Most stopped watches are just a dead cell, and the drawer is what turns a five minute job into a real repair. What happens at the bench, why the seal matters, and how to read the warning your watch gives you first.
By Classique Jewelry Inc. | Bronx, NY | Est. 1992
A watch stops. You put it in a drawer, you mean to deal with it, and a year goes by. That drawer is where most of the watches we see have been living, and the delay is usually the only thing that turned a five minute job into a real repair.
HOW LONG DOES A WATCH BATTERY REPLACEMENT TAKE?
Most are done while you wait. Bring the watch to our bench at 4248 White Plains Road in the Bronx, Monday to Saturday, 11:30 AM to 7:00 PM. We open the case here, fit the cell, check the seal and close it properly. Nothing is sent out, and you are told the price before any work starts.
A quartz watch is a very simple arrangement. A small cell pushes current through a quartz crystal, the crystal vibrates at a fixed rate, and a tiny motor converts that into the movement of the hands. When the cell runs out, all of that stops at once. The watch is not broken. It is out of power.
That is the good news, and it is true far more often than people expect. The bad news is what happens to a watch that sits with a dead cell inside it.
A watch cell that has gone flat can leak. Not always, and not quickly, but it is a real risk and it grows the longer the cell stays in the case. What comes out is an alkaline residue, and it does not stay where it started. It creeps along the contacts, into the circuit, and onto the movement.
Once that has happened you are no longer looking at a battery change. You are looking at cleaning corrosion off a movement, and sometimes at replacing a circuit that is no longer repairable. A job worth a few minutes becomes a job worth a great deal more, and on some watches it becomes a job that is not worth doing at all.
So the one piece of advice in this whole article is the dull one. If a watch has stopped and you are not going to deal with it this month, open the case and take the cell out, or bring it to someone who will. An empty watch keeps indefinitely. A watch with a dead cell in it is on a clock of its own.
People think of a battery change as one job. It is at least three, and which one you have depends on how the back of the case is made.
A snap back is pressed on and comes off with a case knife worked into a small lip. It takes a steady hand and the right angle. The usual damage from a kitchen drawer attempt is a line of gouges around the rim, or a slipped blade across the back of the case.
A screw back has notches cut into it and unscrews with a wrench that grips those notches. If the wrench is not set to the exact width of the notches it slips, and a slipping wrench marks the case and rounds off the notches so the next person has a harder job than you did.
A screw down back with a gasket is the one that matters most, because it is usually on a watch that is rated for water. It has to come off square, go back on square, and be tightened to seat the seal evenly. That is the difference between a watch that is still water resistant afterward and one that merely says so on the back.
Closing is its own step. Most case backs should be seated with a press, which puts even pressure across the whole back at once. Pushing one home by hand or against a table edge puts the load in one place, and that is how crystals crack and how backs go on at a slight angle and never seal again.
Water resistance on a watch is not a property of the metal. It is a rubber gasket sitting in a groove, squeezed between the case and the back. That gasket is the whole of it.
Rubber hardens with age and with heat. The moment a case is opened, the gasket has been disturbed, and an old one will often not sit back the way it did. This is why a watch can be opened by somebody in a hurry, closed up, handed back working, and then fail the first time it meets a sink.
We replace gaskets once a case has been opened. It is a small part and a small step, and skipping it is the most common reason a perfectly good watch dies of water a month after a battery change rather than the day of it.
Two honest caveats. A watch that says water resistant on the back is telling you what it was when it left the factory, sometimes decades ago. And no gasket makes an old watch a swimming watch. If water matters to you, say so when you bring it in and we will tell you what the case can realistically be trusted with.
Many quartz movements have an end of life indicator built in. Instead of ticking once a second, the second hand starts jumping in steps of two seconds, or four, holding still in between. The watch is still keeping correct time. It is telling you the cell is nearly done.
If you see that, you have weeks rather than months, and you have the chance to deal with it before the cell is flat and sitting in the case. It is the single most useful thing to know about a quartz watch, and almost nobody is ever told it.
WHY IS MY WATCH STILL NOT WORKING AFTER A NEW BATTERY?
Usually one of three things. Some movements need their reset contact bridged after a cell change before they will start. Some have a hand that is catching, so the motor is turning and the hands are not. And a movement that has run dry of oil, or that has corrosion from an old leaking cell, needs a service rather than a battery. All three are diagnosed at the bench in a few minutes.
A watch with subdials and pushers has more than one motor, and after a cell change the subdial hands often need to be driven back to zero through the pushers. A watch handed back with its chronograph hands parked at random is not finished, it just looks finished to somebody who does not use that function.
If your watch has pushers, use them in front of whoever changed the cell before you leave. It takes ten seconds and it is the one check a customer can do themselves.
We have been at the same bench on White Plains Road since 1992, three generations of jewelers and watchmakers. Watch work is done here, in house. Nothing goes out to a third party, which is why most battery changes are finished while you wait rather than in a week.
You are quoted before anything starts. If we open a watch and find corrosion from an old cell, or a movement that needs a service rather than a battery, you hear the price for that before we go any further, and you are free to say no and take the watch home.
If your watch is not the only thing that needs looking at, the same bench does ring sizing, chain and clasp repair, stone tightening, restringing and engraving. There is more on all of that on our repair and custom work page.
WHERE TO FIND US
Classique Jewelry Inc., 4248 White Plains Road, Bronx, NY 10466. Monday to Saturday, 11:30 AM to 7:00 PM. Call (718) 405 1687. If you are not local, we take watch and jewelry repairs by mail from anywhere in the United States, and we ship them back insured.
A watch is one of the few things people still own for decades, and most of them are stopped for the cheapest reason there is. If you have one in a drawer, take the cell out today, and bring it in when you can. Send us a photo if you are not sure what you have, and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth doing before you make the trip.
Classique Jewelry Inc. is a family owned jeweler on White Plains Road in the Bronx, NY, founded in 1992. All watch and jewelry work described here is carried out at our own bench.
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