Quote:
Originally Posted by brianeck
I mean the biggest thing for me is that I wear my watches ALL THE TIME. Shower, hot tub, sauna, whatever. . . Water Resistance and heavy water resistance at that is key. I don't like leather bands for the same reason. I bought a fake Patek Phillipe that I would have totally rocked as a dressier go to. It was automatic and even had a moon calendar complication. What it lacked was the 50m WR property that the real watch had. First day in the shower and that was it! I've trained myself to never take watches off. I'm left handed and I've been doing it so long I'm pretty sure my right wrist is actually thinner then my left wrist haha.
Bottom line for me is I'd rather buy a 200-300 Seiko that won't break when I forget to take it off or get pushed in the pool!
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A few points:
- Water resistance (WR) is largely a function of the pressures per square inch that the watch case -- mostly the crystal -- and the gaskets/seals around the crown/pushers can withstand before giving way.
- Gaskets, no matter the extent of WR, eventually dry out and crack, thus allowing water into the watch. Soap and shampoo that contacts and remains on gaskets will hasten the drying process. I can't say by how many days, months, years, etc. Also, strong collisions -- like dropping the watch, or banging into a door or or other object -- can unseat a gasket and compromise the watch's WR.
- The lack of any openings into the movement section of the watch, and therefore no gaskets, case is why Pita's Oceana is water resistant to 5000 meters. That's how deep the watch can go before the crystal cracks. The movement is housed in a solid steel container and is moved using magnets that I think are in between the movement housing and the outer case body. (You can check Pita's website for more details on how exactly it works.)
- Water will absolutely destroy a running quartz movement. Pure H2O isn't itself harmful to a mechanical watch's movement, and it shouldn't affect a quartz movement that's not running.
- Water can do major damage to dials. It can cause enamel to bubble, transport oils to the dial and stain them, and more.
- The concerns with water and mechanical watch movements are:
- As it flushes in and out of the watch, water'll carry the lubricant out of the watch. With no lube, friction is greater and the watch parts wear more readily.
- It just takes miniscule bits of moisture to initiate oxidation on tiny, thin watch parts, which is why many watch parts are rhodium plated; it's very resistant to oxidation.
- Water generally has certain impurities in it. If those impurities, particulate matter as well as chemicals, are left on certain parts, they can also cause corrosion, which will also hasten wear/abrasion
- The short is that if anything gets inside a watch, one needs to go to a watch repair shop right away so that minimally the watch can be dried out, cleaned, and re-lubricated.
- If you wear your watch for extended periods in a a hot tub and sauna, it's extent of water resistance won't be what eventually causes you dismay. The problem is the glue that holds the crystal affixed to the case. Repeated, long exposures to rapidly changing hot and "comparatively" cool temperatures will cause the glue to fail. When it does fail, moisture will enter the watch.
- Whatever WR a watch has will be sufficient for almost all water-related activities one performs at sea level, provided the watch's WR hasn't been compromised by human error or dried out gaskets, glue or seals. Diving, particularly high diving, into a body of watch is the one potential exception. The reason for that is the immediacy of the change in water pressure. The collision with the water's surface can produce pressures greater than the actual pressure at the depth to which the diver descends.
- No extent of water resistance obviates the need to regularly have a watch's water resistance checked and restored as needed. It's simply not the case that watches with 600 meter WR will retain their WR capability longer than watches with 30 meter WR.
And now a question for you: how do you and your watch come by so much heavy water that you need heavy water WR?
All the best.