I own a lot of watches. And I’m one of the people that knows what’s in them. And that services them myself, to the extent that I’m able.
I have ETA 2824s and 2982s, Valjoux 7750s, Seiko 7s26s and NH35s, a bunch of different Citizen calibers (mostly various Eco-drive, from 3 hands to 6), and multiple Orient and Orient Star calibres.
The Orient 46943 movement is the best watch movement in history. There, I said it. This will make the watch people faint, but the last thing the watch people care about, most of the time, is keeping time.
Oh, they say they want to keep time, but the way they understand “keeping time” is how close you can get to nanosecond accuracy… right now, while staring at a watch. Which is to say that they fundamentally misunderstand time, largely because most people that can afford Swiss watches can actually afford to ignore time (all while claiming to care about it).
If you don’t service a Swiss watch every 3-5 years, it will stop keeping good time. And even if you do service it every 3-5 years, Swiss watches routinely fail with all kinds of failure modes. Out-of-tolerance hacking arms. Slightly bent balance staffs. Sludgy lube. Slight slide loads from the stem. All kinds of stuff. In other words, Swiss watches are “accurate and beautiful” but only for a while, and often intermittently. Which is to say…that they are just not very good at keeping time.
Because, you see, the thing about time is that it passes. In fact, that may be its most fundamental single characteristics.
If you have a “timepiece” that cannot reliably remain functional over time, then it isn’t much of a timepiece.
I’m coming to this realization as I get older.
The Orient 46943 isn’t beautiful. There’s no real finishing to speak of. It’s only 21,600 beats. It’s accurate to with a few seconds per day, not per week or per month. It’s a simple design. It doesn’t hack. It doesn’t hand-wind.
But here’s the thing. It lives in and across time.
I have never had a 46943 “ask” to be serviced. Ever. I have them as old as 20-30 years old. They do not care. They do not change, degrade, stop. They just run. Forever. They don’t need a battery. They don’t care about service. They are not “precision engineered” because time is the enemy of precision. Time kills precision, no matter what materials you use.
Instead, it is elegantly engineered and overengineered to run and keep running. Five years in. Ten years in. Twenty years in you can pull one apart and see the wear but nothing is broken. And it’s still running, as good as it ever was. It’s still winding. The power reserve has lost maybe a couple hours max.
Over that same twenty years, the average Swiss watch has been serviced four, five, even six times. It has slowed down or stopped working, stopped actually keeping time, over and over again. It doesn’t like vibration. It doesn’t like hot. It doesn’t like cold. Sure, it’s got nice polish and engraving patterns on its rotor and a bunch of gold plating but in the end, it’s mostly to look at and show off. Not to keep time. Certainly not when it matters most, which is generally when things get tough.
I’ve come to this over time, this realization. The 46943 is it. The best. Ever. It costs next to nothing, does its job without complaint, and continues doing for the space of a lifetime, receding into the background and being completely forgotten until needed. And when it is needed, there it is…keeping time.