About what percentage of your watch collection has been serviced within the last, say, five to seven years? What percentage is not and what is the reason? Do you ideally service all or most of your watches?
All of my vintage pieces (three only) are serviced (2014), there other two watches I have where bought new last year too so no need to service then yet...
I see to it that all my watches are fully functional. I have no defect watches. I see that some people here seems to have a very high standard when it comes to service. Always when I read Archers posts about servicing watches, I'm both deeply fascinated as well as hit by very bad conscience! If I were to service my watches to his standard, I would be forced to sell half of my collection
My best watches (maybe the top 25%) have been serviced recently or at least inspected by my watchmaker for evidence of a recent service. Some others are in line for a service, and aren't being worn until they're serviced. Many others won't be serviced until they declare themselves in need of one; these tend to be the ones without rare parts and with a value </= the cost of a couple of services. And a few will probably remain non-functional, unworn, and unserviced as long as I have them.
Hey you know that's not true Dave - I have watches of yours here for service!! Hopefully you will around long enough to wear them for years to come - just go easy in that little sports car of yours and you'll be fine....
Although there may be circumstances where this makes absolute sense, as a broadly applied methodology, that is bad advice IMO. Cheers, Al
I'll answer this for my own collection. Some have been recently serviced, some within the last say 2-3 years, one is new enough not to have needed a service yet, and one is beyond the recommended service interval. So over 90% of mine are within 5 years of last service. Mine are typically at the bottom of the list for service, because I'm too busy servicing everyone else's watches. I did take some of my "time off" over the Xmas holidays to pick away at a couple of mine that needed to be serviced that had sat for a while...and I recently serviced my latest acquisition, but more on that after this coming weekend. Cheers, Al
All of the regular "wearing watches" and most of the rest of the menagerie are serviced. About 20% are not and that's because I've not "gotten a round tuit" yet as the local watch shop hasn't worked through the small glut (can one have a small glut?) I've left with him.
More than half of mine have been serviced, probably more like 2/3. I buy to wear in most cases unless I come across a mint example of a very uncommon or rare watch.
My collection is small, and new (to me). I'm trying to plan out when each watch will be serviced so that I don't end up with a pile of them all coming due at around the same time (assuming 4-5 years between servicing). so some probably need it but will wait a little longer (bad me!). Since the watches I buy are really for wearing, I expect to keep them all in good shape. I have about 7 now, so not all that onerous. I can't imagine having as many as some on the forum - like in the 20+ (or more!). I would definitely not keep them all perfectly tuned if i were in that league.
The ones that sees more than occasional wear (like more than a few hours / month) are usually noted as serviced within the past half decade or so. I tend to service 6-8 watches / year. I do keep track of the ones that are "freshly" serviced and tries to keep em busier than the rest. I am an engineer, and do have a quite realistic view on what un-lubricated wear does of damage, hence the really unserviced ones either are lined up for service before use, or goes into hibernation for some other days to come. Defective ones (or obviously dry ones) are set aside for future service and not worn.
I have a modest collection of 8 watches collected over the last year or so and being relatively limited in my knowledge, everything I buy goes to my 'semi retired' watchmaker for an appraisal before they are worn. I'm guided by him as to whether they require a full service and trust his judgment on that........some he has advised need servicing and others he deems as looking good and running strong and a service is not necessary at this particular time. Knowing how busy good watchmakers are, they don't have to look for work so if he tells me a service is recommended, it gets done. I always try and factor in the cost of a service in anything I buy, if it doesn't need it......happy days!
Having someone look at it and determine if it needs service is a good way of handling this - this of course assumes that you are unable to do that yourself, and I know a few on here can. As noted by Spike, watchmakers are not generally going to tell you it needs service if it does not - we already have way more work than we can handle, so we don't need to generate work that we won't have time for anyway. Wear happens - it's a fact of life in a movement that is dry. As I said, sometimes it makes sense to let the watch die, and other times not. It depends on a number of factors and every situation is different. This ladies model came in a while back with a 2135 inside: I disassembled and cleaned the parts, then looked at them under the microscope...not pretty in some areas: Keep in mind these all started out as nicely mirror polished pivots, parallel along the diameters shown at the red arrows. This pivot was particularly bad: The wear you see in the photo above caused this wheel to go off center and tilt. This caused the steel pinion leaves to chew up the brass teeth of the mainspring barrel, so that barrel had to be replaced. In the end about $300 worth of movement parts were needed (not counting case parts as well). Looks good now, and runs well: Cheers, Al
All of my vintage watches have been serviced in the last 6 months. I definitely reject the idea that if a watch is running fine then there is nothing wrong with it.
Short answer, both of them, the wrist watches anyways. The pocket watches about half of them. I'll get to the other half as time permits.