Are affordable auto watches essentially disposable?
No snobbery intended.
Mechanical movements are supposed to be serviced every 5 years. Many affordables are around $200-300. A service is $150-200.
So by the time you reach servicing age the service probably costs more than the watch is worth. Do people bother?
I started my collection buying cheap mechanical watches but now I’m a few years in, servicing seems not worth it. May try to go for fewer (1-2) more expensive mechanicals and stick to quartz for cheaper watches.
Thoughts?
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Luke
Welcome to my WatchCrunch profile.
London, UK
Member since
Last active: 1 week ago
7.00” / 17.78 cm
The movements are not cost effective to service below a certain point. The rest of the watch should be fine though.
Somewhere there should be a dropbox for all the busted lower end movements so that budding watchmakers can try their hands at what would otherwise be landfill fodder.
For those with the skill to do so, replacing the movement is much cheaper than servicing.
For others...they probably just let it ride until it stops. Some of these watches will run for decades.
The movements are not cost effective to service below a certain point. The rest of the watch should be fine though.
Somewhere there should be a dropbox for all the busted lower end movements so that budding watchmakers can try their hands at what would otherwise be landfill fodder.
Great idea!
The movements are not cost effective to service below a certain point. The rest of the watch should be fine though.
Somewhere there should be a dropbox for all the busted lower end movements so that budding watchmakers can try their hands at what would otherwise be landfill fodder.
There is. It's called ebay😜
I wish I knew of a place to get a full service for 150-200 bucks!
Good looking San Martin!
Yes, like cheaper quartz , uneconomical.
I've got 60 yr old Russian watches that still run fine (and a couple that are flaky), so I'm not expecting any of the newer ones to seize if they're not serviced after five.
That’s a difficult question. I have one cheap watch with simple ETA movement - I serviced it and will keep doing so only because watch holds sentimental value to me.
But I somewhat support argument that service wise - it might be more reasonable to opt for pricier watches with standard movements (ETA, Sellita, Soprod, Miyota). High end watches would likely have in-house or highly modified base movements brining service costs higher.
Modern movements are so robust you shouldn’t need servicing for decades, in fact.
Almost all of my mechanical watches are too cheap to make a service economical. I had some of them serviced anyway, to a large extent as an experiment to see what difference a service would make. 3 of those watches were vintage watches (ebay buys), and 1 was a modern Chinese watch.
Cost: £150-230 per service; on average, the service cost me about 4 times the value of the watch.
The results: one vintage was deemed unrepairable (I was not charged for that); I actually suspect that the service took a badly running watch and turned it into a broken one; a second watch was deemed repaired but barely runs (it is now back with the watchmaker), and the third vintage was also deemed serviced but the timegrapher can barely tell the difference between before/after the service [high beat error, low amplitude, accuracy poor]. I am not impressed.
The modern Chinese watch had been improved. Not so much the accuracy (that got slightly worse by the service), but the amplitude is now through the roof and the thing finally has a decent power reserve which was the main reason for the service. Seems the movement came unlubricated from the factory.
I wish I knew of a place to get a full service for 150-200 bucks!
Cheap servicing does not always mean quality servicing, right? 😂
Cheap servicing does not always mean quality servicing, right? 😂
No-it usually means sevicing by an unqualified hack