Patek Philippe

bryanhiler
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That’s The Whole Point Of A Perpetual Calendar!

The whole point of spending the large amount extra for the Perpetual Calendar complication is that you never have to correct it, even for Leap Years like this year.

But you have to always have the watch running or else you will have to make corrections. So why spend the huge premium on a Perpetual Calendar if you are going to be making corrections?

Watch winders are inexpensive and can be set to only run enough to keep your watch wound and can be battery powered so that with high-quality batteries and how little power it uses, it will last a number of years before it runs out and you have the ability to put it anywhere, including a safe deposit box and it will keep the watch running.

Watches are designed to run continuously with servicing as little as once per decade and still maintain the accuracy of it being new (that’s Roger Smith’s co-axial escapement service recommendation), most will be less, but it’s good for getting the watch professionally polished and most brands update parts known to have had issues or like Journe, if they have improved a part since you bought it, no matter what, they will update that part.

It’s okay to let them run continuously, centuries of engineering by Breguet and Daniels amongst many hundreds of others spent their lives improving the ability for a watch to run longer with less wear. The English invented jewels for all friction points (brought by Breguet to the Continent for usage beyond very limited use in the escapement. Abraham-Louis Breguet was the one who started using jewels for all friction surfaces in the late 1790s on the European continent which made it standard practice in the industry in the years to come over 1800s...his problem was even with jewels, which significantly helped, he lacked quality oils but we don’t have that issue). They have spent so much energy into making watches wear extremely, extremely slowly and with proper servicing to clean and relubricate per your manufacturer’s recommendation, it will last thousands of years. I have 225 year-old watches that even with no jewels outside of the escapement, still are amazingly accurate for simple pivots in a hole drilled into brass and all of these years later, all things considered, it’s amazing how accurate that primitive technology still is. I have an 1808 pocket chronometre that could be made to perform as well as your average modern, Swiss mechanical watch today.

So don’t worry that by it running continuously its entire life that you or are hurting the watch or wearing it out too soon. Even with our modern lubricants, except for the time-keeping accuracy degrading, you technically don’t even need to service the watch 25 years or more and you won’t significantly wear the pinions in the jewel bearings. But that’s just dumb. You want a clean, serviced watch that has been re-adjusted so that it keeps as good of time or better than a quartz watch (any watch of this quality that has a Perpetual Calendar will, excepting for slight damage from knocking it into a wall really hard while wearing it or dropping it...enough to not break anything, but possibly do a tiny bit of damage inside somewhere...will keep as good of time accuracy-wise as quartz watches. Maybe there was a big difference in the ‘70s compared with the average mechanical ‘70s watch, but a well maintained and re-adjusted high-end watch from a high-quality brand today will perform as well or better than quartz even running continuously for its entire life).

I have yet to get a Perpetual Calendar for my collection (I personally feel like the Minute-Repeater is the highest complication not counting the Grand and Petite Sonnerie which is different because it usually uses its own barrel for independent power; the Perpetual Calendar is second...sorry, but a Tourbillon is NOT a complication.

Don’t have a Perpetual Calendar and waste the incredible engineering that goes into never having to adjust your calendar because you let it stop. It needs to run continuously its entire life and then you get the benefits of the complexity of a bunch of mechanical parts that can keep track of not only how many days are in a month (an Annual Calendar), but will correct every 4 years for Leap Year (a Perpetual Calendar). If you want it to stop, just get a normal calendar (I highly recommend Breguet’s simple calendar watches because you can quickly set them even if you are just passed the date the watch stopped and you have to only go forward to get though all of the dates to get back to the correct date).

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