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.
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