How To Wind An Automatic Watch
Winding an automatic watch can be done in 1 of 3 different ways. Those are wearing your watch, winding the crown, or rotating your watch. Many newer watch enthusiasts cross over from battery operated watches to automatic movement watches and sometimes struggle with keeping power reserve. Once you know how to wind and automatic watch it’s easy so let’s get to it.
If your watch isn’t keeping its power reserve, it may need serviced. Read our 3 Signs Your Automatic Watch Needs Serviced to see if it’s time for you.
Wear Your Watch
Wearing your automatic wrist watch is the easiest way to keep the power reserve because as long as you wear the watch, it’ll never run out of power. This can simply be assumed by the name “automatic watch”. How this works is there is a weighted rotor attached to the movement. As you move your wrist this rotor rotates around the movement thus winding the mainspring, which provides the kinetic energy need to power a mechanical watch movement.
Winding The Crown
If you pick up your automatic movement and none of the hands are moving it means that your watch needs powered. All you have to do is simply pull or unscrew the crown and start to twisting it. This action will manually tighten the mainspring which provides the kinetic energy to power your automatic watch. On most modern watches there are mechanisms in place to ensure that you don’t over tighten the mainspring but always be aware. When you start to feel resistance, it’s probably a good time to stop winding.
In most watch manuals, they will instruct you to power your watch by this method if its not powered when you pick it up. Winding the crown manually gives the mainspring enough energy to not go back and forth keeping energy thus maintaining accurate time for the initial period wearing an automatic watch.
Rotate Your Watch
Although we don’t recommend this method of powering your automatic watch, you can always rotate the watch to power it up. This is a synthetic way of rotating the rotor to power the mainspring. Spinning the rotor might cause damage to the automatic movement so we don’t recommend doing this often but if you haven’t worn your watch in a day and want to give it a quick 12-24hr charge, it won’t be a big deal.
