![]() ![]() ![]() For the sake of fairness, we've left out the models that are caked in bazillions of diamonds. With the vintage watch market booming, this is where you'll find your expensive watch record-breakers, the timepieces that go for as much as a decent Premier League midfielder. But when you want people to know that you've spent the GDP of a Pacific island on your watch, sometimes the best way is to make it glittery.Īnd then, a notch above both, you've got your one-offs – watches owned by famous people, or long-dead people, or, counterintuitively, the watches were made slightly wrong and are, therefore, completely unique (read: collectable). On the other side, you've got watches that are expensive because they're made from expensive stuff – precious metals, hand-cut diamonds, bits of meteorites. This is where you'll find the flagship watches by your Swiss old-guard (and the odd disruptive new brand), which use nothing more than cogs and gears to track the movement of the planets, or chime like Big Ben. On the traditional side, you've got six- and sometimes seven-figure timepieces that earn their price tag by squeezing incomprehensibly complicated engineering into teeny tiny cases. The most expensive watches on earth, then, tend to fall into one of two camps. Which makes it all feel a bit more justifiable than dropping more than most mortgages on a ring with a big diamond on. But like an Italian sports car, your outlay also buys you precision engineering and decades of heritage. The best watches do, of course, look very pretty. ![]() Instead, they're more like functional jewellery, a way for men to buy themselves something fancy but also know that what they've purchased does more than just look pretty. Or rather, they're not just about telling the time. But a these days, watches aren't really about telling the time. For example, you can purchase very inexpensive jeweler's screwdrivers and tweezers, but these almost always are not only cheap to buy but poorly made and will not allow you to do a good job, even if you understand watch repair.Considering that everyone has the exact time, in every timezone on earth, in their pocket at all times, a mechanical watch that costs more than a house can seem like a curious investment. The key is to start right of getting high quality tools and learning to properly use and maintain them. There are many other things you will eventually "need" to work on watches, like a supply of oils and oilers, hand removers, balance calipers, etc, depending on how far you progress in your watch repair work. The internet is also a great resource, including many fine videos posted on You-Tube.īut to answer your question regarding essential and specialized watch tools to begin working on watches, I think I can say that you can get started with a basic tool kit that includes: 1) a good quality set of watchmaker/jeweler screwdrivers 2) a set (of 2 or 3) high quality jeweler's tweezers 3) some sort of optical magnifier (3X to 5X), such as the Optivisor for general use and a 10X handheld loupe for close part inspection and, 4) a movement holder that allows you to hold the watch movement securely while you work on it. Click to expand.I agree with the other posts that recommend getting and reading good basic watch repair books (my favorites are those by Fried, DeCarle, and Gazely). ![]()
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