What time is it? Watches and horology

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Regal in reply to @jambon
GS come in a few flavours:
- quartz (including high accuracy variants)
- mechanical hand-wound (needs winding daily)
- automatic (wind themselves when worn)
- hi-beat automatic (as above, but a faster beat rate which is a bit more exotic and is considered capable of greater accuracy at the expense of power reserve)
- spring drive
The latter is the one that is a bit of a head scratcher if you’ve not read much on it. It is automatic (ie self-winding) and powered by a mainspring like an automatic, but instead of having a mechanical escapement to regulate the rate of the hands it has a very clever and unique system that is regulated by a quartz crystal and microchip, using a magnetic brake. It is entirely self powered by the mainspring (no battery), hence “spring drive”. This is also why the second hand sweep on spring drive models is perfectly smooth (they don’t tick).

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deleted in reply to @Regal

Worth adding that the accuracy on Spring Drive is within a couple of seconds a month.

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Regal in reply to @deleted

Indeed, that’s the benefit of the quartz regulator, but it does cause a bit of confusion - eg “is it not just a quartz watch”, to which the answer is yes, and no.

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/does-spring-drive-have-an-escapement

There are also a small number of hand-wound spring drive models, they tend to be used in the higher end dressier models.

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