|
Wow. Watch snobs can be worse than Porsche owners. How did this turn into a Rolex-bashing thread?
I can't for the life of me understand why people don't think a Rolex has a high quality movement, or one that can't keep accurate time. Most of the comments in the watch geek world, related to a Rolex movement, complain about the fact that Rolex doesn't decorate their movements. They don't do a lot of the fine detail work that you might see on a Patek Phillipe movement, for example. So what? You'll never look at it anyway and lots of the pretty detailing has no bearing on how it runs. There are things that some "experts" claim are important to the way the movement works but if you read enough of the the test results in the watch magazines over a period of years you'll sooner or later figure out that the highly decorated/finished movements don't work any better on average than a Rolex movement. I own around 30 different watches from a dozen different companies, from the bottom of the food chain all the way to the top. My experience over the last three decades has been that the ones that gave me the best service were those made by Rolex.
There has been a little carping lately about some of the changes Rolex has made in the last 5 years or so to their movements but again, so what? They actually run better in the real world. What do you want? A theoretically superior design or one that works? The last one I bought new was an Explorer 1, just after the most recent change in movements for that model and it's the most accurate Rolex I've ever owned. It keeps time to within a second per WEEK, which is ridiculous for a mechanical watch. Do the math. That's one second in over 600,000. THink that's good enough? Do you really need to be more precise with your time? God help you if you think that's not good enough.
Realize this, you can regulate any mechanical watch. If it runs slow or fast, change it. You can also "adjust" the running rate yourself, in a manner of speaking. A watch will run a different rates depending upon it's position and the influence of gravity. Face down and face up, it will likely run at different rates. On it's side, crown up or crown down, again the running rates will be different. Some will be fast, some will be slow. If you find that it runs fast during the day when you wear it, stick it in a drawer at night in a position where it runs a little slow and Presto!, you can average out the running rate. If you play with it a little, you'd be surprised what you can learn.
Rolex is one of the few companies that now makes virtually everything that goes into their watches. They even make their own steel and gold alloys. You can't say that about any other watch company in the world.
The bottom line I think is this. There are people that like these watches and those that don't. If you like one, buy it. If you don't, buy something else, or go whine on one of the political threads.
Cheers,
JR
|