Hi from a newbie in Massachusetts. I just purchased a new Titanium Speedy (blue with blue alligator strap) from an AD in Boston. The date changes at 9:00 PM, not midnight. I've had the watch a couple of weeks but did not wear it for one week while out of the country. I noticed the problem when I returned. I've searched many places but have not seen this problem. Your help / ideas appreciated. Thanks

 

Never seen that before, better take it back to the AD and have it checked out

 

Thanks, roach7 - I figured as much. It's very interesting - it rolls the date over right at 9:00 PM just like it should do at 12. I cannot imagine that would not be discovered in final QA at the factory.

 

The tolerance on the 9300 for the date change is +/- 10 minutes of midnight. This is a very generous tolerance in my view, but yours is obviously well outside that. The hour/minute hands must be removed and refitted properly to make the date change within the tolerances. Most definitely a QC problem.

Cheers, Al

 

It's a minor flaw, but it may be very annoying considering the quality of Omega watches.
Then again, no Quality Assurance process can be 100% accurate when talking about large volumes, so if there was a 0,01% change to get such a flaw, unfortunately you just nailed it.

 

I bet the companies wish this was the failure rate!

 

Hehe, you're probably right as you've seen close hand far more watches than I have .
Thinking about it, it would be really nice to see some actual QA rates regarding the flaws they miss. Wondering if there's a strong difference between brands or models competing on the same price point, between different price thresholds, and even between production years (you know the saying: they just don't make them like they did in the good old days).
For sure each company has such KPIs and measures them constantly, however I strongly doubt we will ever take a glimpse at such figures...

 

I have been through many watch factories, although not Omega (I have been to an Omega service center though). The only factory where I saw any openly posted quality or SPC information was at Patek, and the numbers I saw were not great, at least as someone coming from an automotive manufacturing background. Note that this is SPC on the production floor (movement parts), not for finished watches. But to me this is the starting point of any sort of control system. It's not good enough to make a pass/fail judgment on a specific part one by one - this is what most laypeople think of as QC work. Although a final inspection may be done, what you really need to know if your process is drifting and what is needed to keep it within control limits, and be able to correct it as you make the parts to reduce scrap and or rework.

Now this was several years ago, so things may have changed, but considering the manufacturing plant I worked in as a project engineer implemented SPC back in the very early 80's, the watch industry seems to have a ways to go in this regard. I'm certainly not a "quality" guy in terms of my knowledge or the job I did, but I designed and implemented many production and inspection processes over my years in that job, and had a good working knowledge of how the systems worked, since the equipment and production lines I put in had to meet these requirements. Most watch companies didn't seem to be doing much of any of this sort of thing - inspection of a part was often done well after production was done on that specific batch - make a whole bunch of parts over here, and then sometime later they get inspected over there. So it was more a weeding out process or "quality sorting" rather than "quality control" - control is the key word there. Sorting good from bad after the fact is not control.

Cheers, Al

 

Interesting, I learn something new here every day. I would have never guessed a 10 minute for date changing is within tolerance! Is there much variance on tolerance between different modern Omegas models? Or is this typical on chronographs movements? In most of my watches I notice the date change much closer to midnight - I think.

 

The tolerance depends on the type of date change mechanism, but most modern Omegas have a tolerance of +/- 10 minutes of midnight. Of course they can do better, but they can obviously do much worse as the OP's watch shows.

As I've said, this is a very generous tolerance, and if I brought my watchmaking instructor a watch that was as far out as that on the date change, let's just say he would have ripped me a new one...