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Happy Ending (Eventually) - First Stab at Regulating a Seiko 5 7S26

813 views 1 reply 1 participant last post by  blowin 
#1 ·
First of all apologies to those who notice a similar post on another forum - it took a while and I'm interested in feedback from various sources.

Having got the watch bug and being a fairly practical person I decided I'd get something old-ish and have a go at regulating it.

This seemed to fit the bill and arrived from eBay just after Xmas.

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I used WatchTracker on my phone and after a couple of days got a pretty smooth pattern of +21s a day. So with a couple of hours free I downloaded Hairspring to my phone, nicked my daughter's headphone mic and opened the watch up.

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The iPhone mic/Hairspring/DVD box cover combo had the watch running at +13 at this point.

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So... heart in mouth I used a cocktail stick to move the lever to slow things down.

This went badly. From being completely stuck it suddenly swung round to the point where Hairspring was showing -400s a day. Oops.

I managed to get it back to -9 (which seemed sensible given the difference between the real world performance and Hairspring's reading), put the back on again and started timing it.

Oh dear. The rate swung all over the shop for the next couple of days - from -20s to +12. I was convinced I'd ruined it and put it out of beat but, figuring I had nothing to lose, I opened it again and managed to get it to +5 which felt like a sensible compromise.

This time, thankfully, the watch settled to a consistent but not great +26. So off I went again - setting it to +0 on Hairspring on the assumption that small increments upset things less than wild swings.

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This gave me a smooth +15 over the next 36 hours so I went for a final tweak to get it down to -10 on Hairspring.

This has now given me a consistent real-world rate of +4.9 which I think is about where I should quit!

So what have I learned? Well...

-WatchTracker is very helpful.

-Hairspring is also great (and cheap compared to a real timing machine) although there's still plenty of trial and error involved - probably due to the cheap mic and the rather ramshackle blu-tac based positional work.

-Watches that haven't been regulated (at least for a long time) might a) be a bit sticky when it comes to making adjustments and b) might not respond well to big changes - little and often seems to be the way.

Anyway, I now have a £20 Seiko running at +5s and have learned something along the way.

Any comments/suggestions for what I should read, watch or try next would be most welcome.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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