Donald Williams

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since May 28, 2003

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May 28, 2003, on Shopping for Airplane Accessories:
My experience is that the accuracy of a number of mechanical (i.e., automatic) watch movements is very vulnerable to shock , arm motions, consistency of wearing,etc. Try this experiment: (a) set your automatic watch to the precise time using a shortwave radio or other precise time source (use the digital clock on a personal computer if need be). (b) do 10 minutes of some activity that involves physical motion of the arm wearing the watch ; e.g,. shadow boxing. (c) check your automatic watch against your precise time source about 6 hours later. I've seen an automatic using a common ETA movement gain 30 seconds from just a minute of arm motion. What's hilarious, in my opinion, is that these fragile automatic movements are dressed up in rugged, tank-like , oversized cases. Even better test: Run a jackhammer for 10 minutes and compare the accuracy maintained by an automatic with the accuracy maintained by a $50 G-Shock from Walmart. I think a lot of the accuracy claims for aut...