Zenith – Champagne Gem

Hi Jewelristas,

It has been a long time since I wrote about watches and tonight I am in the MOOD finally to write a long post on watches only! remember the post on PANERAI?

There are so many terms and definitions in watchmaking that I don’t know their meaning too and now we are going through most of them together:

Movement: The mechanism that measures the passage of time and displays the current time.

Mechanical movement: is a watch that uses a mechanical mechanism to measure the passage of time

Mechanical movements are less accurate and often with errors in seconds per day, though require constant maintenance and adjustment but public are so attracted to them beside all the above facts and high prices for one reason: Craftsmanship!

additional functions on a watch besides the basic timekeeping ones are traditionally called complications. Mechanical watches may have these complications:

Automatic winding or self-winding—in order to eliminate the need to wind the watch, this device winds the watch’s mainspring automatically using the natural motions of the wrist, with a rotating-weight mechanism.
Calendar—displays the date, and often the weekday, month, and year. Simple calendar watches do not account for the different lengths of the months, requiring the user to reset the date 5 times a year, but perpetual calendar watches account for this, and even leap years.An annual calendar does not make the leap year adjustment, so the date must be reset on March 1 every fourth year.
Alarm—a bell or buzzer that can be set to go off at a given time.
Chronograph—a watch with additional stopwatch functions. Buttons on the case start and stop the second hand and reset it to zero, and usually several subdials display the elapsed time in larger units.
Hacking feature—found on military watches, a mechanism that stops the second hand while the watch is being set. This enables watches to be synchronized to the precise second. This is now a very common feature on many watches.
Moon phase dial—shows the phase of the moon with a moon face on a rotating disk.
Wind indicator or power reserve indicator—mostly found on automatic watches, a subdial that shows how much power is left in the mainspring, usually in terms of hours left to run.
Repeater—a watch that chimes the hours audibly at the press of a button. This rare complication was originally used before artificial lighting to check what time it was in the dark. These complex mechanisms are now only found as novelties in extremely expensive luxury watches.
Tourbillon—this expensive feature was originally designed to make the watch more accurate, but is now simply a demonstration of watchmaking virtuosity. In an ordinary watch the balance wheel oscillates at different rates, because of gravitational bias, when the watch is in different positions, causing inaccuracy. In a tourbillon, the balance wheel is mounted in a rotating cage so that it will experience all positions equally. The mechanism is usually exposed on the face to show it off.

Electronic Movement: can be completely electronic with no moving parts which is called Quartz and works with battery, plus shows the most accurate time.

I think I covered most of the parts that you should know about watches, the decision is up to you but try to be creative when it comes to watch brands and go for the ones which are less known to public! be unique…

Here are some fascinating watches which are one of a kind in terms of their craftsmanship and technique!

Enjoy

xoxoxoxox

Bebe

p.s. All the photos and prices are courtesy of World Tempus!