Using Your Ears When Buying Vintage Watches

by Watchking

One of the most useful tools to use when buying a vintage watch is a loupe or magnifier. This kind of tool multiplies your sense of sight to help you find problems in a watch that may change your buying decision or alert you to problems that will need fixing later. An inexpensive stethoscope can also help you when you are searching through vintage watches that you want to buy. 

An inexpensive stethoscope can often be purchased for $5. - $8. (including possible replacement of the ear pieces). The least expensive plastic stethoscope will be able to help you detect troubles in a watch, and it will be especially helpful in finding problems in a diver's watch or any other watch in a heavy steel case. Sometimes this is the only way you can hear the way an escapement sounds because the case is so effective at reducing the sound of the movement. Stethoscopes with flat plastic diaphragms are the simplest, most common, least expensive and easiest to use for watch inspections. 

Obviously, a stethoscope makes it easier for you to hear the watch ticking. Check in a few different ways to determine the condition of a movement. On manual wind watches, wind the watch 5 or 6 turns while listening to the winding mechanism. Then “twist start” the escapement if it doesn’t start immediately on its own and listen to it as it runs under low power. On watches with mainsprings that are very worn there may not be enough energy transmission to produce a regular, even beat. Then hold the watch against the stethoscope and wind it up towards being fully wound and see if there is a point at which the movement seems to “take-off” and where it starts making a clear even beat. Again this can be an indicator that there is either “drag” on the movement (usually from accumulated dirt and oil turned to varnish) or worse, a worn mainspring that won’t fully power the escapement long enough to run the watch accurately for 24 hours. In some cases the side force of the mainspring on the escape wheels has to be quite strong to overcome the offset due to worn jewel bearings or gear teeth. 

Mainspring replacement is a major repair but relatively simple if the spring is available and thus not extremely expensive. Most mainsprings are available except for various “long-running” (56-72 hour models) but you should always check before buying a watch with a “tired” mainspring to be sure about it’s availability and cost. Replacing gears is a step up the difficulty scale. If a movement has a problem with gear tooth wear it is usually a problem for all the gears, not just one. Gears are even less commonly available because this type of repair is not done very often. Replacing a jewel bearing is common on balances (the staff) but uncommon elsewhere in the movement. The cost of such a repair may exceed the value of a watch and so unless the entire movement is replaced this type of overhaul might not make sense.

There are other things to listen for when evaluating a watch. Avoid watches with loud pinging sounds because this indicates excessive force when the pallet jewels are hitting the escape wheel. Either the balance is turning outside of its normal range of rotation or the pallet jewels may have been too long or not glued-in to be in the correct position. Listen to the watch in all 6 positions that it can sit in when doing this evaluation and let the watch sit alone on a flat surface free of your hand (which will dampen out vibrations and can actually reduce the loudness of problems). Another sound to avoid is a “galloping” movement. This indicates a balance that is making an uneven “spin” on its axis. The spring may have a small problem and might only be “out of beat”, or it might have a major problem like a kink in the hairspring.

Listen to the watch while you are turning the hands in the time-setting position. In setting the time, advancing a quickset date or winding the watch, grinding noises are “a bad thing”. At best they indicate an improperly lubricated watch. Turning the watch over in your hands while listening using a stethoscope you may be able to hear that a movement is loose in its case, or perhaps a rotor weight on an automatic movement is loose on its arbor. Sometimes these are easy to fix, sometimes not. Get a watchmaker’s opinion if you hear these types of noises. A good way to sharpen your “ear” is to listen to a few recently serviced high-grade timepieces. A manual wind Audemar Piguet, an automatic wind Patek Philippe or Rolex and perhaps an IWC chronograph would be good standards of comparison to let you hear what a movement and escapement “should” sound like. They are usually available at watch shows if you are courteous. Then, if you hear sounds that seem “odd” from the watch you are inspecting with the intention of buying, you can be more sure of which little sounds “shouldn’t be there” if the movement is laboring for some reason. 

Finally if the watch has a hack feature I always listen to the watch as I engage the hacking seconds stop and then restart the movement. A few small “clinks” that might occur when the movement is stopped are very common as the balance’s inertia is dissipated on the pallet fork, but not scraping noises which can indicate a “loose movement”, and when restarting the watch there should be little or no acceleration of the escapement beat as the movement restarts from a dead stop. This would indicate either a gummy movement in need of cleaning or a very worn movement that can’t release its energy immediately and has to build up to it while overcoming the resistance from worn surfaces. Cleaning is always part of regular maintenance but rebuilding a worn movement can be an impossible project. This is an especially important consideration for chronographs because until the problem is “fixed” the chronograph will be wildly inaccurate and the difference in the timekeeping accuracy of the chronograph with the stopwatch function engaged v.s. not-engaged will be substantial. 

For those who are shopping in a store with many possible watches within the purchaser’s budget or interest or whenever buying vintage watches at a flea market or watch show, a quality magnifier (like a 10x loupe or an achromatic 16 diopter magnifying glass) and a low priced stethoscope with a flat diaphragm are important tools to have. They will save you time and trouble because you will not need to open every watch you look at to sort out the especially bad watches quickly. The low cost of these tools will be returned to a shopper with the first few watches you either avoid or buy. Even if you trust a seller and there is a guarantee in writing, some problems are difficult to correct and when parts are difficult to find, there can easily be time delays measured in months while the service is being done. Trusting your own senses will help you develop skill in evaluating watches and it will help you appreciate the difference in quality between a good watch and those that are usually mentioned as the standards of comparison for quality. Good luck in your search for vintage watches.