The question in the title is one I see on watch forums often. The responses will be quite varied, but inevitably there will be someone from the “If it isn’t broken, then don’t fix it” camp chiming in. Now here at Omega Forums, this attitude is far less common than on a site like WUS, but I consider most posters here to be quite a bit more knowledgeable about watches in general than the WUS crowd is. But still I have seen the “it runs well so it must be okay” sort of statements posted here occasionally.
Now I’ll be up front here that if that is what you believe, and you want to continue that way of dealing with service on your watches for whatever reason, I am not trying to convince you to change anything you currently do. The purpose of this post is to dispel the myth that if the watch is keeping good time, then everything inside must be fine.
So I recently received this Speedmaster in. I’ll be up front in saying that I purchased this watch, and had no idea of service history or even how well it ran to be honest. Sorry for the blurry photo:
Since I had no idea what condition this was in, I decided to fully wind it and put it on the timing machine for checks in 6 positions, and here is the result:
Now keep in mind if you don’t have a timing machine and just simply wore this watch, all you would know is that it keeps damned good time. The average rate is +3.7 seconds per day, and the positional variation (Delta at the red arrow) is extremely good for this movement at just 5.4 seconds difference between all 6 positions. Note that for the Cal. 861 in this watch Omega allows the average daily rate to be from -1 to +11 seconds, and they allow up to 25 seconds of Delta measured over just 3 positions at full wind, so this is excellent.
Now what I see as a watchmaker is a beat error that is a bit larger then I would expect, and the balance amplitudes are not quite as high as I would like to see, but they are far from horrible. So to be honest although I was hoping it had been serviced fairly recently, that was certainly questionable at this point.
So the next step was to remove the case back, and it was on tight. One reason why is evident below - the case back gasket has started to turn to black goop as these often do after many years:
The movement overall looks to be in good condition though, so I place it under the microscope, and took photos of some specific areas. Now because this is a chronograph, it has a lot of parts mounted on top of the base movement, so it’s not easy to see all the jewels, but I can see a few. Here is one, and as you can see the well of the jewel around the pivot is completely dry...and I mean 100% bone dry:
On this one some of the old oil residue can be seen, but again completely dry:
And lastly, here is the balance jewel, and again it is 100% dry:
Now because balance jewels can be tricky to know what exactly you are looking at due to various features on the hole jewel that might look like rings of oil to the untrained eye, some time ago I took these photos of a jewel (also in a Cal. 861) before and after service to show what a properly oiled jewel looks like:
You can clearly see the ring of fresh oil between the hole and cap jewel.
So this watch has certainly not been serviced recently, and after looking at it more, I’m pretty convinced it’s never been serviced actually. No service marks inside the case back, and all the heads of the screws are nearly perfect. And slots that do show deformation from a screwdriver being in them are only deformed in the direction of tightening the screws, not loosening them.
Once again, I’m not trying to tell anyone to do anything differently then they are doing now. I just want to illustrate pretty well I think that timekeeping is actually a pretty poor indicator of the need for service.
I know this will not deter some true believers out there into repeating the false idea that if it runs okay it's fine inside, but for those who might be on the fence I hope this gives you some clarity.
Hope this helps.
Cheers, Al
