Why aren’t mechanical alarms a thing?
How often do you have to look at your moon phase complication? How often do you use your chronograph? Your GMT function? Your timing bezel?
I guess that for most people the answers would vary between „never“ and „sometimes“.
How often do you use your alarm on a clock or a phone? For most people the answer would be „daily“.
So why aren’t alarm complications a huge thing in mechanical watches? It can’t be that hard to recreate a memovox style complication? A look in the past also shows us that these watches wouldn’t be necessarily enormously sized monsters.
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Chronoking
@Chronomaster
Welcome to my WatchCrunch profile.
Hamburg
Member since
Last active: 14 hrs ago
they are, or at least were a thing.
Top 5 Best Automatic Watches With Mechanical Alarms - WatchReviewBlog
I have my dads old seiko Bellmatic - great thing. Agreed that it’s a complication you’d expect to see more of..
Completely agree. Even analogue quartz watches with an alarm function don’t seem to be easy to find (I’d settle for that if I could find a decent one)
That Merkur is one that recently came out, for £350.
Completely agree. Even analogue quartz watches with an alarm function don’t seem to be easy to find (I’d settle for that if I could find a decent one)
Exactly what I have!
Tag Heuer wac111a from 2001.
Set for 5.30am.... but.... It goes off at 5.30pm too to tell me to stop working and go home if I haven't already.🤣🤣
In a mechanical watch it’s extremely fiddly and power consuming. And ultimately, its loudness is gonna affect other things — like Water Resistance.
I use my timing Bezels on my divers several times a day, and the alarms on my digital/smart watches once a day (and not to wake up even) and largely because I have them set to daily. In ye olde times, I didn’t use an alarm at all, and would turn them off to save battery. Timers are generally more useful to me, whether it be the vibe alarm countdown I set to twenty minutes on my GD350, or some mixture of bezel and chrono when cooking, cleaning, brewing tea, letting things dry, refilling a vape, timing tasks for me, timing tasks for little one…
That only alarm I use? It so I can get bedtime rolling, but in the two years I’ve been using it, it’s been ignored as often, as is more a running joke. A way to say ‘evening is here’.
An alarm clock for waking you up is just louder, no watch alarm has ever woken me.
That Merkur is one that recently came out, for £350.
That one looks pretty neat!
Indeed they do seem uncommon. That's what got me interested in them, and I just bought a vintage Vulcain Cricket. Runs but I'm going to get it serviced so it runs even better. So cool!
Here’s mine. It’s big as it is also highly shock and water resistant. They do smaller dress watches
We need more of these now. I’d rather use that to wake up than my phone
and to comment on using the timing bezel, I use them while I’m cooking. Either for timing steaks, boiling noodles, or when I pop something in the oven.