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Water in your watch!
It's just physics in action.
Quite possibly one of the greatest disservices that the
watch industry has done to the buying public, is the
"water-proof" image.
Actually, for many years now the manufacturers have not
been able to label their products as "water-proof" but rather as
"water-resistant" with some sort of depth qualifier. That
depth qualifier is a factor of pressure required before the seals allow
seepage into the watch.
In order for the company to put that information on the
watch, they in reality only need to test the first watch off of their
assembly line. As more and more production takes place and the dies
wear the later watches may not be anywhere near as tight as that first
one.
And about that pressure thing -- often a watch can exceed
that pressure without even going into the water. An example we have
seen many times, is that of the weekend yard warrior working in the heat
of day and finishing up by spraying the area with the hose. The air
in the watch being heated throughout the day has expanded and some has
even found paths out of the watch. When the watch is cooled quickly
by that spray, the air inside contracts and causes a vacuum that actually
lets the water (or even worse, the salty perspiration) be pushed into the
case into the case by the outside air pressure.
A few years ago we saw the situation where two men had
purchased the same model professional-dive watches and then went together
on a dive trip - after the trip one watch was wet and the other
wasn't. The difference was, that one man had protected his watch
from the direct heat of the sun before diving and the other man
didn't. The extra heat before the cooling of the dive was enough to
cause the leakage. --- Dive watches should have
all their seals replaced every 6 months!
A simple experiment that you can try, is to use one of the
new flimsy water bottles. Leave the bottle with just a bit of water
in it, in the heat with the lid off (the car is a good heat place) when it
is hot, screw the lid back on and take it where it will cool, or spray
cool water on it for a quicker reaction. The crushing you will
is the same process that in the case of the watch allows water in.
The most common points of leakage are around the stem and
crown or around push-buttons. As time goes by the gaskets in those
areas shrink and harden, if you could remember how tight it felt to turn
the crown when the watch was new - the looseness of the seal would be
highly apparent. A watch that is labeled as water-resistant is
destined to fail some day (kind of like your hard drive). The
unfortunate thing is that the ones we usually see are expensive watches
that are very expensive to repair.
For example, forget to tighten the screw-down crown on
your Rolex and you may quickly looking at needing over $800 in replacement
parts PLUS the cleaning repair bill.
Another seal problem we have seen, is the liquefying of
the gaskets caused by solvents or solvent fumes, and this may include
things like perfumes or aftershave splashes.
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