I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well.
I'm observing that developers these days are quite surprised to see anyone write code for OpenGL / WebGL directly instead of using some layer of abstraction on top, such as Three.js or Unity etc. Few seem to know that OpenGL already is an abstraction of the computing model underneath.
A couple years ago I did some consulting for a company that needed a point cloud rendering engine. Luckily I had one ready to go. I showed them and they liked it and their young devs asked which library I was using. When I told them I used OpenGL they couldn't believe it. To them OpenGL was the "black magic box" and using it akin to having secret conversations with the GPU in some arcane cryptic language.
I wrote interactive 3D graphics programs in SGI IrisGL, the proprietary predecessor of OpenGL. At that time I considered it super easy because it was so high-level. Even so, as an experiment, I networked an Iris to a Lisp machine so I could write graphics code in Lisp and let the SGI machine render the output. Good times.
History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.. Later he went on to found Netscape.
> History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.
Even more trivial: When I moved to Silicon Valley I bought a used Porsche on a whim (my recruiter implied it was a proper consultant accessory in SV) and fixed it up a bit until it became my daily driver. When I researched the title I discovered Jim Clark was the original owner. So I’d like to credit Jim Clark for starting me on the road to speed up my commute.
When I was in college, I got really deep into OpenGL and worked through old textbooks about OpenGL 1.1. I think my favorite one was just called "The Red Book"? It was so much fun.
After finishing that I found out that they were already several major versions ahead and had fancy things like shaders... it really is an amazing tool.
Recently I started messing with some Three.js stuff and it does have some nice abstractions... main benefit of it for me is the ecosystem around it. Being able to just plug in some physics and interactivity and not have to deal with digging up old screen-to-world conversion code is nice.
He does it "the right way™". Use the platform. Don't use any framework or generic library. Go straight to the point and code what you need, when you need it. Don't minify or bundle anything, and let the people who are learning and courious a straightforward way to connect the dots, without forcing them into a github repository with 90% of the code unrelated to the thing and existing just to glue 1000 pieces written by 10000 people together.
Every essay by Bartosz is so top-notch and a such breath of fresh air! He gives me hope in humanity and I am immensely grateful for what he does.
I strongly disagree that this is "the right way". I think that the platform provides low level primitives that are _designed_ to have abstractions built upon them.
Doing it like this has the potential to be the most performant, but it does so in the same way as writing your programs directly in assembly is potentially performant.
I also don't think that the source code is particularly readable for me, and contains lots of magic numbers and very imperative code. I would personally find it a lot more readable if it was written in some sort of declarative way using a library, even if I have to look at a GitHub repo instead of view source.
> but it does so in the same way as writing your programs directly in assembly
> contains lots of magic numbers and very imperative code
Well, we really don't know if the code was written in this form by hand, don't we.
It could have been compiled into this, to use your words, "assembly with magic numbers and imperative" from much more elegant form. We may see this form only because this is what browsers understand.
I am not saying it was compiled, just speculating that seeing pure WebGL does not mean it was pure WebGL to begin with.
When there's physics, graphics and mathematics, there are magic numbers, which are results of formulas which needs to be computed once, or material properties, or nature's constants.
Also, nature and graphics works as an imperative parallel machine. So the code mirrors that.
This is not written deliberately this way. Code comes out like that when you strip all the libraries, fluff, and other less-related stuff.
I also write a scientific application, and yes, This is the way.
Abstraction is the only thing that makes any of our advancements possible. Not even the simplest of math theses could be proves without a “framework” of relevant lemmas, nor could you write even a single hello world without the layers upon layers of abstractions written carefully over the decades. Sure, there is also bad abstraction, but the problem is the bad part, not the concept itself.
Without abstractions you wouldn’t be able to read a text stored on a remote computer with accompanying style information displayed the same on both of our devices and with embedded 3D graphics doing the same thing on vastly differing devices be it a top of the line GPU or a simple low-end phone. Is it not abstraction?
Well, if the abstractions were peer reviewed and put through the same rigour as mathematical proofs, that's a whole different topic.
The equivalent would be a mathematical services company, who created "free" abstraction packages that required you to rewrite all your math, away from the scientific community standards, to fit their abstractions, and who also made money on consulting and selling books. And the big benefit of it all, is really that they only abstracted away writing summaries of your papers, which is actually the easiest part that is quite irrelevant to your research.
But it is not math - we only have empirical evidence and not even much from that.
Who is to tell whether the OSI model is ideal? It is more than likely not it, but we can’t measure these things up front, there is an insane cost associated with changing it, etc. Yet again, what is the alternative? We can’t manage complexity any other way, and essential complexity can’t be reduced.
i mostly mean the heap of stuff people often throw at problems. of course you cant do anything without abstractions. it helps to understand them better though.
I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times).
But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “min” part from the URI, while the majority of end users will still benefit from pulling the minified js.
minified js is not greatly smaller than gzipped js, I think the whole minification thing is a swing and a miss and now we have to deal with source maps and shit, and build pipelines and etc
$ ls -la
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 330905 May 4 22:56 watch.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 152172 May 4 22:55 watch.min.js
$ gzip watch.js
$ gzip watch.min.js
$ ls -la
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 43690 May 4 22:56 watch.js.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 32507 May 4 22:55 watch.min.js.gz
Of surprise to no one, Brotli does better on both:
$ ls -l *.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 330904 5 May 01:04 watch.js
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 152172 5 May 01:10 watch.min.js
$ brotli watch.js
$ brotli watch.min.js
$ ls -l *.br
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 34461 5 May 01:04 watch.js.br
-rw-r--r-- 1 mrd staff 27122 5 May 01:10 watch.min.js.br
If I were serving this content, and if my web server and all of my target browsers supported Brotli, I'd be somewhat more content to ship an un-minified + Brotli-compressed file than an un-minified + gzip'd one. I'm sure it's some rule of thumb stuck in my head from the Web 2.0 era, but a JavaScript payload in excess of 40KB crosses some warning line in my head. (Probably 40KB / ~4KB/s throughput on a good dial-up connection = 10s transfer time, about the longest you'd want to wait for even a pretty spiffy page to load.)
> I'd be somewhat more content to ship an un-minified + Brotli-compressed file than an un-minified + gzip'd one.
Whoops, typo: I meant to say that I'd be somewhat more content to ship an un-minified + Brotli-compressed file than a minified + gzip'd one. That is, I'd be more happy to serve the 34.4KB watch.js.br than the 32.5KB watch.min.js.gz.
> and now we have to deal with source maps and shit
Yeah minification is only really for obfuscation. The small and unpredictable difference is absolutely not worth the ridiculous complex "solution" of source maps. Just the fact that your debugger really doesn't work right, is a deal breaker in and itself, not to mention all the time spent configuring and fighting with webpack.
I don't think any form of "compilation" i.e. bundling, transpiling, minification etc is needed at all. Javascript can already dynamically load (additional) code files when needed, I don't understand why you need to bundle it in the first place.
I don't buy that the http request overheads are so big that it motivates all this complexity, and in the average case a user don't use every single page of the application anyway, so by bundling everything you are always serving "too much", compared to just dynamically loading additional code.
Gzipped JS is generally much smaller than minified JS, but minified-then-gzipped JS is even more so. The minification (assuming gzip) doesn't make a much difference in this case only because the input file is not that large at all and compression algorithms have a natural bias for larger inputs. You can (rightly) claim it is bad to have a JS file large enough that the minification makes a difference after all, but you'd be moving a goalpost then.
True, but it also removes the comments and the whitespace, leading to slightly better performance and memory usage. There are also less bytes to gzip on the server side.
Slightly, but is it enough to warrant the extra steps?
I don't think the difference is significant enough in this case.
That said, I do think there should be an alternative to minification+gzipping, like e.g. a compiled version of JS that is more optimized than a browser's own JIT compiler can do. Mind you, that might up being a larger package than the JS source code.
A discoverable version would be to include source maps that link to the original as well. That way a browser console will automatically pull up the original.
People measure minification in byte size (unfortunately I guess you're charged by CDNs by that metric too?). In reality everything text based compresses really well over the wire. In either case, importing tons of libs left and right is going to vastly out-size any minification, yet most fe devs are very liberal with dependencies.
Minification strips comments too though, which may be undesirable in many cases.
That's simply not a very well followed (and thus discoverable) standard. Especially for hand crafted code, minifying functions and variable names only obfuscates what is written and minifying whitespace often only has minimal benifits.
In practice this seems to be a lost cause, and links to alternatively hosted source code is more common. Sadly this makes is simple to introduce subtle, harmful differences between the source and what is hosted.
> He does it "the right way™". Use the platform. Don't use any framework or generic library.
Hard disagree. "Use What's Right For You™".
Of course there is value in understanding the platform beneath your framework or generic library, but that's just an extension of "understand what you're using and why".
Yeah in this case it doesn't need to; there's no extraneous or unused code or documentation blocks, and gzip (and comparable) compression is good enough, minification doesn't actually reduce the downloaded code size by that much.
the obvious downside is that it's a lot of work and takes a lot more time... so it might be "the right way™" for some cases, but it's definitely not a rule of thumb...
The tradeoff is that there is basically nobody else that has the expertise or time to do the same thing at a similar level of polish. We're not going to see more Ciechanowski-level posts unless new libraries and frameworks make it more accessible.
Nobody stopping you from not using a framework, and yet there is basically nobody else at Ciechanowski's level. It's not going to happen, you can't expect everyone to become a hardcore webgl expert (have you tried?). If we want more cool interactive visualizations, we have to make it easier. Otherwise, we're stuck waiting for those with the time and expertise to pull it off.
Can you point to what libraries he could have used that would have made it simpler? I doubt anything like would benefit from any type of abstraction that currently exists, unless it was a more interactive application that would incorporate user input etc.
Depending on one's skillset, you could use a dcc tool like Blender + three.js to make creation of these visuals and interactions much simpler. Have a look at gltfjsx + react-three-fiber [1] combination, which themselves are abstractions over vanilla three.js.
With that said, the raw webGL approach here is arguably more educational, so goal achieved I think!
Cool example, but all r3f is doing here is just providing the threejs camera, controls and the text with emoji, the watch itself is loaded as a .glb file, where I'd assume most people would be interested in learning about.
Yeah, I think exporting a scene from blender as glft/glb, and then using these tools to bring your exported 3D file to the web, is one of the more approachable abstractions.
The reason you'd use gltfjsx (which that example doesn't) is to have fine grained controls for every node in the scene graph. In the case of the watch, this would map to having a component for each mesh or gear, which can be controlled with mechanics/physics.
Three.js maybe, but it doesn't abstract too much away in my opinion, it has a lot of functionality around more complex topics (textures for example), but since he doesn't seem to use those it's probably not worth the hassle.
> How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?
I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter.
It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.
That looks like a fair bit of boilerplate, and a shitty tutorial with comments that mostly just repeat what the code says, but the API doesn't look unusable.
Honestly I think your examples are both genuinely less comprehendible to someone without a deep understanding of GL going in than my example.
It’s a very bad, non-object oriented API in an object oriented language. It was designed for and by people who know GL in other C like languages, not for people who know JavaScript. It is unlike any other part of the language.
The fact that I have to write a shader myself, as a fricken string like I’m writing SQL over here, just to draw a triangle is absurd. There should at the very least be some sort of provided builder for simple shaders.
Yeah, they probably are, I didn't intend them as tutorials but as a better representation of the actual scutwork necessary to draw a triangle.
Object-oriented languages are not a good way to do 3-D rendering. If you want to write pixel shaders in JS you can totally do that but you will have to run them on the CPU; as it happens I wrote a program last week that works that way: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/trama. If you want to run them on the GPU you need a language that exposes the GPU's capabilities.
In essence your primary complaint is that the GPU instruction set is not object-oriented (and neither is your database). Well, you can design your own GPU, but I've got some bad news for you about Verilog, Chisel, and BlueSpec! And you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented, so your OO GPU will end up underperforming, like the Burroughs B5000 and the Symbolics 3600 (hopefully not as badly as the Intel iAPX432). You'll probably have more success writing an object-oriented database.
However, I do agree that WebGL is a bad API, because boilerplate is never acceptable.
Examine it more closely; you will find that it is a dynamical system composed of sextillions of parts, constantly entering and leaving the rock, and that the boundaries between the rock, the table, and the air are very fuzzy indeed. It isn't even encapsulated, nor are its interactions with its environment mediated by messages to which it freely chooses a response; it is its environment.
Your insight is remarkably well-written. I wish we could see our bodies in the same way, all of the time. The world might be a kinder place overall. Do you meditate?
But even if we're arguing physics, that's debatable. The shape and toughness of the rock are actually an effect of forces between the atoms composing the rock, and the weight of the rock is actually the interaction between the mass of the rock and the earth. The color of the rock is the effect of the interaction between the molecules in the rock and photons (which are themselves wave-like) and then the interaction between that light and the cells in your eyes.
Objects are a convenient day-to-day model in real life and software, but there are more "functional" models that comprise the object model.
I don’t see how someone not understanding GL first can do anything useful with it. Like, what would such people even use it for? If they need a complete solution just use a plugin that displays some rotatable 3D model. But I really don’t see the value of planning for the lowest common denominator in case of a highly specialized domain specific API.
Holy living crap. I was all with it up until I saw the actual full HTML example. That is an incredulous amount of overhead for what is essentially one of the most basic and fundamental operations in *GL.
Comparing this to Canvas is almost like comparing assembly to C. I'm honestly very surprised.
Though boilerplate is never acceptable, most of that is constant-factor overhead, not per-triangle overhead, and tutorialspoint is not a site you should trust under any circumstances. See my links above for better sources.
If you put more vertices and indices in Step 2 you can draw an arbitrarily complex 3-D object with this same code.
And there's a lot of stuff in GLSL where you can program directly with high-level concepts like vectors, normals, and partial derivatives, instead of expressing them by hand the way you would in C.
Right, and that's what the glslCanvas project I linked above is, though in this case it's negative overhead if you're just counting the lines of code you have to maintain :)
Yeah, Canvas 2D is great, though it's not any more OO than WebGL, and I sometimes forget to create a new path and wonder why it keeps getting slower and slower with every frame. SVG is also pretty reasonable.
Neat, you do the math yourself and then render the tris/quads in canvas? I did something like that recently (in C/SDL, later RayLib). I found it amusing that to get performant 2D rendering you have to use a 3D API, so my "software rendered" 3D engine which just uses the gfx api for 2D draw calls ends up using 3D for the 2D under the hood...
There's at least one (great) game written like that though, Need for Madness with a custom 3D engine and just using java's 2D gfx api for rendering.
Except that WebGL didn't exist so I just had to use the 2-D <canvas>. There's probably some trick for getting antialiased polygon edges in <canvas> to not show cracks...
Once you get through the process of drawing a triangle on the screen then you're learnt 70% of the core of OpenGL. I think you're making the incorrect assumption of "wow if it takes this long to just get a triangle on the screen it must take 1000x as long to get an entire model of a watch" when really you're almost able to draw a model already, you just need to put multiple triangles on the screen now instead of just one.
Apart from going to each post and manually looking at the JS codes, is it possible to get them all in one go? https://ciechanow.ski/js/ returns 403 error.
wget will do what you want, with the right flags. Try `wget -r https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ --include-directories=js/`, the resulting `ciechanow.ski/js/` dir should have it.
Adjust the flags as necessary to crawl more of the site if needed (omitting `--include-directories` without an `-l {limit}` flag will eventually crawl the whole site, please be kinder to their bandwidth than that).
I like that; it's a lot of work but a lot of people seem to prefer to have to make libraries work together than to just do the work, and it's timeless since it doesn't depend on any future frameworks; any issues that might come up in the future with regards to browser incompatibility can be fixed relatively easily.
Would antifragile be an applicable word to use here?
Frameworks change and get in the way when a new version is released. It is most annoying. The underlying WebGL changes much more slowly, and in a much more controlled way with a focus on backward compatibility. So I do the same whenever I can and ignore frameworks to get rid of a dependency. The boilerplate overhead can be encapsulated very well into homemade JS functions that only change when I change them. And JS + WebGL is not really low-level.
You really have to admire people who do stuff like that (I can't imagine that I would ever have the patience to do that).
What I'm mildly curious about is why would anyone want to do it? Is there a demand for such stuff? I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them?
I'd reckon most would be like me in that they'd pulled enough watches apart in their younger years to already know their ins and outs (I've long lost track of the number watches and clocks I've either fixed or disassembled by the time I was a teenager).
"There's little benefit to writing your own asm these days"
Agreed, but programming in ASM makes one think differently. In my opinion every programmer should do some elementary Assembler as part of their training, say some basic projects based on 8086 stuff or even the simpler 8085/Z80 etc. It's a long while since I've done any serious ASM work but the techniques one learns and the ideas one develops frame important attitudes that can't be easily gathered from high level stuff (one gains a better understanding of the underlying hardware and such).
You're right, we still need people for this work, it'd be pretty hard to optimize a compiler without them methinks.
FYI, there's stuff I omitted to mention in the above comment, I mentioned it below in my reply to bitcurious. It's interesting 'fitness for purpose' arises given your ASM comment.
> I can understand it if the exercise was for training people but wouldn't most people who were interested in the internal workings of watches already be familiar with them?
Most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days.
I fully accept your point that 'most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days' but I'd contend that that ought not be relevant (as I'll explain in a moment).
First, I should say that I was perhaps a little harsh in my above comment and I didn't convey what I actually wanted to say. Unfortunately, I was distracted by the somewhat irritating fact that I couldn't view any of those drawings on two different smartphones (I could read the article but only saw white spaces where the drawings were supposed to be). It was only later when logged onto my PC that I could view them, and even then the whole page was sluggish and a pain to view. Perhaps those with faster equipment and or faster internet connection had better luck.
Thus, the thinly-veiled message behind my comment was a question about fitness for purpose—both about the subject matter and its method of delivery. My cynical inference was that if people today didn't already understand the basics of gearing, mechanical advantage and escapement mechanisms etc. then something has gone wrong with the education system in that the basics of how clocks worked were well covered in physics (in mechanics) during my first year in high school—and that should not have changed as we still live and move around in a mechanical world—and thousands of industrial mechanical devices use these principles and rely on people having a good working knowledge of them.
By third year physics, everything relevant about the essential workings of a clock would also have been covered at a basic mathematical level: Hooke's Law, gears and gear ratios, friction and simple harmonic motion. Even temperature expansion and contraction and the need to compensate for them was discussed (and in this context the physics teacher even discussed Harrison's famous chronometer and how his design included temperature compensation to ensure that changes in these parameters did not impact heavily on time drift).
In essence, by third year, everything of important in that article had been covered in the school curriculum. If articles such as that under discussion are now being used to compensate for the lack of training in high school science then we have a serious problem with the education system.
Incidentally, even if one's not interested in clock mechanisms, it's worth having a look at this 19th Century publication on mechanical movements that's on the Internet Archive (there are more types around than most people have ever likely considered: https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507
I might be an outlier in how I learn, but I find that learning happens in multiple passes.
First, I learned a concept in school, and probably forgot it. Later, I heard about it again, and hung the concept on the skeleton of what I remembered from school. Only much later, when I'm actually applying the concept (in my career, during home repair, when doing my son's homework), do I connect the dots and really understand the concept front to back.
When talking to people I'll say I learned the concept {of gearing, of escapements, of the behavior of springs} in school. But it's probably just as accurate to say that exposure to experiences like this site were what truly cemented them in my mind.
"I might be an outlier in how I learn, but I find that learning happens in multiple passes."
I don't think so, I'd reckon you'd be pretty typical. It's basically how I learn things and I'd think it's how most others acquire skills.
From my experience, the key issue is having an interest in the subject, subjects that I was interested in I did well in and it was the opposite for those that bored me. I suppose that makes sense but in both cases multiple passes were required before I became proficient - it's just that it took considerably longer when my interest was less.
However, what I've noted on many occasions is that there are students who I'd classify as a class that are just good at learning things even if the subjects have little interest for them per se, they're the ones who would often top the class and later in life you'd find them doing jobs unrelated to the subjects they did well in. I often think I'd like more of that trait.
For reasons I can only speculate about, my interest in certain specific subjects seems to have inate origins, it's as if some a priori interest was there before I knew about them. This doesn't necessarily bode well for other subjects that are deemed essential for one to become skilled in as one's learning can become lopsided.
There's little doubt that hands-on training works for most - and that brings me back to clocks. In physics practical classes on tension, springs, mechanical advantage, etc. we actually had clocks to experiment with. These were usually old bedroom alarm clocks and such that could be pulled apart and reassembled and if damaged it didn't matter much. We all learned from these experiences, even kids with little mechanical aptitude as clocks contains just about every instance of the physics we were learning about and it was obvious how they all came together to make clocks work.
A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive (I spend close to €1k and that is with b-quality stuff. Good stuff is 5-10x more expensive.) and can be rather frustrating. Finding parts to buy can be complicated depending on your locale, loosing parts is very easy and destroying parts, even when gentle and careful is par for the course.
I hat to put my repair hobby on halt after running out of practice pieces. All now have broken or missing parts. your milage may vary ofcourse :)
> A warning though, if you consider to get into that hobby. I tried, it's really hard, expensive
Wrist watches are pretty hard and expensive. Pocket watches are less so. When I was interested in getting more intimate with watch repair, I went to eBay and bought up a whole bunch of old pocket watch movements. I've got about 150 of them in various condition, most of them Waltham (easy to get, inexpensive, and I happen to have spent the first 25 years of my life spending a lot of time in the old Waltham Watch Co factory building because my father's company leased out space in it).
Basic tools aren't too bad, just a nice set of tweezers, screwdrivers, and a good magnifier is enough to do a lot of repairs. But you can fall down the rabbit hole pretty quickly with the desire for increased quality tools and things like a staking set so you can replace balance wheel arbors.
I tried to move from the pocket watches into wrist watches, and while the technology is largely the same, the reduced size and increased complexity made it less enjoyable for me. Instead I ended up moving the other direction and now have a nice collection of 18th and 19th century 30-hour and 8-day clocks (more commonly known as "grandfather clocks").
Huh, I recently got into it and, as is my way, I did things on the cheap. All told, including tools and practice movements (and a couple inexpensive whole watches I restored) I'm in for maybe $100.
Here's a tip on buying watches to repair or restore - avoid the big brands at first. Many watches use the same or similar movements (ETA is a big one, but you'll find Seiko movements hiding in watches from the 60s and 70s, too).
eBay is your friend (don't fall for too-good-to-be-true items from India or Pakistan)
Hang out on watchrepairtalk.com and/or watchcrunch.com and ask lots of questions. It's a very friendly community.
When I saw this, the first thing I did was Ctrl + F to see if anyone else dropped Marshall's link. I have no desire to do it myself, but it's so satisfying to watch him repair them. His videos are great.
If you wouldn’t mind answering a question, how difficult is it to swap a dial/handset/movement set into a different case?
I saw a custom mod watch that paired the face/movement of a Marathon navigator with an O&W diver case*. Is a combination I find desirable (as the Marathon bezel is too chunky for my use), but the maker won’t respond to emails.
Is it possible that the combination could be “ drop in” or is it likely to require significant modification?
That really depends on the sizes, if the face and movement are the same size I expect it should be easy enough. You will need some tools and fine motor skill, but no where near as much as you need when taking apart a movement.
Looking at the two watches you mention, the navigator has a Quartz Harley Ronda 373 movement and the diver has a ETA 2824-2 movement. The 373 I can't find the specs for, but from an ebay auction it seems to be a 11½’’’ diameter. The 2824-2 is the same diameter. However, all 11½’’’ ronda quartz movements I can find are 3mm thick where the 2824 is 4.6mm. So what I'd expect is that it will fit, but you might not be able to secure it properly. It really depends on how the movement is held in place. Perhaps you can fabricate/3d-print a spacer for that.
Another consideration is the lug stem, that might not be the right size. To long is solveable, to short means buying a replacement. I am also not sure wether the stems can have a different thickness, to thin and it wont be waterproof, to thick just won't fit.
You could probably try without destroying anything (no guarantees ;)), you are not really touching any of the fragile & tiny parts. But you will atleast need tool(s) to open the cases, they might be different, and a tiny screwdriver to release the lug. And I wouldn't count on it remaining waterproof, not sure.
Thank you for the detailed response! It’s the sort of project I find intriguing, so I’ll have to do a little more digging. May end up being beyond me though.
Edit: I see that Marathon does make several watches with the 2824 (which would presumably simplify the process).
Depends. The ETA-2824 is a fairly common movement with inexpensive Chinese clones, so dials and hands are reasonably cheap and common. If the target case also uses the same ETA movement then it’s simple: Unscrew the back, remove the crown stem, drop the movement. Assembly is the reverse of removal.
Where it gets tricky is if the target doesn’t use the same movement. In that case, I’d just buy an AliExpress watch with the same dial size and an ETA clone movement. Otherwise you have to ensure your target is the correct size and you’ll probably need to 3D print a movement holder.
I was able to get into this with a $60 set of screwdrivers, a $20 crappy movement from eBay, and another $20 toolkit of random watch repair stuff that wasn't really necessary. And maybe like $20 of lube. I would never attempt to service something I wear/use, but for the $20 crap movement off eBay there's no harm no foul.
I probably already went overboard a bit when staring out. My cost where mostly in a stereo microscope and the consumables (mobius oils, cleaning liquids). Oh and maybe I didn't need a timegrapher before having a functional movement haha
Also, almost everything I had to import in to the EU. Importing chemicals is expensive for some reason I discovered. UPS charged me like 3 times the usual amount.
There is a lot of advice that says 'don't cheap out, just buy good stuff'; which is great if you are going to make this really your hobby for years to come. But I feel starting with some cheap tools on a junk movement is a fine start.
To those interested in becomming a Watchmaker I can offer this:
1. The school route is great, but after the two year program you still won't get a parts account from anyone. You will have no problem finding a job though.
2. Self-taught. It will take awhile, but it's a rewarding hobby/career.
Every budding Watchmaker should have books. Books by DeCarle, Fried, and Daniels are great.
There are old correspondence courses that are good to. Try to get Chicago School of Watch Repair, and Bulova School of Watch Repair. Hunt around for the best price.
The quality of internet videos on the internet are spectacular. You are lucky to have them. When I started their was only one guy who taught Watch Repair.
Tools:
#2, #5 Dumont tweezers. (any tweezers will do, even the cheap ones.)
Watch back removal tools. You will need various types, including Rolex, and universal tools.
small ultrasonic bath to clean parts. A mason jar filled with cleaning fluid, and rinse will suffice to hobbiests though.
oils. Moebius are recommended, but expensive. Personally I think they are overpriced.
Presto #1,#2 hand removers.
some Radico.
A mainspring tool. These can get pricy. Look for a old set of Marshall mainspring removal tools.
Decide if you want to work with a loupe, or a 10-40x stereoscope.
a band remover.
A staking set. (Look around. No need to spend more than $250.00
A jewelers lathe, mill, etc. come way later. The biggest mistake newbies make is buying every tool they thing they might need. Then again you wealthy boys can go crazy.
Too tired to go on, but I'm in the Bay Area under "I buy Watchmaker, jeweler, amd some Machinist's estates. I'm gearing up to do repairs. I hope to have a website soon. I'm thinking about teaching, but not sure if there's a market for it.
This may not be the most valuable comment, but my goodness, the quality of this writeup and it's interactive descriptions of complex mechanical components AND their interactions is radically impressive. The treatment of complex topics in deeply visual and partially interactive ways, for me at least, is a remarkably helpful way to learn.
True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page. The internet taking over turned everything back into text, and then as bandwidth grew the only thing we thought to use it on was higher and higher bitrate video.
When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.
There is absolutely a market for your LOTR example. I think a kickstarter made LOTR or Harry Potter Interactive applications like you are purposing could charge $1,000 maybe.
And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too.
I think one problem is that it's difficult to make videos easy for anyone to edit, the way a wiki text page is.
- The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because
- The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available
- Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it)
Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll.
A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.
You can already put instructional videos on Wikiversity.
You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.
There's Wikimedia Commons! It even (somewhat) addresses this particular issue by having a system for requesting specialized media-related edits—video editing, photo retouching, SVG editing, mapmaking, etc.
For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual.
Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2]
There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby.
This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot).
>True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page.
Microsoft sold a bunch of titles for things like music. They did quite a nice job as I recall during that period when it was really rather wondrous you could hold all this information in the palm of your hand.
Last time I used Amazon Prime Video, around 2017, it would show info that Amazon deemed relevant for that bit of the show (apparently it's called X-Ray). Back then at least, it wasn't on the same level as what you described but still something.
The danger was it made me want to pause all the time in case I missed something interesting, but by putting the user in control of what they get info on, you could avoid that.
Last time I used Amazon Prime Video, around 2017, it would show info that Amazon deemed relevant for that bit of the show (apparently it's called X-Ray).
X-Ray still exists, but the only way I've ever seen it used is to tell you what the background music is, and the names of all the actors in a scene. But even then, it is often incomplete.
The Kindle has a similar feature for some of its native book: if you long-click in the name of a character it would give you a short description and a timeline of where it appeared in prior parts of the books (with future parts hidden to prevent spoilers).
That was also my dream when I first saw the CD encyclopedia and seeing the first demo of AR using google maps of pointing your phone to a building and seeing information about it and then the introduction of google glass, then it all suddenly disappeared.
Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information
I remember the cable companies promising this when everything went "digital."
I also remember when the movie studios promised us one of the big advantages of DVDs over VHS was that we could watch the scenes of a movie from any angle?
And the director / talent commentary tracks, which were sometimes really great (Vanilla Sky comes to mind). I think that was only common for a really brief period unfortunately. To be honest I think it just failed from a market perspective (cost vs revenue). I could be wrong and maybe it still happens a lot?
Suspect the angles thing was the same. Sounded cool but no one wanted it (or to pay extra for it).
There is a movie player that would highlight the character/actor on screen at the moment you hit pause. There is a link to find out more that would take you to the appropriate web page with the info.
I want to say it was google play, but not completely sure.
Amazon Prime Video show you information on the actors in the current scene. If you are (e.g.) chromecasting from a phone you have it continually on the mobile display while the film is on the TV.
I almost couldn't believe the quality of this while reading it. Not just animations, but simulations? That perfectly illustrate the concept being discussed? Incredible. Not to mention the incredibly clear and articulate prose.
Sent this to my dad, and can't wait to talk this weekend. When I was a kid we would tinker around with watches in the basement but, alas, I had different interests and never really got around to truly understanding these mechanisms. I don't really know web development beyond setting up basic pages, but how the CAD was integrated into this is wonderful and I'd love to see more posts going through things like human joints or ICE, or maybe weapons ... other things where we kind of intuitively grasp how they work, but don't know the details. This entire blog seems to do a lot of that. So cool.
Came here to say the same thing. This incredibly well done, well written, well executed, well... everything. How does one find, not only the talent, but the patience to do such incredible work... Mind boggling.
I think that the person(s) that created the interactive visuals would find this to be a helpful comment. Radically impressive is a fitting description. I don’t think I’ve ever seen and interacted with anything like it, although I imagine people working with CAD software get to see and mess around with this kind of stuff pretty frequently.
To be 100% honest I found it very intimidating to even begin reading it. It's such a time sink (no pun intended) and a huge wall of text (with figures and interactivity nonetheless).
This man is marvelous. Even though I know how top-notch he is at writing interactive blog posts, he surprises me with his quality every time I open his new blog posts. Bartosz is a huge inspiration for me.
I don't make this comparison lightly but I'm reminded of Leonardo DaVinci. How much talent does one need to create something like this? It's not enough to be just 'good' at engineering, design, watchmaking, and writing... you have to be amazing at it ALL of it. AND have motivation to do it.
There's something magical about mechanical watches. Maybe it's just knowing that you have this perpetually winding machine on your hand (in the case of "automatic" mechanical watches).
Also knowing that the thing will last forever, take care of it and it will probably outlive you. Can't say that about an Apple Watch.
If you want a good mechanical watch that won't break the bank I suggest picking up a Seiko SKX (though prices have been going up), a Vostok Amphibia (might be hard with the ukraine conflict) or a Timex Marlin.
Sadly this advice is a little bit out of date, as the SKX has been out of production now for a few years and the price on uses examples has risen above what one is worth (except to collectors).
The newer advice is to grab a Seiko 5*. There's a million different choices, and all the current ones come with the 4R35 or 4R36 movement, which are better than the 7S26 which was in the SKX divers.
A mechanical watch needs regular service which is usually just cleaning, lubricating, replacing seals and springs. Eventually it will need replacement parts and that is probably the end of life for the watch.
There are a some brands that will service every watch they've ever made, fabricating new parts as needed. Few of us can afford one of those.
To that point - yes, but it's less expensive than many people think. I got a vintage 1970 Omega Seamaster in very good condition some time ago, paid less than £1000 for it. It kept very good time, no issues with it, but I decided that since it turned 50 recently I'm going to treat it to a full Omega service with an authorized workshop, paid £495 - that included replacement original parts from Omega, which of course they still stock and make for this watch, because well - it's Omega.
I asked them how this works, and they said anything younger than 80 years Omega just sends them parts without any issue, anything older they have to send back to Switzerland for service, and yes, then Omega might have to manufacture the parts required on the spot - and yes, that then turns really expensive.
Do be careful having your vintage watches serviced.
I was lucky enough to inherit my grandfather's pre-COMEX 5513 in very good condition - one or two tiny specks on the dial and a light scratch on the case. The appraiser gave me the warning that I should never send it to a Rolex repair center for servicing under any circumstance. If I did, I'd likely end up having the original acrylic bubble being replaced with crystal, the case polished high heaven, new tritium applied, and it'd probably be worth $15k less.
Collectors want a watch that shows signs of life; they value a nice patina. Many watch manufacturers service things to "modern spec" and try to make a watch look new. For a watch that old, I'd strongly suggest you find an independent watchmaker or two and get them to give you an estimate before you do anything.
>>Collectors want a watch that shows signs of life; they value a nice patina.
Yeah, but I don't. I don't have this watch as an investment - hopefully I'll use it for another 50 years and then someone else can use it again for 50 more years. In fact in addition to the service I paid £300 to have the dial replaced with a brand "new"(old stock) identical dial, because mine was showing very minor signs of corrosion. If a collector somewhere has an issue with that.....tough? Also I have no idea how anyone could ever even tell the dial was replaced, the new one is original Omega, just......flawless.
>> If I did, I'd likely end up having the original acrylic bubble being replaced with crystal, the case polished high heaven, new tritium applied, and it'd probably be worth $15k less.
That sounds perfect, if it were my watch I'd absolutely do that. Who cares how much it's worth at the end? If it's your grandfather's watch, then you probably won't ever sell it, will you?
Either way, I understand this is a personal choice.
>>for a watch that old, I'd strongly suggest you find an independent watchmaker or two and get them to give you an estimate before you do anything.
I did, both of them went "oh it's an omega, it's going to be about £400 for a full service mate" - so servicing it with Omega wasn't that much more expensive and it was a much better shout in my book, I know that whatever parts they replaced are original and brand new.
edit: just to add to the above - sorry, I realized I came across as very defensive. Yes of course your advice applies 100% if someone cares about maintaining the value of a vintage watch. Identical advice applies to maintaining vintage cars as well. But if you buy a vintage watch like me, to use it as....a watch....then just keep that in mind too.
No worries – and ultimately, you are absolutely right, it's all down to what you want out of it.
The two things I wanted to flag were
1) watches can have surprising value fluctuations, so they're worth being appraised professionally: just because you have "a model X from company Y dating back to Z" doesn't mean you'll get the valuation right if you try. If Papa were a desk diver at COMEX instead of Arthur Andersen I'd have likely ended up with a 5514 instead, and my six figure watch would be in a safe somewhere, not on my wrist.
2) many companies, when repairing, will not hesitate to add modern components. Rolex is apparently notorious for this, but others do it as well. In the opinion of Rolex, a watch is a watch: your GMT-Master with a Bakelite bezel is no different from a GMT-Master from 2022, it's just out of spec and needs a refresh.
The combination of this has lead to horror stories where people send their watch in for what they expect to be a fairly routine service (cleaning, oiling, etc.) and end up with an entirely different watch.
They last longer if you wear them, say, several times a month - i.e. if you have a rotation with several quartz watches and several mechanical ones. They definitely will last decades that way.
As others have noted, if you own a well-known brand like a Seiko you can easily purchase an entirely new movement for $50-$75 and this should take a watchmaker no more than one hour of labor or you can DIY. (Many non-Seiko brands use NH35/36 movements, which are made by Seiko)
Will Seiko provide parts for older watches? I just got stuck with a bricked Swiss Army quartz watch because no one can get parts for it (it's 20 years old). I'm very tempted by some of the more affordable Seiko mechanical/automatic models, but I'd like the watch to last at least a decade or so.
Sadly, I'm not aware of any specific "we will continue to manufacture parts for X years" guarantees from Seiko.
Still, though - keep in mind that entire Seiko movement can be bought for like $50-75. And many of their most common movements are interchangeable. For example, an older 7S26 can be replaced with a new NH36 that sells for about $50. https://chronometercheck.com/seiko-7s26-movement/
It's not entirely unfeasible to imagine buying a spare movement or three if you were, say, planning on doing sort of a heirloom thing and wanted to ensure a supply of parts N decades into the future.
My grandma has a mechanical watch she only wears on sundays - to the church. Whenever I was visiting her she asks me to wind it up for her before the mass. She uses this same watch for over 30 years with minimal maintenance, and it's not an expansive brand, just a good noname watch.
The parts last quite some time if properly maintained. If you're worried about replacement parts availability, stick with the most popular movements such as the ETA2824/SW200 series or Seiko's NH35 series.
For example, the size and fit of Seiko "calibers" are the same going back further than NH35, which means far older watches can accept NH35 as replacements. Even sub-assemblies and parts of NH35 fit straight onto 7s26s from the 90s.
NH35 can be serviced, but makes more sense an assembled replacement part. The same argument can probably made for the entire watch. The appeal of using one watch for 30 years is more in romantic fantasy than practicality.
A lot of watch fans are happy when they see a watch brand use an in-house movement. I’m exactly the opposite for the reason you say - the popular movements are going to be easily and inexpensively serviced for much longer.
That said, a lot of in-house movements are little more than tweaks and high end finishing applied to existing commodity movements.
Exactly. The flip side of the recent proliferation of "barely in-house" movements is that there's actually even less diversity of movements in the mid-range watch market than the brands would have you believe. So in the long term, it's going to be fairly easy to get any of them serviced. Just replace some springs and gears with compatible parts from a 2824/2892/7750/whatever and stick the brand's pretty rotor back on.
Ever since I picked the hobby of fixing old mechanical watch, in house movement is my number 1 criteria for not buying because of the availability of parts.
I'm with you on this. I see a ton of custom watches that end up using a Seiko automatic movement or an ETA. A bit like Lotus using Toyota Camry engines.
Not just custom - Seiko used to (still does maybe) provide manufacturers with bare movements, even with the company name on it. That means you'll find "no name" watches from the 60s onward with Seiko movements. That makes servicing, repairing and replacing them much easier and cheaper. Same with ETA.
The solar Casio I bought as a teenager stopped holding a usable charge after a few winters. Maybe it was just bad luck. I'll see if the new Citizen Eco-Drive in my collection lives up to the 40 years claim I saw elsewhere. :)
The first Eco-Drives came out in the mid 90s. If you look around you'll find quite a few reports from people who bought the very first ones, and which are still ticking away virtually maintenance-free for 25+ years and counting. My own, a dive watch with around 10 years, which has actually been used for its stated purpose, is also still problem-free and with zero maintenance so far.
The only thing you need to be mindful of with Eco-Drives is that you can't let it lose all charge. It can keep functioning in complete darkness for around 6 months, according to the specs, but if you do this enough times the battery will lose the ability to hold charge and will need to be replaced, and there are plenty of reports to this effect. If you're not planning on wearing it, just leave it somewhere that it can get natural light, instead of a drawer, and you should be good.
While mechanical watches are undoubtedly cool and elegant, they're not perfect timekeepers, and when they do need maintenance it's not something trivial which you can perform yourself. For my day-to-day watch I'll take an accurate quartz movement with virtually zero maintenance any day. In other words an Eco-Drive, or something similar.
My experience with a very high-end solar Casio was akin to yours, with the battery needing replacing after about five years. Perhaps gambiting is correct about the common nature of the battery, but multiple watch repair shops (both in a department store, and the "old man in a tiny room in an office building" type) refused to deal with it. I always had to mail it to an authorized Casio repair outlet.
I do not know whether this also applies to Eco-Drive.
I have seiko automatic which kept great time when I first bought it, but not long after, it slipped off my wrist and fell on the tile floor. Since then it has been losing time but no so much as to be a huge problem. Would service easily fix this or is it just something to live with?
Seiko makes a huge range of watches so: it depends. If it's a cheaper one, just buy a new one. If it's a mid-range one, you can just buy a new movement for under $100 and toss it in with a few tools. Lots of tutorials on YouTube.
It may or may not be easy to fix properly, but if it's an inexpensive Seiko it may not be worth doing that, just replacing the movement when it wears out completely.
That said, simply adjusting the tick rate to regulate timekeeping is very easy and if you've got steady hands and a sharp eye then you can do it yourself with a wooden toothpick, assuming you've got a tool to remove the watch back. Any shop (offering repair facilities) could do it as well in a matter of minutes.
Should be a simple fix. It might just need regulation on the balance wheel (super quick, no need to disassemble the whole movement), or one of the pinions might be bent (just replace that wheel).
Take it to a watchmaker, a fix like this would be pretty straightforward.
Parts rarely fail on watches from the 50's on, especially the better made watches that are sealed. Even those that arn't sealed very well, the parts seem to last.
If a part does fail, it's usually the old blue steel mainsprings.
They can be replaced with modern White-Alloy springs. (That is just a brand name.)
Watches are my thing. I don't know why I like them so much, but do.
Servicing does take awhile to learn though. That whole 10,000 hrs probally. Servicing a watch does not take that long to learn. I'm talking about making parts with a Jeweler's lathe. And getting to the point where you know those parts well enough to visualize exactly what's wrong with a timepiece by looking at it.
If you did learn to clean/oil your mechanical watch, it's something that will be passed down to loved ones.
Oh yea, Service a mechanical watch when it stops keeping good time. That is unless you take it in the water.
I know a watchmaker who told his father he needed to Service his gifted wristwatch. His father got it 30 years ago as a present, and just wore it daily. The watchmaker was expecting dried up oil, but to his astonishment, the oil was still there. It was hermetically sealed. Oils do breakdown, but he couldn't find any damage to parts using a 40x stereoscope.
I keep considering a mechanical watch, but I think I'd find the accuracy a bit tedious - having to continually adjust it every week so that I didn't arrive late to appointments.
It's a quartz watch, powered by solar power through the face. It has 'just worked' for as long as I've had it. From an accuracy point of view, it loses negligible amounts over the several month interval between me being forced to adjust it anyway (daylight savings, international travel).
This is of course a matter of personal taste, but:
I usually set my watch a few minutes fast on purpose. I just use it to get an approximation of the time: "oh, it's nearly 5"
When I need the exact time I look at my phone, and naturally that's where my calendar reminders and such live as well. So I'm not missing any appointments if my watch is off, and if I did rely on my watch I'd be a few minutes early.
The two work well in tandem for me.
Of course, I also know lots of watch owners who prioritize accuracy from their wristwatches. If I was one of those people, I really couldn't imagine wanting to deal with a mechanical watch. They are wonderful, wonderful little machines and it's a miracle they're as accurate as they are... but, they are not as accurate as a $10 digital watch.
You can always get a spring drive from grand seiko - it's mechanical (with an "brake" driven by an integrated circuit, but still no battery) but basically only gets a few seconds off per year. Lowest price point for those is like $5k though.
It depends on the movement in the watch. Any COSC chronometer movement will hold +4/-6s per day which worst case is under a minute lost per week. Typically the error is much smaller.
I've been using the same mechanical watch, more or less every day, for a little over 12yrs now. Miyota movement, stainless body, Sapphire window, about $300. In years of machine shop work the movement survived fine, and has one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide.
Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn't matter. I started working around pulsed high voltage last year (100kV+) and now it loses a couple minutes a week.
> one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide.
Checks out. Tungsten Carbide and Corundum (sapphire watch crystals, the hardest watch crystal in use) have the same Mohs hardness of 9 and will scratch each other.
And I'd guess that a $300 watch probably doesn't use Corundum but rather mineral glass.
I’ve got a cheap Seiko 5, the SNK809. Bought for $50 new in 2013, wore it for a few years then it moved with me in drawers for the past 5. I pulled it out last week, wound it up and it works perfectly, gaining just 4 seconds a day.
A demagnetizer is on the shopping list, but at the same time, a quick adjustment every now and then is easy enough. I also love my watch, so a switch to antimagnetic isn't high on my priorities.
Watch movements are generally sensitive to magnetic fields, and can become magnetized and lose accuracy. Some watch models explicitly advertise their level of resistance to magnetism, for instance the Rolex Milgauss, which is designed to withstand 1,000 ("mille") gauss.
Yes indeed, though not necessarily the cause in this case. While it could be coincidence, magnetization of components can result in reduced accuracy. Some companies have started to release watches with silicon springs, though very expensive.
As an owner of an SKX who doesn’t know much about watch longevity, how long can I expect it to last? Are there other automatics that will outlast a person’s life?
It still blows my mind that you can take the SKX scuba diving, especially when you factor in the price.
This may sound cynical but as I get older and see the world becoming more and more digital and connected, I find myself appreciating analog, mechanical things like watches and old cars more and more.
Mechanical watches can last a lifetime (or more) if properly maintained and periodically serviced, just like old cars.
People all over the world pass down their Rolexes and Omegas, still ticking, to their children and even grandchildren. Patek Philippe is well known for their slogan, "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation," showing confidence in the longevity of their watches.
Of course those are very expensive brands, but I think part of what makes expensive watches last longer is that their owners take good care of them. Few people bother to get their SKX checked up on a regular schedule, on the other hand, because they're so cheap and easily replaceable by first-world standards.
They also cost a ton to service. It's nice if the sentiment of carrying something through the years appeals to you, but the thing that keeps me away from mechanical watches is the service costs compared to the odd battery replacement on a quartz.
My father's Seiko from the late 70s still keeps time at around 30 seconds per day. It has never been serviced so I am sure it is bone dry and really should not be run. I regularly wear a 2015 Seiko that used to be 8 seconds per day fast but has fallen to 5 seconds per day slow so it is probably time to service it. My two newest watches are from 2017 and 2021 and they are consistent since break in. So given my limited number of data points, I would say 5-7 years between service but if you just want to wear it until it dies, 10+ years is probably reasonable.
On a side note, I have read about 40 year old Seikos being worn daily without service but that sure feels outside of the norm.
I have a 7s26A movement out of a late 90s SKX which was unserviceable, and another 7s26C became unusable after 4-5 months of use.
I also have a replacement 7s26C which worked flawlessly [-5,+5] s/d out of the box and a year so far, and another watch with NH35 which still holds [-5,+5] s/d after seven years of daily use.
There are stories of SKX:s which hold good time after 20 years.
There are much cheaper watches than SKX (at their current prices) that will withstand the depth, see "Beyond on the press" pressure chamber tests, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti-GdfGbj4Y
I think maintenance requirements are overstated. I wore a relatively cheap (~£120) mechanical watch continuously for about 8 years, and never had a single problem with it. I only stopped wearing it about 2 years ago when I finally bought a smartwatch. It still works fine, I just don't wear it except on special occasions.
If your watch is a sizable investment then maybe you care about maintenance more, but otherwise I wouldn't worry that it's going to stop working in short order.
If you are going to take your SKX diving, you probably want to have a watchmaker pressure test it once in a while and make repairs as needed. The seals dry out and water will get in.
> Are there other automatics that will outlast a person’s life?
Very unlikely. You do hear the occasional story of a mechanical watch running fine for several decades without requiring any servicing, but there's a lot of survivorship bias at play there. It's extremely unlikely to go ~8 decades without needing servicing. Keep in mind there are lubricants at various places in the movement that are essential to proper operation that evaporate/denature over time.
I have an automatic mechanical watch - a Seiko 5. It loses about 5 minutes a day. It might only need an adjustment to calibrate it, but that would require a watchmaker. I think the last one in town just went out of business, and even if he hadn't, the cost of his labor would be greater than the cost of the watch.
This suggests it's completely out of spec, and maybe beyond saving. However, regulating functioning Seiko movements is certainly within reach for enthusiasts using a timegrapher device, or software with a microphone. Persistently adjusting over a few days, it should be able to get within -10,+10 seconds per day.
The timegrapher will also reveal the condition of the movement and whether further work is worthwhile. Servicing these movements is likely more expensive than replacing them.
It's not hard to make the adjustment, but you need a timegrapher to measure the results in a reasonable time.
I've adjusted a couple of my watches over the course of a week or two by making small adjustments, noting the time, wearing it for a day, and then noting how much the time had changed versus a "known good" time. It's a pain but doable.
There are mobile apps that use the phone's microphone to measure the watch's "ticks" and graph them for you. They aren't anywhere near as accurate as a "real" timegrapher but they'll get you close enough.
At one point I had about a dozen mechanical watches. These days I have three, and only one that I wear almost exclusively. It's a Maratac Mid-Pilot, which uses a Miyota 8245 movement. I've used the "adjust and check later" method to adjust it, and it loses about 10s per week - well within the acceptable range.
The other two that I've kept are a Seagull 1963, which I wear as a "dress watch", and a Vostok Retro 1934, which I sometimes wear when I want a change of pace. It has a white face and I have a variety of brightly-colored straps for it.
One day I'll step up and buy a Hamilton, but I'm still savoring the serotonin from looking at them and anticipating :).
> Also knowing that the thing will last forever, take care of it and it will probably outlive you. Can't say that about an Apple Watch.
I don’t know how many mechanical watches really will last a lifetime, but they will easily last longer than a so-called ‘smart’ watch.
Six years ago I seriously considered purchasing a ‘smart’ watch. Eventually I realised that they were just another money sink and attention leash, and put the money into a couple of automatic watches instead. I still have them, and wear them regularly. Had I bought an Apple or Android watch, I would have replaced it multiple times by now.
That’s the plus side. The minus side is that I don’t wear one of those two every single day because … I gotten bitten by the watch bug, and now I have a pile of other watches, and I wear those too! I still think that I am ahead of the game, though.
BTW, I write ‘smart’ watch because I don’t think they are really that smart; if anything, they should be called unwise watches, because they are an unwise expenditure of resources, money and attention. Also they just don’t look good. I predict that in thirty years we’ll look back on them much as we do digital watches: as a fad.
The minus side is that I don’t wear one of those two
every single day because … I gotten bitten by the watch
bug, and now I have a pile of other watches, and I wear
those too!
This was a big part of the fun for me. Different watches for different days. It's ridiculous, even embarrassing to admit this but -- I feel like the richest, luckiest man in the world when I look at a drawer full of watches from which I can choose each day. As a child I would never have dreamed of it.
In reality they are all very modest watches, most under $100. The entire collection is not worth more than a nice laptop. But whatever.
As a bonus mechanical watches, unless I'm mistaken, will last longer if not running 24/7/365.
Agree with you so much. It still feels absolutely magical wearing one. The SKX007 was my first automatic watch and I wore it daily for 10 years. Incredible thing.
As mentioned the SKX is no longer produced, and the replacements for it are inferior as the 5 series has increased in price beyond inflation and are not true dive watches anymore. Orient is better if you want a dive watch in the spirit of the Seiko SKX.
The best current advice for beginners is probably on the Just One More Watch youtube channel, most watches are in the price bracket that the SKX occupied, and you will learn about micro-brands that exceed Seiko in quality, beat them on price, and under the hood have Seiko movements that are easily replaced & serviced for decades to come.
My Helm Komodo reccomended by Jodi of JOMW gets as much wear as my Rolex Submariner and at a fraction of the price. It isn't the same price or quality, but I enjoy it just as much.
Not to defend Apple watch or other smart watches, but they have been my dream since my childhood watching James Bond movies. So I love both mechanical watches for their engineering and smart watches for what they bring to the table. We dont have to diss one to make the other feel better.
I have a couple of Seiko automatic watches, but I recently picked up an SNK809 as a new daily driver: https://www.benswatchclub.com/blog/seiko-5-military-review. For £120/$130, it's cheap enough to wear every day and it looks great. The amount of mechanical complexity and engineering that goes into it for that price is mind blowing.
I feel the same way, I write software for a living and I'm sure an outsider browsing through the thousands of lines of code in my codebases everyday would be confused, but I get that same feeling when looking at a mechanical watch. To think that people were building the first mechanical timepieces 500 years ago, just a hundred or so years after the printing press is incredible to me. How did they even create parts that tiny so accurately?
This rings especially true when you live and work in an ephemeral digital environment. I find mechanical devices of all kinds grounding. No batteries, no upgrades, no security vulnerabilities, no dependency hell.
Normally I would crap (pretty hard) on web tech, because normally, it's only ever used to make websites harder to follow in the name of design, or to create new ways for ads to be served to me.
This site, and the most recent blog entries on this site, are excellent examples of why web technologies are not all bad. People seeking new ways to make money make everything bad, eventually, and thankfully there are bastions of utility without sales still to be found, sprinkled around.
What is wrong about trying to find ways to produce a nice stuff and keep being to able to pay the rent and raise kids?
I run a small and nice visual weather app for Apple Watch and iPhone (https://weathergraph.app). Some people in reviews object to price, but if I wasn't able to charge a subscription (because weather data costs money continuously), there would be no app. And if I wasn't able to make (about 50 % there right now) a living, I would work for a corporation like I did before, and I wouldn't be able to dedicate enough time to make it great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I'm not talking about people like you who make apps like yours.
I'm talking about companies that make everything they touch demonstrably worse if it earns them any money at all.
there is a very clear line between you and the companies I'm talking about. you provide a service; the companies I talk about are late-stage capitalism monsters who exist solely to provide value to shareholders, and they don't care if they create a dystopia by doing it.
nah, people trying to make enough money don't create Facebook. people trying to have enough to live comfortably don't create Amazon.
monsters create those companies, and monsters grow them.
growing larger and more profitable at any cost is called metastasis, and that's what's happening. lives get worse for most while the cancers grow and grow, almost unabated.
Mechanical watch nerd here. This describe an ETA (swiss) movement, I really prefer the Japanese movement (I know mostly seikos). The mechanism are more simple and more robust.
For instance, on ETA the crown mechanism is really sensitive, a lot of tiny fragile parts with a lot of tension in them, it go wrong easily.
Also, seeing this web page I got frustrated by the fact it doesn't tackle what got me the hardest time: how can the crown move the hands without any clutch mechanism (some have) ?
It's a matter of friction and torque, so it's hard to get while reasoning on a "perfect" mechanism.
It doesn't go into a lot of detail but the article does say:
> Notice that when we turn the minute wheel only the cannon pinion turns. That pinion fits tightly inside its driving gear – it usually turns with that gear. However, when the driving gear can’t rotate because it’s blocked by the rest of the gear train, the cannon pinion can overpower the friction of that tight fit and rotate on its own. This lets us set time without interfering with the gear train, which could break the delicate parts.
Personally, I was wondering how one can wind the watch from the crown without engaging the weight of the autowinding mechanism. I'm guessing that winding with the crown causes the ratchet to slip on both pairs of blue/yellow gears.
That is an absolutely amazing book - how to design and make the highest quality watches from scratch. At the time, all watch fabrication was by division of labor, no one made an entire watch from scratch.
Daniels also wrote a riveting autobiography. He rose from the most abject poverty to world eminence, largely because of the British guild system.
He also collected, restored, and raced old cars. He used to drive his Blower Bentley to his gentlemen's club (!) in London[0]. All this is described in his autobiography.
He needed to do business in Switzerland, so he simply drove his restored Rolls-Royce across the Continent.
My late Uncle Vic taught me how to repair clocks and pocket watches when I was young. I let it go, and returned to re-learning it with this book. I still dream of completing my first, from scratch, pocket watch.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is how the parts were modeled. I asked @BCiechanowski on Twitter and the response was "Modeled in Shapr3D [0], animated manually in JS". Another person asked about the gears, and he said "Gears are just generated programmatically, it made it very easy to tweak their shape as needed".
I'd gladly pay for content like this. It's so informative. I've watched yt channels of people who disassemble and fix automatic watches, but never understood all the intricacies in such detail. This is what journalism, or writing in general, should be about. Explain things and go into details.
I think it also points to compensation for creators, so that they can dedicate their time to creating their works, mattering. I think him being on Patreon, and knowing he can count on income as long as he keeps creating this kind of content, contributes to the quality of what is produced.
I believe when someone no longer needs to concern themselves with financial consequences for taking time out of their day to create content for the public, and knows that there is reciprocity in the relationship between themselves and the rest of the world for whom they produce content, they can dedicate themselves more completely to their craft.
My brother is a watch maker and fixer. It's an art that's becoming rarer and rarer with the advent of smart watches. Although his job is surprisingly secure because very wealthy people tend to pay a lot for their very fancy watches to be fixed or made. It's kind of sad how far we're moving from watches which last hundreds of years as heirlooms with minimal maintenance, to electronic waste generating items with components made as cheaply as possible and at most last several years before their irreplaceable battery dies and you purchase another.
Watches are robust technologies that work without internet connectivity, are crafted/maintained by people paying attention to mechanical parts that are sometimes about as thin as human hairs. Humans have used them for hundreds of years and they are really freaking cool.
If you think the animation is awesome(it is), consider owning the real thing. Not just for my brother's sake, but maybe for your families.
> when we pull the crown all the way out to enter the time setting mode, that stop lever blocks the balance wheel, which stops the watch in an action known as hacking
whoa, is this the origin of the word "hacking" in the "throw something into the wheels to make it work" sense? very interesting.
I believe that for every Bartosz Ciechanowski (huge kudos and thanks to him!) there are 100 similarly abled people, who can't create essays like this, because they need to do something else to keep the lights on. A collective loss.
Wow. I had no idea how intricate and CLEVER the mechanism of a mechanical watch is. Being no engineer, I cannot imagine how someone could think of all these clever designs. (Yes, of course the mechanism evolved over time. Even so.)
I have been wanting to buy an old mechanical watch. When I do, I will never again complain about how much a watch repair shop charges.
Also, the explanation, presentation, and animations are top-notch. Amazing work by the author!!
You know, I had the somewhat opposite impression reading the article. For me, what is interesting isn't the absolute genius of the design (which of course, it is). I find it more interesting that the watch has had enough staying power as a useful machine in society over hundreds of years to have gone through thousands of design iterations to arrive at the "genius" design. If you have enough smart engineers over several hundred years working at a problem, such an elegant design seems almost an inevitability to me.
I would call it "clever" if one or two engineers created this over perhaps a decade or so. With thousands of engineers over several hundred years, however, it just feels like the natural evolution of things.
I feel that a lot of things happening in today's society will be the "watch" in 100-200 years. A marvel of complexity at first glance, and then an acknowledgement of how much "standing on the shoulders of giants" contributes to things that are enjoyed on a daily basis.
This was fantastic, for the first time in my life I actually understood what jewel means and what njewels refers to when it comes to a mechanical watch.
If Bartosz is reading this, I'm genuinely curious how much time did it take him to create this post. It looks like an insane amount of work with all the knowledge acquisition, write up, animation and so on..
If I was born 20 years before I was born I would be able to enroll in clock-making faculty in University of Technology I graduated. They discontinued this faculty, and the only remaining part was a course of precise mechanics I received..
This article is pure gold. It makes me thinking how much of know-how is already lost and how much can we find in some old book stores... I'd buy a book about clock making.
For those interested in watch assembly (I'm differentiating between assembly and watch making), I can highly recommend https://diywatch.club/ I bought one of their kits and was super satisfied with it.
You could do it cheaper by buying random parts off eBay or Taobao, I did this for a second watch - using the following video from the "Watch Repair Channel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rieKmfaKMCY
But having your initial attempt somewhat de-risked gave me the confidence to dive head first into other concepts and ideas.
I'm not quite ready to do a tear down and service of a movement, but with a timegrapher on the way... it won't be long before I'll end up scratching that itch too!
Will we still be able to find and consult this mesmerizing piece of documentation art in let's say .... 100 years?
Pretty sure mechanical watches will still exist then.
Oh, wait, is it same author who wrote excellent GPS explainer?! Yes, it is!
Another masterpiece, then.
I've understand mechanical watch internals thanks to hundreds of hours of procrastination spent on watch-repairing youtube channels, but I wish I had such presentation several years ago.
Same with GPS - I've deep-dive into GPS when I've bought my first receiver, I think in year 2002 or something like this, and it was HARD at these times (there was Internet, of course, but good texts on GPS were very hard to find).
Now, thank you to Bartosz, I have two excellent links to hand out if I'm asked about these topics. I understand them well, but I never ever will be able to explain them so clear and accessible.
> This mechanism protects the fragile tips of the balance shaft from braking when the watch experiences a sudden jerk.
“Breaking”, presumably.
More generally, am I the only one who finds that the temporal aliasing in the fast repetitive animations just before the balance is introduced looks funny to the point of being misleading? Might be my combination of mobile hardware, though, I wouldn’t normally expect it to synchronize to the framerate to this extent, but I’m seeing that it does.
(I appreciate the immense effort it would take to make this account for aliasing with motion blur or similar. I just went “huh?” when fiddling with the speed slider there, because it really was confusing at first.)
Enjoyed this one very much. I am hoping to get a blue dial Orient Bambino to wear for my wedding. I've always loved that watch. I'll have to refer to this article to explain the "but why mechanical.." question.
That's it, this is gonna make me pull the trigger on a skeletonized watch. I've been wanting one for a couple years, but never really sat down and browsed, but I appreciate the mechanics so much more after reading this.
It's like a clear hood on your car. On a nice enough car, it shows the beauty of the engine. But on a cheap one ... Skeleton watches can be uniquely telling of the price of the watch.
Worth mentioning, most mechanical watches will have a sapphire back, so when you take them off you can admire the movement privately.
There are many centuries of engineering behind this. I went to the Museum of Horology in Austria. It has examples of the first mechanical clocks, up to today's timepieces. It is fascinating looking at the giant, wrought-iron town clocks that kept shitty time and bent and rusted, and seeing different parts of the clock evolve over the years, especially as engineering & metallurgy improved.
Really beautiful site. Made my morning. I wear mechanical watches on a daily basis (I rotate between a few Maratec/CountyComm models) I like the size, weight and the sound and the feeling of the counter weight moving around. And the feedback of the bezel as I time an egg or a load in the dryer...
I really like the correspondence between the respect for the ingenuity of this technology and the "handcrafted" WebGL.
Last line:
"With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive."
i'm continuously astounded by how accurate the Omega Aqua Terra is. it will be within 90s over a 30 day period after 4 years of daily use with no servicing. the fact that something mechanical and so tiny operating at 3.5hz can do this is mind blowing to me.
If you want absurd accuracy in a watch powered by mechanical energy (without just resorting to a battery-powered quartz), look into Grand Seiko's spring drive. It's super interesting technology, and the result is a smoothly sweeping second hand (as in it's actually continuous, not merely a higher number of beats per second).
yep, i've considered that one; insane engineering for sure. but the watch's aesthetics don't do it for me. also, it does feel a bit like cheating ;), if an EMP were to go off, i dont think the Spring Drive would come out okay like a purely mechanical watch would.
another crazy one is Zenith's all-silicon oscillator:
To be clear, there are literally hundreds of different models of Grand Seiko watches that are powered by spring drive that have been produced over the past two decades plus, with wildly varying looks across the range. It's not just one watch I'm talking about here.
i probably would not get a watch model from two decades ago, let's limit it to maybe past 5yrs.
most (all?) that i've seen have a power reserve gauge. if it's a daily wearer, that needle will be pegged to max and basically useless clutter. complications for their own sake are not my cup of tea.
most (all?) that have a date function have the extra-wide single digits, which i'm not a fan of.
(i could go on)
i know it's not one model, but there's certainly similar design language to them (as there should be, perhaps), likely due to the geometry of the movement itself. i havent seen anything wildly varying, as you say.
i put on some decent headphones to listen to this and can tell you that at least on my 8800 movement (and the common ETA 2824-2 in another watch i have), this clip misses some important nuance.
both movements have an audible "twang" of the hairspring at each tick -- you can hear it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYCujza8JU. the sound is somewhat different for each watch, since the 8800 has a Si14 hairspring and the cheaper 2824-2 is metal. if you want another rabbit hole: [1]
what's interesting is that if you leave the watches on a hard flat surface, like a table or nightstand, the entire surface amplifies this twang, so you can hear it from several feet away.
Interestingly, I met George Daniels a number of times (creator of the co-axial escapement). He asked me to record a video on my phone of a model he created to illustrate how the escapement works:
What a fanatic writeup. I’ve been fascinated with mechanical watches for what seems like forever. I browse YouTube at night and see collections by Mr. Wonderful and John Mayer (mostly very high end collector grade Rolex, Patek, AP, IWC). I actually splurged and purchased a new Omega Seamaster Professional Diver 300 automatic and absolutely love it. It does have a see-through back making watching the caliber 8800 movement hypnotic.
This article is fantastic. Beautiful illustrations and comprehensive explanations.
Creating something like this takes a lot of work. Consider supporting the creator on Patreon if you want to enable them to create more of these: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski
Since everyone is appreciating the. writeup for details, comprehensive and animation done by author, I was thinking if there is any library/platform to build such tools/animations so that masses of teachers, who can write good content, can write and animate like this. This would really make learning experience impressive.
> Once the pallet fork unlocks the balance wheel, that wheel has to start spinning very quickly. This is why gears in the gear train have holes in them – it reduces their moment of inertia so that the barrel can accelerate them more quickly.
I think that should say "unlocks the escape wheel", not the balance wheel.
This is a wonderful article! Thank you to the author for taking the time to write and animate all this.
I want future generations to have access this so I have to ask - how can I back up this page with all of the interactive 3D animations still operational? Simply saving the HTML file doesn't seem to work.
What an awesome explainer! I love mechanical watches. I have a relatively cheap Stowa Antea which runs a simple hand-wound Peseux/ETA 7001. It’s so thin, the entire watch is less than 7mm thick. All of what you see in this explainer is crammed into that tiny space the size of a stamp.
Really cool stuff. The author has come up with a wonderful way of really imparting an understanding of how things work. I loved the one they did on internal combustion engines.
If there's one thing I'd love to see, it would be a similar breakdown of manual and automatic transmissions.
This bumps up my desire to build my own mechanical watch using one of the kits here: https://rotatewatches.com (something I've had bookmarked for a while as a possible rainy day project)
One of my isolation projects was to put together a watch using an ETA 2824-2 movement from EBay. You might want to consider buying the parts you want individually. Match a case to a movement or it's clone. Find a dial that matches the movement complications and the case diameter. Find hands that match the movement and the case diameter. Most of the work is in the identification of parts, putting the watch together is really just like slapping a small sandwich together (minus putting the second hand on, that... is a test of dexterity, perseverance and commitment, the shaft you have to set it on is ~0.25mm).
Often a seller will be a small time watch maker and their components will all fit together, a good way to save on shipping.
Result: it's become my favorite watch, I wear it every day.
Next project was to use a bunch of cheap clone parts and a 3d printed dial, still working on that one :)
For folks who are interested in the subject matter: electronic tuning fork movements, like the Accutron 214, are amazingly elegant bits of engineering. Both the time regulation and motive power are provided by a tuning fork (vs the balance wheel and mainspring), which is kept oscillating through electromagnetism (vs the escapement) in one of the first consumer applications of the transistor. The movement was designed and started being manufactured in the late 1950s.
This is lovely! While there's a lot of watch content on YouTube, I'm amazed that no one has called out Clickspring's skeleton clock build. It's also a masterpiece, just in a different medium:
This is random, but a lot of these parts exist because of the way it is constructed.
I wonder how minimal this kind of watch could be if you had a unrealistically accurate 3d printer and the design was essentially optimal (done by machine learning perhaps).
Wow, I didn’t expect I would read all that but the visualization was so great and made it easy to follow, I learned more about mechanical watches than I ever thought I would!
If every subject could have visualization like this I could learn anything!
A few months back I stumbled upon a YouTube video of a watch maker servicing a mechanical watch. This started a mild obsession with watch making and I've been watching these videos ever since. For anyone interested, here's an awesome video [1] of a guy putting together a watch and explaining how all 60 parts of a typical mechanical watch work together (by the way the tools he uses are as cool as the movements themselves). It's surprisingly easy to follow for a noobie.
As usual Bartosz with another extremely high quality post, I have one question, in this bit:
> However, when the driving gear can’t rotate because it’s blocked by the rest of the gear train, the cannon pinion can overpower the friction of that tight fit and rotate on its own. This lets us set time without interfering with the gear train, which could break the delicate parts.
How can the cannon pinion (green) both overpower the friction to slide freely and also be attached to the driving gear (blue) when functioning regularly?
Does this imply that the driving gear and cannon pinion wear each other out every time you adjust the time?
I always thought a compass that floats in water, and is also a sundial would be neat. Not super accurate but very good for military, offgridders and preppers, wherever there's limited access to power.
I always enjoy reading these, but this one is special for me because it relates to two back burner projects I'm thinking about recently:
1. building a custom mechanical timer, which I want for practical use.
2. designing a real-world alethiometer - a fictional watch/compass device with chaotic (magical) behavior - which runs entirely on clockwork. I've been wondering how to incorporate a source of significant entropy into a watch movement. One idea, for example, is something like a double pendulum, but made from torsion springs.
Very hard. And it comes at an outrageous price. Independent watchmakers usually go one of four routes:
1) Source a movement from a big manufacturer (eg; ETA/Valjoux or a japanese/chinese movement) and use it as is but design the case/dial yourself
2) (1) but modify the movement adding functionality, replacing parts, or refinishing it to your own standard
3) Designing a custom movement around specialty movement parts from a supplier like Jaeger LeCoultre. They make some of the trickier parts (gears, balance springs). They can also manufacture special parts on a swiss screw machine.
4) Going through a bespoke movement maker like agenhor. You tell them what you want and they have both the machinery to make many custom parts and source the rest from elsewhere. They also provide movement design expertise.
Actually machining the watch parts isn't the hard part... the tricky part comes in things like hairsprings and escapements which are made from sometimes exotic materials like silicon. Some tiny watch parts are made using electrical discharge machining which costs $$$$$$$$ as well.
Looks like a fun website to spend a hour or two. Thanks!
Regarding tolerances, your OPs article states that they were actually able to produce them before, but not at a satisfying quality. I don't know what a 'good enough' quality is, though. It's a good story nevertheless :)
Crazy to see this thing with the spring is constantly rotating so furiously all the time all so just that the second hand would move ever so slowly once a second.
Bug report: the balance wheel animation when run on Firefox on my android eventually becomes a forced oscillator, with the slider running off to infinity
I have a mechanical watch. I wish it was quartz. I simply could not find any quartz watch in a style I liked. I even prefer thin watches.
I feel like the field of actually nicely designed quartz watches is dead from competition with mechanical and smart watches. Where smart watches are just ugly, and mechanical watches look amazing but are more hobby or conversation pieces than actually good for telling time.
As someone who has been into mechanical watches since I was kid, this article is beyond amazing and explains everything about how a watch is powered with excellent interactive diagrams and cool animations. The author should try to go after other areas of mechanical movement like operation of a car or a plane. So well done!
I could post more but just go to the archives and see. Every single one is a treasure and there are few enough that you can read them all: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
This is genius. Attention to detail and quality of the writing and delivery is amazing. The fact that the watch in the first animation also shows accurate time reminds me of the 9:41 in each iPhone screenshot when Steve Jobs was doing the Apple demos. Sweating such details indicates a labour of love.
Mr Ciechanowski's articles are themselves complete works of art. Another brilliant article and collection of interactive animations.
My favourite escapement is the detent escapment. I saw a cutout model at the Imperial Science Museum in London. Even after staring at it for ages I could not figure out how it worked!
In 20 years we will see similar visualizations about car engines which used petrol instead of electricity. We will be awed by the complex mechanisms, which were necessary at that time to make a car drive as we are awed now by the complexities of mechanical watches.
What great work. The only thing I had to read twice was how energy is restored to the oscillation. The text doesn't discuss the role of the slope on the jewel fork teeth. But everything else was so clear as to be transparent. What a loving gift.
I wish there as much detail on the escapement as on the springs. The bouncy sliders are a fun way to draw in the attention but springs are already intuitive... I'd like to see that kind of visualisation effort applied to the harder concepts.
If this makes you think mechanical watches are cool but you don't really want to wear one.. you can go the other direction. Ebay is full of old mechanical driven (be it pendulum or wound springs) wall clocks that are looking for new owners.
This is such an easy to follow understanding on mechanical movements. WOW! From someone who tinkers with watches all the time and has to explain a simple mechanism over and over I've found my resource to send to friends now.
As much as I might like features of smartwatches, my favorite watch is a skeleton style mechanical watch my grandparents bought for me a number of years ago. Watching the teeny tiny gears moving around is somewhat cathartic.
Is there a “gearpunk” hobbyist community anywhere? Where people design mostly un-electrical contraptions or even mechanical computers etc.? Would be a pretty fun and rewarding hands-on craft.
What an insanely cool demo of the workings. This is so informative. I mostly dismiss such stuff thinking I won't understand it but this one was easy to follow even for me. Loved it
Incredible work with this article. I didn't realize experiences like that were even possible in the browser without a whole company backing the effort.
The balance wheel gets a small energy push through the escapement on each tick. The barrel's mainspring has enough force to just kickstart a stopped balance wheel. The balance wheel doesn't really need much "winding" - it's equivalent to the pendulum of a grandfather clock.
It's really fascinating seeing this mechanism alive, even in a simple mechanical kitchen timer with plastic gears. When wound up, the balance wheel starts to swing a little and quickly accelerates on each tick.
Same question. The balance wheel/hairspring has to be losing energy overtime to friction (however miniscule). Otherwise we have ourselves a perpetual motion machine
To add to the other answer, that friction (and the intertia of the balance wheel) is actually factored in when regulating the watch. The pallet fork gives the balance wheel a nudge on every "Tick" then the pallet fork stays stuck until the balance wheel swings around and back and jolts it in the other direction (the tock). Basically a little bit of energy is released from the mainspring via the escapement to the pallet fork to the balance wheel on each tick/tock.
Stuff like this is a smaller percentage of the web these days, but in absolute terms there's more of it than ever before and a lot of it is higher quality too.
All of articles from this blog are worth archiving and putting in a library in this exact interactive form forever. I never understood mechanical watches before. Now I know exactly how they are made possible. Thanks for explaining it visually while interaction with the visuals.
Does anyone know how the author supports themselves? They have a patreon, but it’s not enough to make a living: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski
The hardest part for me when doing open source work full time was giving it up and getting a day job. I was fortunate that my wife was the breadwinner, and that I got to see what it was like to be a stay at home husband. I’ve often wished to go back to it. Did the author figure out a way, or is he wealthy?
He could also be a Superman, being able to do this with a full time job or contracting work.
I spent a few days studying their blog. The work is so good that when I retire, I’ll make a conscious effort to copy their style as closely as possible. It seems like the optimal way to transmit knowledge.
I wish there was an equivalent to YouTube sponsorships for blogs. If this had a 3 minute preroll ad, they would be rolling in money.
They made anywhere from £470 to (using a rough sharp-tail model) £1666 per article.
Whilst I agree that the amount of time required do this doesn't professionally cover that, it's a very nice hobby which makes somewhat real money (very much depending on how many sharp the tail of £54's are) and garners some serious traffic whilst building a very solid credability in the industry.
[1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js