Why watches need regular maintenance? Today I will tell you why luxury watches need regular maintenance, here we talking from the watch structure.
1. Sealing. Most of the luxury watches are marked as waterproof, as 30m, 50m, 100m and so on. But you can also find some watches are non-waterproof. Caused by watch structures, some are water resistance while some are not, but not the point where non-waterproof watches are not good, plenty of watches on market with only few dollars are also waterproof. Such as, you buy a luxury watch with thousand dollars and wear it in bath, occasionally one or two times of water leaking in you may be not aware of, but a couple times of watering and not timely taking after-treatment may cause rust inside further come out malfunctions, then you come back to store along with your malfuntion watch and requires exchange or fund. On the flip side, you can’t wear any watch (regardless how good or high priced a watch is) to bath or sauna, after the gasket becomes cold, warm air goes inside the gasket and stuck inside, so may lead movement rust or corrosion. Watch only can be worn under normal situations. As a matter of fact, water resistance of a watch is mainly relying on a few tiny gaskets which will be aged over times, so to lose elasticity and occurs gaps, thus the water/moisture may get in. Therefore, regularly change gasket can ensure a water’s waterproof function
2. Mechanical operation. Normal speaking, average luxury watches are mechanical watches that are powered by gear and wheel operation, we can usually see a watch marked with jewels numbers, relatively, a watch with more jewels the watch can live a longer service time. But wheel pinions of the watch can not be made of jewels, it mainly comprises of steel, smaller and thinner watches, the wheel pinions also become skinnier, tens of thousands rotations daily simply depend on a trace of gear oil to decrease wear, once run out of the oil, years later, the watch also dies. Though gear oil is very high-class inside luxury watches, volume is quite small, years later, will be definitely used up, just imagine how long a slim wheel pinion like hair can be worn out? Older watches don’t have complex structure like today’s, they were bigger case with thicker wheel pinions, therefore, some customers may say my watch bought ten years ago without any maintenance and it still keeps running, nowadays, watch becomes smaller and smaller, but price doubled even tripled.
3. Watch surface maintenance. Luxury watches are usually made of K gold, white gold, advanced animal skin. Though main material of K gold is gold, acidic sweat on wrist meet up with corrosive matters in air, it will not look like new as purchase after a while, so it requires regular clean and polish to make it new as before. If it were white gold, the out layer of silver may be worn out after a period time of wearing, inner gold will be exposed, so the watch will no longer as white as before, that’s why we also need regular plating on it. not even mention to straps, corrosive sweat will make strap ageing, hardening, cracking on it, the right way of maintaining strap is try not to wear it under sweaty or rainy conditions. If it were bracelet, timely polish and refurbish can better reflect its value.
So for luxury watches, a proper maintenance really plays an important role to watch value.
