hell yeah i love "horology", love to do scientific study of whores
FreedomBliss 2012 Damn, this comment section is woke as hell ! +12 upvotes
Dave C Agree, and high dislike ratio on a very well produced visually beautiful video. These are not George Daniels sympathizers, they're just Omega haters. +4 upvotes
Boy McFacto Dave C no one has anything to gain from just hating omega and most don’t hate it. Stop being a dumbass. The fact of the matter is a reference to George Daniels’ contribution is clearly owed here. +1 upvotes
Watches, watchmaking, and horology is such a frustrating topic. On one hand its a beautiful, thoughtful art in both design, manufacture, and repair/service.
On the other hand, its dominated by the worst bourgeois elitism. Not even rich guys who own and drive race cars are as elitist as some guy who buys 4 15k rolexes so rolex lets him buy the 20k watch he wants.
Any talk of cheaper movements is scoffed at because it loses 3 seconds/month. Like dude you have an electric winder, most people just have their watches wind down and are set again when you put them on.
One of the best examples is the Soviet Vostok watches, and their design philosophy. Soviet tools weren't as good as swiss tools, so they couldn't copy a design, so they made their own that keeps great time, needs servicing every 10 years, rather than every 3, and competes in water-tightness with industry giants by just using the pressure of water to improve water-tightness and seal rather than a convoluted positive pressure system that makes a watch even MORE expensive and impractical to own and use.
Theres a few videos of watchmakers taking them apart and reviewing them and its obvious they can't find anything really wrong with them, they just lack the unnecessary build quality of a piece that costs 100x as much. Yet 40 year old vostoks can be wound and ran with decent accuracy without fear of destroying the internals because the tolerances are slightly bigger and less damage is done by metal particulate when the works are dirty.
Edit: an anecdote. I was in vegas once getting my value out of giant alcohol slushy refills and I walked by a panerai shop. No way I could afford one but I went in to look anyway. The one guy in there asks if I want to try one on and I take off my vostok, and the dude was more interested in the vostok than the unrealistic expectation of selling me a watch on credit. Still working class in the end I guess.
That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I've found that the communities who genuinely love horology to be extremely friendly places, ie "watchrepairtalk.com" while the places devoted to oogling collections have constant ongoing internal drama and awful culture, ie "watchuseek".
watchrepairtalk.com is the only time on the internet I've had a turk, an iranian, an englishman, a german, and an american all try really hard to help me diagnose and solve problems.
I'd be seriously interested in reading that.
I got into watches because I inherited some old mechanical pieces from the 50's that belonged to my great grandfather. An auto timex and a manual wound aureole. The timex being a timex can't be serviced but it keeps great time, the auto-rotor just wallered itself out a bit so it rattles. I got the aureole fixed and was absolutely fixated by it.
I got a couple Vostoks and years later decided to learn how to fix them, because a service is about 3x the cost to buy a new one, but they're not disposable pieces whatsoever. Turns out you can buy beat to shit vostoks from Ukraine for basically 2-5 bucks a watch and tear into them till you're blue in the face. I moved onto working on some old american and swiss pieces, did a small repair on a 70's tissot with a worn out cannon pinion and did a full service and polish on my late grandmothers tiny bulova as a gift to my sister.
To get the proper screw drivers, tweezers, oils, etc was a bit expensive, but not more than a single service. Nothing beats just getting in the zone for 4 hours meticulously taking apart and cleaning each piece, and slowly putting it back together, oiling to spec, and watching it come back to life. Jeez I honestly miss it a lot but my new apartment has all carpet floors and I'd lose an incabloc spring or jewel in an instant.
I've got a ~40 year old Vostok and wear it every day. It's really nice, keeps great time.
They're wonderful watches and I swear by them. I'm wearing one right now.
Not for nothing, but before the invention of the quartz watch, accurate and synchronized time keeping was a big deal, it’s what Rolex and Omega made their reputations on.
That’s why pilots wore them, that’s why divers wore them. That’s why Castro wore them.
Then after the invention of the quartz watch, an even more accurate form of time keeping was made available for all, so to stay in business, watchmakers pivoted to being a luxury good. And this happened with everything.
Leicas, for instance, used to be THE only camera if you were doing photography, then SLRs came out and many photographers became corksniffers to justify not switching over to the more accurate system. But they would lose sales, cause they’re very expensive compared to the cheaper Japanese camera systems that democratized photography. Then they made the M6 which I’ll say was their pivot to luxury goods.
hell yeah i love “horology”, love to do scientific study of whores
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Mechanical watches are awesome works of art. Too bad its such a bougie scene.
If you like watch mechanics and don't necessarily need or want them on your wrist, and somehow you've got money to spend, I've heard that pocket watches are a buyers market now with all the old folks and/or their kids selling their collections. I have no idea where prices start though.
