The Breitling Watch Source Forums

I may have a bad ”apple” when I bought my new SO a year ago, I'm not sure. I weared my watch on/off-style at spring and summer not paying so much notice of watch power reserve, watch was usually stopped always when I took it with me after day or two but I did thought that maybe everything was not right. But autumn I had watch on my wrist daily, only took it away on weekends and I noticed that power reserve was like 27-31hours, even if I manually winded my watch. I measured it few times and same answer, about 30hours reserve. Now Breitling says it's min 42hours so I went to my dealer to talk about it. An older repairman at dealer said it's not right, he will also check it also and if there's something wrong, they will sent it to repaired (off-topic: he had also an older SO in wrist and he said haved both Rolexs and Omegas in his wrist in past and SO is the best watch he had own). I now know that they have sent SO to authorised repairer in Helsinki.


Just wondering what's wrong with my watch, what they do it and how long take it to repair? Is it min 42 hours if I hand wind it like Breitling say? Is this a common problem with ETAs? COSC-check was fine, there was nothing wrong with it. I know I should have contact right away when I did get suspicious but warranty is two years and I was not quite sure about power reserve, not even now. No, I have not lost hope on Breitlings and still thinking that SO is fine watch for me because I'm missing it.

The power reserve of 42 hours is from a fully wound mainspring, regardless of how the winding occurred - manual or automatic.

There could be any number of things wrong - it's possible that the sping is slightly misshapen and is not getting a full wind before it starts to slip in the barrel, but I suspect that th problem is elsewhere in the running train and that there is a problem with dirt, lack of oiling, a depthing problem, etc that is stopping the watch before the spring is fully wound down (as the spring winds down it provides less power to the running train and therefore may cause the watch to stop prematurely).

The only way that there wouldn't be a problem with the watch would be if the chrono were running constantly, which will reduce the power reserve, but even then 30 hours is a bit low.

Update.

Today I did get my watch back. The reason for bad power reserve were old / bad oils. Sp my SO went to Sweden and they changed new oils/lubricants and what ever else they did, I don't know. Hopefully everything is now OK, I will check now that power reserve just in case.