Essex Paul wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 3:22 am
I’m completely miffed about “quartz servicing”.
No one pulls a quartz movement apart do they?
My wife’s Tag has a new battery and is water/pressure sealed and tested at approx £65 every 3 years, (or whenever the battery runs out), at a Tag service centre.
Not once have they said it needs “servicing”.
And CW want £150?
Don’t get it. 10 year battery maybe?
Could not agree more - am I really going to pay to have my £225 C4 'serviced'? Anything over about twenty quid for a battery change is an uneconomical outlay.
I would be interested in the evidence used to determine that stripping down a quartz movement is either necessary or cost effective. Equally, the whole power consumption testing process sounds like complete guff to me.
As an engineer and engineering manager my business was all about ensuring reliability and quality of performance balanced against cost and one thing I do know is that you don't spend man hours stripping and rebuilding a cheap component even if it is U/S let alone just to find out how well it is working!
I would love to know the science behind the quartz servicing rational - is there published information on such things as mean time between failure, for example.
TBH this all sounds like hokum to me. For the cost / value of a typical quartz (and certainly the bog standard ones that CW knock out) the only sensible approach is to stick a new battery in each time it stops working until this doesn't solve the problem and then do one of four things:
- If you are really attached get the movement replaced at an independent ( since I assume CW will want full bunce for wasting time with 'diagnostics' as part of the service.
- Stick it on fleabay as non working.
- Bin it if you can't be bothered with either of the above.
- Keep and use as test bed for honing your watch disassembly / reassembly skills if this interests you.
It sounds to me like this is modelled on the vehicle serving approach that main dealers use to mitigate the fact that cars are now so reliable :
Complete a four page check list of many items for which there is no basis to believe a problem exists and then charge £200+ for an oil change.
Smoke and mirrors.
Paul