Feature: Never Do This With Your Watch

It may be a centuries-old technology, but a mechanical watch isn’t indestructible. An object capable of surviving the briny depths or the vacuum of space still has a few weak points that, at some time or another, you may unwittingly exploit. Well, just in case the situation ever arises, here we are to save your bacon with three things you must never do with your watch.

Never Skip Loctite When You Adjust Your Bracelet

If you’ve ever adjusted your bracelet before—you know, unscrewed a link and made it longer or shorter—you will probably now be wondering what on Earth I think I’m doing introducing a never-never about adjusting a bracelet. It’s easy, right? Carefully, and with the proper-sized screwdriver, remove as many long, thin screws—by turning anticlockwise, of course—as needed to take out or add a link, and then reverse the process. A little fiddly because of the scale, for sure, but well within the realms of most people’s ability.

Well, the never-never isn’t so much about what can happen during the adjustment, but after. You see, moving parts, like bracelet screws, have the annoying habit of obeying the laws of entropy—that is to say they seem to be constantly trying to reduce themselves to their component parts. Think about the twisting motion that is constantly acting around those pivot points—sooner or later, perhaps very soon and perhaps very much later, they are going to try and work that screw loose.

And you don’t need me to tell you that the last thing you want is a bracelet screw dropping out. The threads only tend to be a few millimetres long, so noticing a loose screw would be tricky, and when it goes, you can most certainly guarantee that lady luck will have you pointing at something over the edge of a cliff as it does, plummeting into the briny ocean to become nothing more than a line on an insurance claim form.

The solution? It’s simple really, and the same one manufacturers like Rolex use in the very construction of the watch: Loctite. This is a specially designed thread locking liquid that will ensure your screw only comes loose when you want it to. Now, make sure to use Loctite 221 or 222, the low strength formulas, or you might find your bracelet that size forever. A little dot of Loctite on the thread, as per the instructions, and you’ll be good to go. Never be without it.

Never Try To Get The Crown Logo Straight

How often have you heard the complaint, “All that money and the crown on the logo doesn’t even line up!” You have to be a certain type of person to be bothered by the alignment of the crown motif and, more often than not, if you’re the kind of person who’s into luxury watches, you will probably be that guy too. Me—I am that guy.

So why can’t manufacturers get their crowns straight? Well, if they’re not screw down, it’s no problem, they can be aligned however which way. The difficulty comes with crowns that seal with a compression thread. The screw down seal itself is a technology first patented in the 1870s by a fellow of the name Aaron Dennison, a name we’ll see again in a moment.

An evolution of a screw down cap that went over the crown to seal it, the screw down crown combined both into one, cleverly taking advantage of the binding compression of a screw thread to seal against a gasket. But hold up! Didn’t Rolex invent that with the 1926 Oyster? Not quite. Rolex was the first to utilise this technology in the wristwatch specifically, a design unpopular at the time. And who was Rolex’s case supplier in the early days? Well, that would be Dennison, of course, with the idea later refined by case manufacturers Borgel and Perregaux and Perret.

Not much has changed with that technology since. Extra gaskets, maybe, advanced gasket materials less prone to perishing—but the core principle remains. The problem with that is that the crown aligns however the crown aligns. And even if it were somehow aligned from the factory, the compression of the gasket over time would slowly cause it to change by just enough to really get under the skin of people like me.

So, here’s the advice: don’t worry about it. If you do try and align it, either by not screwing it down enough or screwing it down too much, you either run the risk of letting moisture into the watch and damaging it or stripping the threads and crushing the gasket and damaging it, both resulting in a very expensive bill of repair. Best just to let sleeping crowns lie.

Never Try To Polish Out Marks By Yourself

For owners of expensive watches—and especially ones that appreciate—the biggest dilemma is actually wearing it. The pristine metal, gleaming polish, delicate brushwork—if any of it gets marked, it could devalue the watch. And wearing a watch will mark it, from the light swirls gathered from the interactions between your clothing and your desk that only show under certain types of light, to the craters pockmarking the surface from larger, more wince-worthy impacts.

They are inevitable. For collectors of vintage watches, they can tell stories of the watch’s past, add credibility to its existence. The paddles will certainly be waving at auction for a suitably worn example owned by a COMEX diver, for example. Nevertheless, the pain at laying down that first imperfection is real. I’ve seen grown men break down and cry taking off the pristine edge of a Audemars Piguet Royal Oak bezel. Okay, that grown man was me, and I’d probably cry again if I had to go through it a second time. But once it’s done, it’s done. Over. Move on. Life continues.

Ah, but that’s not how our brains work, is it? All of a sudden, we’re on Google wondering just how hard refinishing can really be. We’re three lines into an article about removing fine haze from a Perspex crystal and we’re thinking, “I can use this!” Well, let me tell you from experience—we can’t. With hindsight and the benefit of an Audemars Piguet authorised service centre in the next room, I can tell you that refinishing a watch is far from simple. Even for those who can do it, it’s not simple. There’s a tonne of training and a lot of testing and it’s gruelling and relentless. Not to mention the tens of thousands of pounds worth of equipment needed, too.

You, me—we have none of that in our personal arsenal. Take it from me, if you try to remove a mark on your watch, even a small one, you won’t make it disappear, you’ll make the problem larger. It’s a downhill spiral from there, because now you’ve got a bigger patch to fix, and it’s only going to keep on getting bigger. Just, no matter how tempting it is—just don’t.

Ah, hindsight. If only time travel were possible, and those mistakes made in years gone by could be avoided altogether rather than forming part of a rather large compendium of things I know better about the second time around. For me, that’s the status quo, but perhaps if I can impart that information to you now before it happens to you—if indeed it ever does—karma will be kinder to me next time. Probably not.

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