Hi Guys,

I'm a relatively new owner of a Seamaster Diver 300m with the 8800 movement (reference 210.32.42.20.01.001). I bought the watch from a local AD at the beginning of this year. Long story short, there was what looked like a small chip on the ceramic bezel insert and my local Omega boutique tried to send it to a US service center (Seattle I think...?). I was on the fence about sending it in and asked the boutique employees if this was considered normal for Omega quality control. They were also unsure, but they advised it wouldn't hurt to send the watch in.

The chip however was too small to be considered a manufacturing defect and the boutique told me it would cost 1000 USD to replace the ceramic bezel. It was nice to know that imperfections are considered manufacturing defects when they can be seen "12 inches away with the naked eye." I declined the service and asked the watch to be sent back at their earliest convenience.

I thought they would simply send the watch back untouched, but the boutique told me it would take a while for the watch to get back since it is standard procedure to run tests on the watch again. So after a month, I received my watch back. I noticed a couple of things about the watch had changed and I thought I'd ask this community.

1. The boutique said they opened the case and serviced the watch. I received a card with the average daily precision results (just said +3). The card also indicated that the watch had passed the vacuum and air-pressure tests. My watch, fully wound, would gain half a second a day for the first couple of days. But after a couple of days of normal 12 hours of wear per day, the watch would gain more, an average of +4 seconds a day. So the precision when fully wound vs. when less than fully wound differed some. After the service, the precision seems more consistent - consistently gaining 4 seconds per day. But given this change, should my METAS card results also change online? Or should the METAS results only describe the watch performance before it was serviced?

2. Before my watch was serviced, I remember detecting a little resistance after 50 manual winds, at which point I would stop winding the watch. I would do this once a week or two, since I rotate between 3 watches. But now, I don't feel any sort of resistance at all when winding. Even after 60 revolutions the winding is smooth and easy. Is this normal for this watch?

Thanks in advance.
Charlie

 

Can't help much on your questions, but i have one myself (and please don't get offended) - did you check the watch thoroughly when collecting it? If you did, you would have probably noticed the chip immediately and asked for a 1:1 exchange or wait till new stocks came. If you only noticed it later, this chip may have been an accidental damage by you maybe?

i'm only suggesting the question as this was a 20k watch (at my exchange rate) so it's no small value for me

 

metas is at time of MFG

the winding resistance would have been the same unwound and fully and fully wound.

the lack of resistance now is just the crown seal being broken in. Normal and expected.