Watch winder

My son Jamie loves expensive things, anything from fancy cars to really smart watches. I guess it’s the James Dean or James Bond look.

Anyway, what I didn’t appreciate when we started contributing to his watch collection (one is never enough by the way), is that firstly you need a watch case to show off your prized timepieces, and second, you also need a watch winder. What is that I asked him? Let me explain…..

There are three types of common watch movements: quartz (battery operated),

mechanical (hand-wound) and automatic. Automatic watches are similar to mechanical watches, however, rather than being hand-wound, the spring is wound by a weight or rotor attached to the mechanism which rotates as a result of movement and gravity as it is worn. In essence, as long as the watch keeps moving it will remain wound. If you have one watch, then keeping the watch ticking is no issue, however, once you introduce new timepieces into your rotation, suddenly the automatic watch isn’t moving as much and is becoming unwound.

Some may argue that it’s not a challenge to wind the watch and adjust the watch hands if it becomes unwound. However, watches with a date complication make this a bit more complex. Watches with date complications operate on 24-hour cycles to show the correct date, but will only show 04:00 rather than16:00. If the time is adjusted when the watch is in the early hours, it risks damaging the date mechanism, which one wouldn’t commonly do, unless the watch has sat idle and become unwound and showing say 4 o’clock.

To alleviate the risk of damage to the mechanism and ensure the correct time and date are shown, a watch winder can be used. A watch winder is a sort of watch stand that rotates, allowing the rotor to spin with gravity and therefore winding the spring, and keeping the watch ticking.

Buying a watch winder is not a cheap affair. You can easily spend over £100 which to me seemed rather expensive for such a simple gadget. So, I turned to a well-known search engine and looked for DIY watch winders. Well would you know it, there was a video of someone cutting up an old watch box and inserting into it a small circuit board, motor and

some wires. “This looks like a fun challenge” I said to him. Remember his penchant for all things expensive and nice? “Dad, I don’t want my lovely watches sitting on top of a piece of Blue Peter cardboard and sticky tape”.

“OK, but let’s see if we can source the electrical components” I said to him. He didn’t look convinced, but that wasn’t so hard – 10 mins and about £10 spent in fact. Bingo, we had one of those little round motors that you might remember from Mecchano sets, a small circuit board similar to a Raspberry PI, and some programming instructions. The instructions were really simple – they told the motor to turn x revolutions one way, stop, and then turn y

revolutions the other. That was it, about 5 lines of code that someone had written for us. We just needed to input x and y.

So we had the movement sorted, we now needed something to sit it all in. This is where wood comes in. First up we need to make the cradle for the watch to nestle in. That was simple enough – carve out a small semi-circle rather like a half horseshoe, but if you’ve ever seen a watch in a box, the strap sits wrapped around a tiny pillow. Oh lord, where were we

going to get one of those I thought? Let’s go shopping and start a search through the charity shops. Nope, no chance. Then we stumbled into a sewing shop. That was a laugh. Picture this, middle aged man jabbering on about a tiny pillow to some very amused but helpful staff with a highly embarrassed and uncomfortable son looking on. However, 5 mins later we

emerged with a patch of blue felt and a small bag of wadding. All we needed to do was sew it into a pillow, and that turned out to be really easy too. Mind you, it was the first and probably the last time Jamie will pick up a needle and thread.

Pillow made, cradle made, turning mechanism sorted. Just need something for it to all sit on and hold the turning cradle. This ended up being the hardest part of the whole project because the watch needed to be held at a 45 degree angle so gravity could do its thing, and it was quite heavy. If we wanted to hide the circuit board and motor but have the spindle

long enough to hold the cradle, we needed to be clever.

Design 1 sort of worked, but not well enough. We hollowed out of lump of Oak (much hammer and chiselling), but we couldn’t really get a snug enough fit between the motor and cradle. Design 2 was much simpler and more effective!

You should see the pure joy on Jamie’s face when we finally assembled it all and it worked. Silently his precious watches are kept gently rotating. The final step was working out how to turn it off so it only came on for an hour or so a day. He rather cleverly simply plugged the whole arrangement into a smart plug which he has on a timer coming on at short intervals through the day.