The Inbox: Rolex Service Intervals, Innovation In Watchmaking, And The Cost Of Craftsmanship
Welcome to the The 1916 Company Inbox, where we answer questions sent to us by the The 1916 Company community. This week, we’re looking at how to store watches safely, the fine art of regulation, and why servicing your watches is actually a pretty good idea.
I have a Rolex Daytona, purchased new, which has been stored unworn for eight years. Does it need to be serviced before I can wear it?
The short answer is of course, yes, although with some caveats.
The first of these is that Rolex has a quite long recommended service interval relative to the rest of the industry. Two pick two examples, Omega recommends, in general, having your mechanical watch serviced once every four to five years, while Seiko recommends once every three years. Rolex on the other hand, recommends having your Rolex serviced once every ten years. You might think that this reflects a lower confidence in their products on the part of Omega and Seiko but bear in mind that those two companies have a much more diverse range of watches and their recommendations have to cover everything from relatively inexpensive entry level mechanicals, all the way up to and including top of the line high spec sports watches, including divers.
Rolex, on the other hand, has relatively few movements and watch models, and moreover, with generally closely related movements however, the company has made this a strength in that it allows Rolex to both refine technical features in a very concentrated way, and also to maintain best-in-class quality control. As a result, the company can offer a ten year service interval with confidence and the likelihood as with all things Rolex is that the number is somewhat conservative.
That said, I’d have the watch serviced, and certainly if you plan to wear it regularly. It’s true that you could probably put it on right now and wear it without any problems, probably for years. But at eight years, the chances of the watch showing issues related to aging of the lubricants, though small, is not zero and it’s certainly greater than it was when you bought the watch eight years ago. A Rolex authorized service usually takes less time than service from most other brands and spending a little money now would buy you some fairly complete peace of mind for the next ten years. At this point a lot of folks would say, “Well, you wouldn’t expect to drive a car after letting it sit for eight years, would you?” The comparison is not entirely apples to apples, of course, but the general point, which is that machines are happiest when given regular maintenance, is a reasonable one.
Timekeeping has come a long way, and with it newer and more useful complications. But have we reached a point where there are now no more complications to be made? Would any useful complication have been made already? Maybe progress is now seen in things like materials and power reserve?
This is a very good and somewhat long question so I’ll try to give you a concise answer, brevity being, as I’ve heard, the soul of wit.
If you look back at the history of watchmaking, you’ll see that by the late 19th century basically every complication had already been invented. While there have been refinements on all of them ever since, the chronograph, date, perpetual calendar, and repeater were all well understood by then, and while you could argue that some of the refinements to these have been significant and even ingenious (the Agengraphe chronograph caliber is a good case in point) the basic range of complications were all well understood, and miniaturizing them for wristwatches, although challenging, was not a technical quantum leap per se as smaller movements housing these complications already existed (Patek’s first perpetual calendar wristwatch was built around a movement from the late 1800s that had originally been designed for a ladies’ pendant watch).
There are some interesting relative latecomers. The wristwatch world timer, based on Cottier’s design, started to come out in the late 1930s; the first watch capable of tracking 24 hour time in two time zones didn’t come out until 1953 – that was the Glycine Airman; the Rolex GMT Master came out the following year, and in 1959, Patek Philippe launched its first Travel Time wristwatch. I think the difficulties in making an automatic chronograph are underscored by the fact that these didn’t show up until 1969 (I mean, think about it – that’s nine years after the first Accutron and the same year that Seiko launched the Astron) and the annual calendar didn’t come out until 1996, which is a little mind-boggling.
I’m not so sure we’re going to see any dramatic revolutions in materials and power reserve, either. For at least the last twenty years, watch brands have been feverishly combing through various exotic materials from the aerospace and medical industries, and we have an incredible number of industrial ceramics, exotic alloys, and composites used for watch cases and bracelets these days, some of which have surprisingly mundane origins (composites of gold and ceramic were used for dental implants decades before they were used in watch cases). Modern mainspring alloys have made three day power reserves boringly ubiquitous in all but entry level movements and their even torque delivery has long since made constant force escapements and mechanisms pointless from a practical standpoint (although as George Daniels pointed out, for a lot of enthusiasts, the fact that a remontoir is useless merely adds to its charm).
I struggle to think of any technical advances in mechanical horology that could even come close to meeting the performance of Citizen’s solar powered Caliber 0100, which has a precision of ±1 second per year and appears to be capable of running essentially indefinitely without human intervention, or at least until … I don’t know, electron tunneling degrades the IC or something. That doesn’t mean there won’t be more technical innovations in the basics, but from a practical standpoint, a well made modern watch with a good mainspring and well constructed lever escapement is very, very hard to beat.
Hah … so much for brevity.
Do you think there is a “sweet spot” in the market beyond which marginal improvements in craftsmanship start to involve exponentially more money?
Very difficult question to answer because you have to define “craftsmanship first, although hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I’ll give it a shot. I’m going to assume here that you mean craftsmanship as it’s traditionally defined in watchmaking. This includes choosing the best possible materials (high quality hardened steel for pivots, for instance) making components to a high level of precision, assembling and oiling with care, adjusting to the best possible precision, and then, finishing all components both in terms of functional and decorative finishing, to the highest possible degree using the traditional vocabulary of fine watchmaking (which can vary; Roger Smith, for instance, doesn’t finish his watches in the French-Swiss idiom).
Then you have to define what you mean by “marginal.” You can produce a very close approximation of fine hand-finishing using machine tools these days, so let’s say you want to improve on that by doing actual hand-finishing of all visible and non-visible components. This is going to be marginal, to a certain extent, from a finished product standpoint, in that it would take close inspection from a trained eye to reliably tell the difference. However, from another standpoint, it’s anything but marginal since doing such finishing by hand is exponentially more time consuming, and moreover, doesn’t scale, so you get no economies of scale in terms of profit margin.
If you look at it that way, then for sure, a marginal improvement in craftsmanship necessarily involves exponentially more money. Marginal differences in actual hand finishing? That’s trickier and depends on how you evaluate the work – if you have a young watchmaker relatively new to the game, his hand-finishing is probably not going to be as good as someone’s who has been at it for twenty years, although it might be taking them both the same amount of time to do the work (or even less on the part of the expert).
In general, though, especially nowadays, high level real hand craftsmanship is going to cost you. High grade hand finished watches from independent watchmakers are some of the most expensive watches out there right now, even at list.