switching instantly from one day to the next.
A watch with a “quickset date” lets you move from one date to the next using the crown, without having to advance the hands. Otherwise, you need to move the hands forward until the correct date appears.
There is a “death zone” for watches. No, this isn’t a story made up out of thin air to scare children—like Michael Jackson, the bogeyman, or even Régine.
It really is best to avoid changing the date when the hour hand is between 9pm and 3am (the upper quarter of the dial).
When the date-change mechanism is at work, it’s better not to interfere with it. Your watches will appreciate this gentlemanly behaviour that suits you so well.
