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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jambon in reply to @Regal

This was really helpful. After going off and watching a few videos on spring drive your brief explanation was still the easiest to understand. Sounds like the best of both automatic/quartz worlds.

My initial reaction was to discount it as not being 'pure', but it feels almost like a resto-mod when comparing it to cars. Knowing the basic overview of models will help a lot for the next few weeks as I keep my eyes peeled on all things GS. Ta!

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Regal in reply to @jambon

No worries at all. SD is its own thing, I think if you want a really classic mechanical watch it might not scratch that itch but it's very interesting in its own right.

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