Post pics of your watches ***Please NO QUOTING PHOTOS***

Eoin wrote: »

That’s class. What are your thoughts on why the sweeping quartz did not become more common?

Well that one is tuning fork only, but yeah the early quartz - other than the seiko Astron - were smooth sweeping because they used the tuning fork setup as a way to drive the hands. They were the only game in town for about a year or so. Seiko kept developing their stepping motor and in Switzerland Girard Perregaux among others were doing the same, both one tick per second.

I reckon the sweeping versions didn't last long because they were very expensive to manufacture. They required more parts and much more human hand involvement. This meant prices were very high. Two to four times the price of mechanicals. They could be more delicate, about halfway between quartz and mechanical(or in the case of the Longines about as robust as an egg on a dance floor for rhinos) and they used a lot more battery power. On modern batteries you might see a year before needing a replacement, but usually less and back then less again. The stepping motors came with battery guarantees of over a year.

Plus it's easy to forget that back then that while there had been mechanical watches that had this complication, one tick per second was "new" and "modern" and showed off the accuracy of the new tech and the fact you were wearing one, in a reversal of today's mechanical sweep is better idea. Seiko's early adverts ran with the line "have you ever seen a second" to promote this. The disadvantage to the stepping motor was it didn't have the torque to move large hands, or even medium sized hands, so many analogue quartz throughout the 70's had thinner slimmer hands. The GP stepping motor did have the torque and in my humble was the better design, more torque no exposed coil, more robust but was again pricey to produce. Getting the second hand to line up precisely with the dial markings another issue. Though the early examples did. Then again they were very well made and expensive top of the brand range watches.