The Secrets To Orient Movement

Mechanical Movement

Only the mainspring provides energy to a mechanical watch. The orient movement, made up of hundreds of components, is sometimes referred to as the “heart” of the timepiece. The beating of the heart when the mainspring is wound by hand at the crown gives a hand-wound mechanical watch a special, humanlike quality. As opposed to a self-winding mechanical watch, where the mainspring is wound by the wearer’s arm movement, this one must be wound by an external source.

You can tell the quality of a mechanical watch by its craftsmanship and its ability to last for decades without malfunctioning. If taken care of, each of these objects can be passed down through the generations and become treasured keepsakes.

In order to precisely record your life’s fleeting moments, a mechanical watch relies on the coordinated efforts of its many moving parts.

Quartz Movement

Even though there are three separate varieties of quartz watches, they are all powered by automatically winding batteries. While analog quartz watches are similar to mechanical watches in that they use gears to convey energy, they are powered by batteries and oscillate using a quartz crystal to ensure accuracy. Rather than relying on gears for motion, the electrical circuitry of a digital quartz watch is what makes it tick. And the solar cell beneath the dial of a solar quartz watch charges the battery using ambient light. They are characterized by their use of either a battery or solar power, and they can be either analog or digital.

Hand-Winding Movement

For optimal performance, wind your hand-wound mechanical watch every day at the same time, whether you plan to wear it every day or only for special occasions.

There are three primary components that determine the orient movement of a hand-wound mechanical watch. The mainspring, the primary component, stores energy and is coiled by gently winding the crown. To power the watch hands, you have to manually wind the mainspring, which stores the energy until it is transferred to the gear wheels. The escapement is the mechanism that transfers energy from rotary to reciprocating motion. The third component, the balancing wheel, receives power at the same time to maintain the rotary motion. The precision is preserved by the balancing wheel’s back-and-forth motion. The hairspring, a finely calibrated balance, maintains time precision. Each wheel of the train has a set of hands to represent the time.

Self-Winding Movement

Automatic, or self-wound, mechanical watches are convenient for the modern wearer who doesn’t have time to manually wind their watch every day. When worn, the watch will keep ticking regardless of whether the wearer is touching it. The most accurate time may be obtained by wearing it continuously for at least eight hours; it has a standby time of roughly 40 hours.  Three basic components determine the orient movement of a self-wound mechanical watch. The first component is the rotor, a semicircular piece held in position by a ball bearing that rotates to wind the mainspring via the wearer’s wrist motion. The second piece is an eccentric pin that swings the rotor by using gravity to turn a pivot. The rotor’s rotational force is sent to the third component, a ratchet, which is a winding mechanism connected to the other parts. Being an additional mechanism, the ratchet makes a self-wound mechanical watch bulkier to wear than a hand-wound one.