Balance out of poise?

[padi56]

Originally Posted by sevykor

Thank you in advance for your help. I picked up a 16610 (2006) with a +20 second daily rate. Took it back to the seller (jeweler with a “watch guy”). Offered to regulate the watch. 20 minutes later, he showed me watch running at about 1 second fast. Let the watch sit for a 24 hour period and confirmed excellent time keeping. Wore the watch and noticed an increase, depending on the day, 4 to 8 second increase per 24 hours. I intend to have it serviced in the near future, and I don’t have access to see if watch had been serviced recently.

Could the watch be out of poise? If case back interior shows a recent service date, could the issue be microstella unequally adjusted and would it be easy to balance out the wheel without too much trouble (ie. significant hours spent)? Would you tell a watchmaker that the balance wheel may be out of poise or is that checked during servicing? My concern is that the person doing the adjusting wasn’t careful with equal adjustment of the balance wheel.


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Gravity affects mechanical watches the most thats why they are tested in 5 different positions,and in those different positions there will be slight deviations in the timekeeping.Remember this the escapement of a mechanical watch in 24 hours pushes the gears 432,000 times and a day has 86,400 seconds. But on the wrist with owners wearing habits given the fact that the movement is constantly affected by the earth's gravity, metal expansion and contraction,mainspring power-reserve, temperature variations, subtle changes in lubrication and friction, shocks, and so on.The fact is that no mechanical watch made will keep 100% perfect time, very close yes but perfect no myself would not worry about those few seconds,the COSC spec is a AVERAGE of -4 to +6 over 24 hours.

Today regulation is a very very simple task for any good watchmaker,its accomplished by turning the Microstella adjustment screws and nuts on the balance wheel.The two smaller Microstella screws make adjustments of one second for each turn on the tool, and the larger Microstella, two seconds for one turn on the tool,but adjustment must be balanced with the opposite gold adjustment screw.

Microstella tool this is the older tool Rolex now has a more modern one but it does the same job and adjustment is done the same way.



Balance-wheel.

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