Is There a Way to Set Time on a Mechanical Watch Precisely? Down to the Second?
I just got a self-winding watch to avoid having to go out and get batteries every now and then. But I noticed that it’s possible to set the hands on the watch but not the second hand. With digital clocks and watches, I can set the time to the exact second by waiting till the right time and press the "next minute" function and set the watch with "00" seconds. That comes in handy when I’m trying to record tv shows or a few other situations.
With my old mechanical watches, sometimes the second hand slows down a little when I set the minute hand backwards (counterclockwise). I don’t know if that works with the newer watches. Does anyone have any ideas?
Mostly a mechanical watch stops when the stem is pulled out.
Pull it out at 0 sec,s, (it will take a few tries), then set the hands and push the stem back in at your ‘time hack’.
It’s a bootless exercise really as, in ‘mechanicals’, only a fine
chronometer on a stable base can be expected to be accurate to
the second, day to day.
‘Back in the day’ for navigational chronometers, once you got down to a
steady error of few seconds per day one way or the other, you just kept
track of the variation, allowed for it, and didn’t try to adjust further.
I have yet to come across a mechanical watch movement with which you can do what you require, stopping the second hand as well as the minute and hour hands. The drag on the second hand while adjusting the minute hand, which you mention, is not a universally reliable way of synchronising. Sorry.
I have a 15 year old Seiko quartz that I can set to within at least a 1/2 second. It will hold that accuracy for months on end. That is close enough for just about anything a person does in daily life including bidding on Ebay.