This anecdote comes up pretty frequently when I’m working with clients to spec out their watches. Most of my personal watches get worn on a daily basis, and they take whatever abuse life throws at them. I’ll occasionally catch a doorknob, or knock a watch on the corner of a granite countertop, or I’ll do some home or auto maintenance task that I feel is quick and light enough to not warrant changing clothes, and scratch something. It happens.

One watch though… One watch gets the absolute worst abuse you can imagine putting a watch through. I live in a century old home up in the mountains above Denver, and it requires… Well, a lot of work. A good portion of the home is 18″-20″ thick stone walls that require maintenance and repair. Also, it’s situated in a canyon, and the canyon walls are VERY steep. There has been no forestry maintenance done in probably the entire history of the place, and I’ve been doing a lot of fire mitigation. Cutting down trees, and shlepping them down the canyon wall, loading them in a trailer, and hauling them off to unload them at the slash yard. Myriad other pretty heavy tasks.

Chainsaws, air hammers, demolition hammers, jack hammers, sledge hammers, mauls, rocks, boulders, logs, engines… Lots of things most people wouldn’t subject their mechanical watches to.

I’m not most people though. See, if I break something, I’m a watchmaker, and it’s really no big deal to fix it. Also, nothing against quartz watches, they just hold absolutely zero interest to me. They have their place, just not something I have any use or desire for. And I’m just about never without a watch on my wrist. So, something is going to take the brunt of some pretty serious abuse. What watch?

I call it my “shop watch”. Currently, it’s a sort of Seiko frankenwatch. One of my very first mechanical watches was a gray market Seiko 5 back in college some 20 years ago. Fairly small (36mm) pilot themed thing with a 7S26 movement in it. I wore it pretty regularly for a good decade, and then got in a nasty car wreck in early 2016. 70mph head on, small overlap… in a classic car. Among other injuries, I starred the windshield with the hand wearing that watch. The G-forces were enough that my 3oz keychain swinging 90 degrees bent the key in the ignition at a right angle. Hard to do much worse and survive.

At first, the watch didn’t seem to have survived. Insurance bought another one to replace it. Eventually, I opened it up to see what finally killed it. Turns out, it wasn’t any of the things I knew it had to be. I had a husky dog at the time, and if you’ve ever spent much time around such critters, you know they shed like crazy, including these teeny tiny little fluff hairs. Some time prior, I had opened the watch to regulate it or something as it slowed (it was ten years old at this point, remember), and one of those little dust mote hairs had gotten inside. The wreck dislodged it from wherever it had been hiding out, and it got stuck between a couple of gear teeth. I plucked it out, and it started right back up!

That’s not the shop watch though, just the progenitor. I had the replacement, and decided to mess around with it a bit. I took the case and hands, got one of the new NH38 movements, a dial, and a sapphire crystal, and threw something different together (I was not aware of the term or concept of “Seiko modding” at the time, and only learned about that very recently). This is the current shop watch.

That NH38 has been through hell. At this point, I’m almost trying to kill it. Some time a year or two back, I needed to modify some mountainside. I spent a few full days behind a full size jackhammer while wearing the shop watch. If anything could kill it… Nope. Didn’t flinch. The paint literally shook off the dial (you can see this in the lede photo up there), and is now loose between the dial and crystal, but the NH38 in there is happy as can be!

The case is badly scratched up now, and the flakes of dial index paint in there drive me nuts. Also, it’s kinda small, and really not all that pretty. Since I’m doing all this fun watch making stuff, I figured I’d replace it! So I’ve got a new shop watch in the works. It’s not the highest priority, since I have other people’s watches that need building, plus the house, and some cars, and two kids, and myriad other things demanding my time. But I think I have all the parts now… Waiting on a replacement movement for another watch, and that’ll be the last piece of the puzzle. Stay tuned!

Moral of the story though, as far as Rocinante Watches is concerned, is it’s pretty damn hard to kill a NH38. They’re not very pretty, and not very accurate (more on this in an upcoming blog post), but they can take an absolute beating!