I love watches as points of engineering. I started off with a relatively cheap Quartz Timex, and have started wearing various Automatics over the last year. Many of the watches I use now come with leather or fabric straps, but I'm personally most comfortable with Milanese steel straps. The leather ones I've learned to appreciate, but I don't love how they keep their form, and would at least like the option of switching them to a Milanese. However, that means that I need to measure the lug widths on several of the affected watches and get appropriate alternatives.
I knew that this would come eventually, so I had callipers for a while. We love a good set of callipers, so it made sense to have some. The watches in question are as follows
AGELOCER Manta Tourbillon Knot Urushi Automatic Baltany Micro Rotor Airbus 350 XWB Quartz After measuring each, I had to note that all of them had different lug widths, so I would be getting each band exactly for the watch. The most difficult ones would be the Airbus and the Baltany pieces, because the former is much larger than I'm used to, which is why I chose to go with a 23mm leather strap for it, instead of a Milanese, which would probably be too slim. The Baltany is difficult because of its lovely colour scheme. I have the green and gold version, and I dislike gold straps in general. The green Milanese that I found probably has the correct shade, but I'm not sure. If this ends up sticking with its leather for now, it would be fine.
A word on the Airbus watch: I got this one from my dad, who got it as a gift from a work-thing, but doesn't wear watches. It's a very nice one, but the strap kept me from wearing it for a while, because I don't like the feeling of rubber on my skin. Additionally, rubber degrades. Badly. This is, ultimately what made me change the strap on it. Otherwise I would have kept the strap on it and kept it as decoration. Perhaps, now, I'll get to switching to it. The leather strap fits pretty snuggly, because, like the Agelocer, it would benefit from a curved strap bar. It didn't come with one, mind, but it wouldn't have made a difference, since the original rubber strap was addionally secured by screws. That was likely part of the reason why it was so stiff. Still, it looks all in all classy now, even though I have to leave the screws out. The resulting holes aren't too distracting, which was the remaining worry I had.
The Knot watch has a silver case, so I thought it would make sense with a silver band. Having checked it though, it looks a little bit cheap. I used to wear a silver watch for the longest time. I will probably think about switching it back to the silk strap while thinking about a different kind of strap, perhaps even a leather one. I feel like I'm going to struggle somewhat with the silver cases, especially with non-black dials. The AGELOCER is a gunmetal grey skeleton. watch, and it looks pretty good with a black Milanese strap, so perhaps the Knot will, too.
It's probably luck that I found an emerald milanese mesh strap for the Baltany. I have the gold/green one, which then obviously can't go with a silver or black strap, and I don't like gold straps on anything. However, the only emerald strap of this kind I could find had no clasp, but fixes magnetically, which just does not feel very safe and also feels like it interferes with the movement. Since there is no way to replace the magnet with a strap on this kind of strap, I'm switching it back.
Now for the studying section. In general there's a few categories one could sort watches into I'm going to start off with the style categories, because those are kinda most important to me, as long as I don't need to talk to anybody. There's are uncountable ways to describe a watch, but the most prevalent watch styles. I'm going to be frank and start off with an immediate disqualification, in that I don't like smart watches, and I don't like digital dials. Anything that has a dial that consists only of pixels might as well be a tiny, shitty smartphone and has no business being worn on a wrist. On actual dials, there's really only the choice of many many complications. The most known ones are chronographs, which feature smaller sub-areas for dates stuff like moon phases, 24-hour measures, sometimes stop watch capabilities. Except for the stopwatch function, most of these are just smaller transfer wheels than that connected to the hour hand. It is, essentially the fact that most of a watch's function derives from the driving gear that I find so captivating. Rarer complications include, for example, chiming watches, Repeaters that chime at set intervals, or Sonneries, which usually chime the way that grandfather clocks do. They're often a little on the pricier end, but this is a complication that can be hidden away completely. When talking watch styles, I suspect, there's a "I'll know it when I see it" quality to the rough categories that go from "sports watch" to "dress watch", with some exceptions, most notable being the diver and the flieger. The latter is a watch in the style of 20th century pilots which are often minimalistic, with leather straps and highly legible. The former is its bulkier, waterproof cousin, and also perhaps the most stereotypical design that comes to mind when hearing about the term "watch". Rolex watches, as long as they're not diamond-encrusted or some similar odd addition, are usually divers. By the list of watches whose straps I've been switching around it's probably clear that I tend toward dress watches, which are meant to be eye-catching accessoires. It includes what's called a "skeleton watch", meaning that the dial is designed so that the watch movement is visible from the front as well. As someone enamoured with the mechanics of watches, it's perhaps not surprising that I like automatics and skeleton watches, because I can watch the rotor and the gears. In essence, there's not too big a difference between the types of movements after the power source. Automatics wind a spring, that could be hand-wound, and solar or quartz watches use batteries. I can't bring myself to change batteries in quartzes, so they're my least favourite. I can only say in the defense of hand-wounds that if they have a large enough reserves, they're great for fidgeting. If you were to wear it for several days, there's also little need to readjust the time, because with a 40-hour reserve, enough fidgeting happens during the day to keep it wound. However, there's another way of differentiating movements that I find more interesting.
After the driving mechanism, there's something called a "gear train" that transfers the motion onto the different wheels. The second (2nd) wheel - or center wheel - turns once an hour and is responsible for driving the motion work, which in turn move the hands. Most of the other wheels of the going train ultimately lead toward the escapement wheel, which is always last and serves to regulate the speed of the train. A fourth wheel is occasionally meant to turn the seconds hand. The seconds hand can optionally be driven by the motion work too, which consists of a 12 : 1 reduction gear train to drive the hour hand from the minute hand.
A different movement variant would be the tourbillon. It's one of the prettier looking ones in my opinion, but also one of the more expensive ones. The idea is that some of the free-moving wheels like the escapement and balance wheel can be affected by gravity depending on the angle the watch is held. Those positions include on its side, and flat on its face and back, meaning, almost all positions a watch is ever going to rest when it's not being worn. Tourbillon watches place those in a rotating tourbillon cage. The cage can be suspended on various axes. This method of counteracting gain/loss through gravity is somewhat expensive in material and complicated to manufacture, which is why it's so expensive, but I, for one, find them very interesting.