Almost everything written about buying a luxury watch stops at the moment of purchase. Almost nothing is written about the sixty years afterwards, which is odd, because the sixty years afterwards are the entire proposition. A watch that will not be running in 2090 is not an heirloom. It is jewellery with a complication. Here is what actually happens when a mechanical watch goes in for service, and why the interval matters more than almost any decision you make at the counter.
The Problem Is Oil
A mechanical movement is a machine in which several hundred components, some of them turning at tens of thousands of revolutions per hour, bear against one another continuously for years without ever being switched off. The only thing standing between those surfaces and each other is a quantity of lubricant measured in fractions of a milligram, applied at perhaps a dozen and a half points. Modern watch oils are synthetic and remarkably stable. They still degrade. They oxidise, they thicken, and — most damagingly — they migrate, creeping away from the jewel where they were placed by capillary action and simple time.
What follows is a sequence that any watchmaker will recognise. First the oil thins or wanders. Then the pivot begins to run dry against its jewel. Then friction rises, and the amplitude of the balance wheel falls, and the watch begins losing or gaining time — which is usually the first symptom the owner notices, and by which point the wear has already begun. Then the pivot, unlubricated, starts to cut. Steel abrading against synthetic ruby produces a fine dust which circulates through the movement and accelerates everything. This is the crucial point, and it is why “it still runs fine” is the most expensive sentence in horology. A watch that is running badly is not a watch in need of attention. It is a watch that has been damaged already. The service interval exists to intervene before the pivot is cut, not after.
What a Proper Service Involves
A full service is not a clean. It is a complete disassembly. The movement comes apart to individual components. Everything is degreased, typically ultrasonically, in a sequence of baths. The watchmaker then inspects each part under magnification — pivots, jewels, the mainspring, the escapement — and replaces what has worn. The mainspring is normally replaced as a matter of course; it has spent years being wound and unwound and it has taken a set.
Reassembly is followed by lubrication, and this is where the craft actually lives. Different points require different oils. A dab too much and it will spread where it should not. Too little and you have achieved nothing. The quantities are invisible to the naked eye and applied by hand. Then regulation on a timegrapher, checked in multiple positions, because gravity affects a balance wheel differently depending on whether the watch is lying flat or standing on its crown. The gaskets are replaced, the case is pressure-tested, and — if you have asked for it — the case and bracelet are refinished.
On that last point, a warning. Refinishing removes metal. Do it repeatedly over decades and you will round the sharp edges that were the reason the case was worth something. On a vintage piece, ask for the case to be left alone. Honest wear is provenance. A polished case is provenance that has been sanded off.
The Interval
The manufacturers’ recommendations vary, and they are conservative — most modern calibres will exceed them. Rolex’s engineering is notoriously unhurried in this respect; Omega’s co-axial escapement, which reduces sliding friction at the escapement itself, was designed in part to extend the interval. Complications shorten it. A perpetual calendar has a great deal more going on than a time-only watch, and a chronograph’s clutch is a wearing part by definition. Vintage pieces need watching closely, both because the tolerances have loosened and because the parts, if they break, may not exist any more.
Three habits are worth more than any of this. Wear the watch — a movement left static for years is worse off than one that runs. Keep it away from magnets, which are now in every laptop, handbag clasp, and phone case. And have the gaskets checked before it goes near water, because a watch is only water-resistant until the rubber perishes, and rubber perishes silently.
The Actual Argument
Service is not maintenance in the sense that a car needs maintenance. It is the mechanism by which a mechanical watch becomes the thing it claims to be. Every house selling you heritage is selling you an object designed to be repaired indefinitely — a machine deliberately built so that a stranger, decades from now, can open it, understand it, replace what has worn, and set it running again. That is the whole difference between an heirloom and a possession. It is also the only promise in luxury that requires something from the owner. For the manufacturing philosophies behind the two most commonly serviced names, see our definitive Rolex and Omega comparison.
Service networks and intervals for each calibre are listed at Rolex’s official site.
Featured photo: © Rolex
