WATCH POP

Someone had an idea on how to document their accuracy...this is one accurate watch for over 35 years old. :) It went from +5 to +15 sec for a net gain of 10 sec in 32 days.

Cheers!

Pete




You know, I had never thought much of the tuning fork electrics until I started following your posts, but I'm really starting to think that they give a great combination of vintage cachet and practical accuracy, especially now that collectors like yourself have identified a practical battery substitution scheme for the old mercury cells.

-r "Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary. Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending." - WG
How old is my vintage Omega? - Omega Serial Numbers by Year
And like the typical WIS nerd I extol the cool features of tuning fork watches and they give me a deer in headlights look... :))

Pete
very underrated, its as close to mechanical that a watch can get with a battery without having a quarts oscillator. can't think why we don't see more of them, maybe they just never caught on. or maybe they weren’t available for long until the quarts came around. whatever the reason, they're fascinating watches and they deserve more recognition than they get.

thanks for posting ;)
Very underrated but I love them, I have a Constellation f300 date, a Seamaster f300 day/date (the baby Flightmaster case) and a Constellation Megasonic f720 day/date. They're amazingly accurate, the second hand sweep is a joy to behold but the humming sound really bugs my fiance, personally I find it quite hypnotic... and that's all that matters... ;-) Regards, KierΩn once properly regulated for the wearer, the f300 movement is capable of quartz like accuracy.

Does your watch display the common problem of the non advancing date? It is a shame that these watches were designed with this problem built in.

Are you able to hear your watch in a quiet room? I have a friend who claims that someday my arm bone will simply fracture from the constant vibration of the tuning fork.

Enjoy your watch - it looks like a great example.

Roger They have a plastic date ring apparently and the teeth wear. Omega don't supply them anymore so they are hard to get hold of. One f300 (the Constellation) had a faulty date ring when I bought it and was lucky that my watch man just had one lying around, the other two are fine. My hearing isn't very good so maybe not a quiet room but even I can hear it in bed. Oh and by the way, they absolutely, definately and without a shadow of a doubt do NOT like having the hands set anti-clockwise. Be warned, there's a clutch in there somewhere and it's prone to sticking, causing potential gear train damage during anti-clockwise setting of more than a few minutes. Regards, KierΩn
The tuning fork watches certainly did catch on. ;^)

They were were enormously popular when they were introduced by Bulova and many other makers licensed the Accutron movement. I have TF's by IWC and Universal as well as Omega.

The trouble with the date discs of the Omegas is a bugbear as they are no longer available plus they can be expensive to repair but certainly a horological milestone which gave people very accurate watches years before quartz watches appeared. Cheers, Neil.