Recent thread on watches prompted me to ask how others find Seiko for reliability. Not talking about time keeping but the bells and whistles. Alarms, phases of the moon, counters etc. I.M.E. these all fail P.D.Q.
Paul Mc Cann
Well, mostly on watches friends have, the buttons get stuck or lose their spring. I notice this generally on small electronic gadgets though. Took apart a talking cube clock the other day and found the spring was now just a pile of dust that once used to be a foam pad.
Brian
I have an expensive Seiko wristwatch which gets serviced periodically (costing around 90quid!). This year my service was free as it started to fail [1] even before the 12 month service warrantee was up.
On the plus side, Seiko's customer service was excellent and they were able to immediately confirm I was "in warrantee" despite me having lost the paperwork.
Paul DS.
[1] It's a kinetic (auto-winder/charge) and was holding only a few hours charge instead of the 3 days it should hold.
iability. Not talking about time keeping but the bells and whistles. Alarms= , phases of the moon, counters etc. I.M.E. these all fail P.D.Q.
I've had three watches. The first was a German service watch from WW2 that my uncle gave me. It must've been thirty years old when I got it and did another twenty years before parts/traditional watchmakers became hard to find.
My parents bought me a relatively expensive Seiko which survived just beyond its guarantee period before failing irreparably.
I replaced that with a Sekonda (which IIRC Ronnie Barker used to advertise with the slogan "Beware of expensive imitations"). That's now around twenty years old and still works fine.
Based on that entirely unscientific and statistically meaningless sample, I'd say Seiko are vastly inferior to both Sekonda and the Wehrmacht.
reliability. Not talking about time keeping but the bells and whistles. Alarms, phases of the moon, counters etc. I.M.E. these all fail P.D.Q.
Probably not of much use to anyone considering buying a watch today, but my dad still wears his Seiko digital every day. All fully functional (only basic functions on it). It's only ever had battery changes. Still looks virtually new. He bought it in the seventies, as an upgrade from his LED watch!
My own watch is a 12 year old Rado - ceramic links, sapphire glass, etc.; still looks new, depite me repeatedly scrawping it along the brick wall when going through the back gate, lying on it and scraping it along the paved driveway while working on the car and so on.
SteveW
I have a Seiko analogue 'quartz' watch. Battery lasts three years. Is within a minute when I reset it for BST etc. It is my only wristwatch, and over 20 years old.
reliability. Not talking about time keeping but the bells and whistles. Alarms, phases of the moon, counters etc. I.M.E. these all fail P.D.Q.
I believe the phases of the moon have been working for around 4.5 billion years, if you just glance at it. Out of interest, what do you use it for on the watch? What do you do if it disagrees with the moon?
I have a 10 year old Calvin Klien (I doubt they made the movement, and I don't know who did). It was inexpensive, and is working well. The strap is likely to be the first thing that fails - it is a sort of very fine stainless steel chainmail but suffering from me having caught it on things occasionally (my wrist heals up, but the strap doesn't). I think it's on its third battery. The thing I particularly like about it is that its very thin. I have occasionally seen other people with the same watch (there were a couple of variations in face design, and an even finer stainless steel strap that looks like cloth).
If they still sold them, I'd buy another just for the new strap.
Looking back over watches I've had, it has usually been the strap which fails eventially, and that's often been an integral part of the watch design, so a generic replacement doesn't look right.
I had one watch I wrecked whilst replacing the felt on the roof. I suddenly noticed it looked like it had been sandpapered, which it effectively had as I'd been pushing the new felt under the existing layers.
For many years, my brother wore my grandfathers old mechanical watch. It has an automatic winder. (If it could also be wound manually, that's never worked since we've had it.) Many years ago, I built a geiger counter for my dad. Having built it, I was rather disappointed to not be able to find anything which took it above background levels, until I put it near this watch, which turns out to have radioactive luminous paint (although its barely luminous since we've known it). My brother stopped wearing it after that.
That'll be a Chinese ripoff of Calvin Klein, will it?
i before e except after c. Mr Klein can't spell.
True, in English... But it's a German name.
I will seize the opportunity to point out that the rule is not unversal.
"Or when _ei_ sounds like _a_ as in neighbour and weigh"?
Doubly so! It is in the zeitgeist. Talking about einsteinium, watching eisenstein at ceiling-height and Eileithyia, an early Minoan goddess...
Except it isn't. There are more exceptions than, er, non-exceptions.
So it's versal? :o)
In word list I have there are 723 with "ie" and 260 with "ei". (Similar ratios but many more in other, more comprehensive word lists.) Certainly far more than the odd exception suggested by the rule-quoters.
I did like "non-exceptions"... :-)
Ah, a good old hard-and-fast English rule: Is before Es except after Seize
Sounds very much like the one I wear. Managed to get a replacement strap a couple of years ago.
Chris
... when the sound is ee
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