Hello Everyone,

I purchased a brand new Omega Seamaster 300m diver chronograph (black & yellow dial) exactly one week ago. So far, I love the watch even more than I thought I would. However one thing that is bothering me is that I have alignment issues with 5 of the 6 hands on the watch. I have a couple of questions:

1. Every time I set the time, the minute and second hands seem to be out of sync by about the same amount. The minute hand always points to the minute tick marks when the second hand is at the 10 second position. I want the minute hand to point to directly to the minute mark when the second hand is in the 0/60 second position, but I just won't happen.
Is there some alignment between these two hands, or some auto-correcting that occurs? My $100 Chinese-made automatics don't have this problem.

2. When I reset the chronograph, the hour minute hands often (~50% of the time) don't return exactly to the 0 position. They often stop up to a fifth of the way to the next or previous tick mark. Is this expected, or should they always be perfectly aligned with the 0 mark?

Thanks in advance for any answers.

 

I assume your watch is the one illustrated below:



Regarding Issue #1 I have a couple of suggestions:

a) The minute markers on your watch dial may not be as uniformly symmetric as you think. I've learned from syncing the minute and second hands on my AquaTerra that I have to stay away from the minute markers immediately adjacent to (on either side of) the hour markers -- their symmetry is different from all the other minute markers. I don't know if your watch has this kind of an issue or not but it's worth taking into consideration.

b) I assume that you can get a complete stop of the watch (and the sweep second hand) by pulling out the crown entirely, and that what you've been doing is stopping the watch when the sweep second hand is at the 12 o'clock position. When you're going to sync your watch to a time standard, you need to run the minute hand well past the desired time -- by at least 20-30 minutes, then "back-up" the minute hand to the desired minute marker before pushing in the crown to re-start the watch. On most of my watches this procedure works well, but on my Speedmaster with 1861 movement, pushing the crown back in actually causes the minute hand to move by a small amount; I now have an intuitive feel for how much the minute hand will move, so I make the appropriate tweak in the minute hand position before pushing the crown back in.

Regarding Issue #2, that kind of behaviour doesn't seem correct. That's something you should take up with whomever sold you the watch.


It's really quite a nice looking watch and I wish you all the best in getting things to work the way you feel they should.

 

@Jones in LA - Thank you for your detailed response. Yes, it's the watch in your picture.

You're second suggestion (b) fixed the problem for me. The minute and second hands are perfectly in sync right now. Thanks!

I actually see issue #2 in the picture that you posted. The hour chrono hand is slightly to the left of the minute mark and the minute chrono hand is slightly to the right. Maybe that's just the way it is...

 

@bugwriter -- glad that worked for you. Nearly all mechanical assemblies have some "slack" in them; the procedure b) above takes the slack out of play in the direction the watch wants to go when it is re-started.

The apparent mis-alignment you see in the chrono hands in the image above is an optical artifact from taking a photographic image of an essentially flat object through a curving lens. But if that is about all the "mis-alignment " you see on your watch, then you don't have much to worry about