Hard-working Winders for Lazy Users

Now I’m a believer that “Spinners” do exist. These are simply a housing fitted with a toy motor and rotate the watch at a slow RPM the whole day. Below is a description taken from a website…

“Not all watch winders are created or manufactured equal. There are certain heavily advertised lower priced "Automatic watch winders" on the market which are, in essence, simply an ordinary watch storage box with a low quality motor device attached to it. These "spinner" gadgets should not be classified as "Automatic Watch Winders". These gadgets simply "spin" your watches non-stop (some would supply with an external timer to haul the spinning, or you have to manually turn off the device yourself).

While these low quality "watch winder spinners" could serve the purpose initially, be aware that continuous use of these non-stop "spinners" will cause undue stress on your watch's internal mainsprings, and exert unnecessary torque pressure on the moving mechanism of your watch. All these would lead to loss of accuracy of your watches, causing the internal lubrication of the watch movement worn out much faster, and would very likely shorten the useable life of your watches.

Continuous use of these "winding spinners" could result in servicing or over-haul of your watches much sooner than normal. So the small amount of initial cost you saved on purchasing these cheap "winding spinners" will end up costing you much more, in addition to the possible damage caused to your fine watches, and the risk of shortening the useful life of your watches.”

(Ref. www.watchwinderstore.com)

Yesterday, a smartly dressed professional gave me a winder unit for a quick checkup. He explained that he bought this unit without warranty from a local reseller and didn’t want to return it to that reseller for repairs until he got an unbiased evaluation from me first.

He said that after a day of rotating the watches, it (the winder) suddenly went dead at night. And the strangest thing he said was that the LED was still glowing on and off. His rationale was simply… “If the LED is ON, then the watches should be rotating.”

Reaching to find the instruction sheet at the bottom of the box, I found that the manual has a portion that explains, “LED slow blinks in SLEEP MODE”. What this actually means is the unit will go into a prolong rest period once the required Turns per Day is completed. Nice job! This unit is working although not rotating.

I hope owners of winders will not be in the same situation, thinking that a winder should rotate the whole day without any stops. Sometimes manufacturers implement a long pause (sleep mode) in their winding cycles to let the watch mainspring release mainspring torque before winding up again. This will exercise the watch and reduce torque stress.

After explaining to him (and collecting my evaluation fee… chuckle…), he was happy having bought an Intelligent Watch Winder. This is a good winder but he was too lazy to read the operating instructions.