The Breitling Watch Source Forums

I always thought that magnetised watches went kind of haywire: gaining hours every day. My Blackbird was gaining about four minutes each day. I never bothered to check if it was exactly the same amount but it was close. I took it to my watchmaker today and he told me it was magnetised. In the 8 hours since he de-magnitised it, it's still accurate to the second. So a new take on magnetised watches for me!

Glad to hear it was easily fixed!

They aren't always so easily fixed... I know one Radiologist at work who three times over the past 10 years has walked into the MRI chamber with a Rolex on and destroyed them
When I go anywhere near the MRI, my watches are the first thing that comes off!

This thread made me realise I was fairly ignorant on what might actually cause the magnetism of a watch, so I thought I'd Google around for some basic info. After nosing around numerous sites and threads, lo and behold the best piece I found was right here...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=16539

Magnetised watches usually gain dramatically because the hairspring 'sticks' to itself and significantly reduces the effective length, thereby increasing the frequency of the movement. However, slight magnetism will have a much less dramatic impact and is becoming more common with magnetic resistant materials.

In terms of magnetism ruining a watch - it is always a 2 second job to demagentise a watch - just pass it through a demagnetiser, so if a watch got destroyed by an MRI machine then something got permanently damaged by the magnetic field - entirely possible I suspect with fields of that sort of strength.

Roff: Yep more a case I believe of the watch on the wrist being smashed into the MRI at high speed by the irresistable pull rather than pure 'magnetization'

That kinda changes the story a bit!!!

As a followup, my SOSF was running about 90 seconds fast a day. Turns out it was magnetised too. The Blackbird is now 5 seconds fast over 36 hours and the SOSF is 1 second fast after 12 hours. So demagnetising fixed both. My hunch is that they MAY have been magnetised by sitting them on the microwave oven while it was going???

That's a definite possibility.

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Driver8

Site Moderator

Hey Novacastrian,

Whatever you are putting in that Microwave that requires you to remove your watch........... Wow

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Jim

"You have Control".

Not even sure how this situation would come around!