Reply To: Any intermediate quartz watch DVD’s??

[david pierce]

Watchdogg,
I know of two sources for this. One is the New England School of Watch Repair and the other is Watch Repair In A Box by Dan Gendron. The equipment to analyze a quartz movement is expensive. The good news is, the entire quartz movement can be purchased for @ $6.00 up to about $50.00. The average life of a quartz movement is about five years so it would be pointless from a financial standpoint to replace a part in the movement. If you replace a damaged gear and the circuit fails in a year or two the repair effort was wasted. There are only a few companies that manufacture the movements for all quartz watches regardless of the price of the watch. From what I can tell the way to repair a quartz watch is replace the battery. If it still does not work replace the movement. If the crystal is defective and you replace it, how are you going to access the software in the chip to adjust the counting registers for minor frequency variations. The factory that manufactures the movement can afford this equipment and has the techanical expertise to ensure that the movement keeps proper time before it is sold.
A mediocre quartz movement should keep time to about five seconds a month. This is exponentially superior to the finest comercially available mechanical spring driven movements (ship chronometers) that were ever produced.
Before atomic clocks were developed the time standard was kept with two pendulum clocks. One was made in the U.S.A. and was accurate to within 1/300th of a second per month. The other was made in Germany and was accurate to within 1/600th of a second per month. The american clock was connected to a radio transmitter that sent out the time signal. These clocks were far more accurate than quartz movements but they were pendulum regulated, driven with weights, and not powered with a spring. Also they were not available to the general public.
David