What Grinds My Gears: part 2

biggest issue to me on the water rating is the lit’s. 30m means you can wash your hands with it only!?

if 30m meant 30m I would never need more!

I actually like the text on the dial. It’s like cars that have the engine size/model variant on there. It’s not necessary but I’d rather know than wonder. 
 

Agree on the snowflake hands tho. That’s just a square. I’m glad I’m not the only one who had that thought 😂😅

I love how I looked at that Rolex and heard a symphony of brass instruments blasting the opening theme to StarWars in my head.  

I have never even agreed with myself as much as I agree with every word of this, and I‘m brilliant. 😜. The idea that I’m a dummy because I always have to remember what the water resistance numbers mean, and then have to hear how it’s affected by whether I do the crawl or the butterfly makes me nuts.

Water resistant rating on the dial is same as having vtec written all over your Honda Civic Si.

Stowa offers a sterile dial option on most of their watches....just sayin'

Ya but you don’t want Seiko or Grand Seiko putting the model name on the dial cause it would be gibberish to most people like SBGA415….etc, etc. I think Grand Seiko does it right with the logo at 12 o’clock and just  Spring Drive at 6 or Hi-Beat 36000, etc. They let the dial speak for itself. 

Agree about WR rating. Should just say either "okay to wash hands and swim", "okay to wash hands, not okay to swim", or "don't wash hands or swim" on the dial 🙉

See, it can be done, it’s not too difficult to deliver.

True story about those model names, we can leave those out. But even having Spring Drive is too much. I already know it’s a Spring Drive because I can’t take my eyes off the second hand.

Progress is the name of the game, not digress.

Mine reads:

Automatic
Hi BEAT 36,000
GMT

Three lines. I don’t care jot, but just saying. 

Depends on the model. My SBGA413 just says Spring Drive at 6 and my SLGH005

Hi-Beat 36000 

80 Hours. 

But it’s so small that it’s doesn’t muck up the design. IMHO

I promise I won’t ask your thoughts on my Pelagos LHD with all 3

Snowflakes - this was the nickname they were prescribed by fans of the hands 50 years back, NOT Tudor. The increase surface area of lume allowed for better legibility at low light.

Water resistance is not a lie, but technically you shouldn‘t be wearing your dress watch in the bath. It’s not always on the dial, sometimes it’s on the back, but if you need to be reminded where is the easiest place to put it… oh yeah, the dial. Which leads me on to…

Dial text appeals to a lot of watch people, and has been a staple since the 1940s. It obviously works, otherwise they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t shift units. Blame watch buyers.

Blame Rolex for the precedent of extra text on the dial.

I was going, at great peril to my person, to stop you halfway through the Tudor thing to mention that it's usually watch dorks that make up the names for everything.  It's not watch companies that decide watches need names like Hulk and Smurf and all that other stupid sh*t.  But I see you got it.

The missing 3 completely ruins that watch for me. It just looks really unbalanced. However, I do like the little outline around the date window. 

Dial text depends on the watch. I can't think of a mechanical product that doesn't have something slapped on it cars, aircraft, boats, even rockets. Why do professional athletes have their names on their jersey?  It's the pros after all = best of the best. We know em' when we see em'. Water resistance doesn't matter to me. I learned to dive when watches & plastic dive tables were actual dive tools. I actually prefer a minimum of 100m water resistance on any watch I own. Back in those early days of diving it was taught that gear with greater tolerances/tighter specs typically failed less & lasted longer. I don't understand why any watch over $100.00 doesn't have at least 100m water resistance. The tech, the metallurgy, and decades of experience, are all there . Watch manufacturers made water resistance a big deal. Since they started the craze they should  build all watches with better tolerances and standards.   It's easy to do in 2022 almost 2023. Watch companies are lazy    

I wholly approve this message.

I also want to present the counter argument from the watch industry POV.

Snowflake hands: Yes, they only have 4 sides and they don't even look like a snowflake. It's true that they are also kinda fugly but we needed something to stop looking like Rolex second best, Seiko already used the cathedral hands in their Alpinist, and it turn out that some of you do like this shape. So that's what we chose and some idiot decided later on calling them Snowflake because road hazard sign hands was too long.

Water Resistance (WR): You got us here. WR is a scam, try and redeem a warranty for a water damaged watch if you don't believe it. At first we though of using a more appropriate rating of 

• Don't even think of sneezing near it
• May be used near a faucet
• Safe for taking a bath
• Can do dishes with it

But our marketing department thought it was too demeaning and inferred that you might be too poor to own a dishwasher.

Too much text on the dial: Oh really? So you don't want to be our advertising billboard? Just remind us who you are the next time you step in and ask for a trade-in or any other kind of discount. That should teach you a lesson.

Snowflakes for reference.  If you run a hand thick watch hand vertically through fig. 1 or horizontally through fig.2.  you get your covered vertices.  Snowflakes still have six points.  The universe is back in balance.

It’s fine to not like them, because I don’t. Despite the increased legibility in terms of lume, I’m not a fan of effectively a large block of Swiss cheese slowly working its way around the dial, it does look out of proportion (to me). The naming is not a Tudor thing. 
 

Watch fans are daft (and that has got me in trouble so many times on here) and unfortunately they are responsible for a lot of tropes. On the whole, we like certain things and the brands pander, then we moan, they give us what we need, and then we buy the same stuff as before; case in point, the Tudor North Flag and the Black Bay. We all demanded an affordable steel sports with Explorer II leanings, and yes please with your in-house movement, they gave us the North Flag, no one bought it, and we all dived in on the BB and yet another Rolex-clone (from Rolex anyhow as it is Tudor, but I digress). Now there are 2000 different models of BB and the North Flag is all but forgotten in the current zeitgeist.

shrugs 

There are other watches with similar dial layout, so the missing 3 isn't a big deal to me. 

Though I get what you say. Lose the date, put a 3 and bam, get a share of the explorer market. 

Yeah it’s just the other numbers on the dial are so large it exaggerates the missing 3. 

I might start to call that a diamond. Squished square that it is.

Ooooo! Can we blame Rolex for that?! I'll grab my pitchfork.

Thanks to one of our diligent historians. That's why we post things here on WC, for clarity, and public scrutiny. Like low level peer review.

Depth ratings pretty much mean a watch can resist water intrusion if it's motionless, i.e. not one your wrist & moving in the water. When you start moving your hand, the pressure increases, so they rating is useless. I wouldn't trust a 3 bar rating swimming in a pool.

Agree with that one, though I would prefer minimal or the right amount of text instead.

The "Snowflakes hands" look like a Mallet