III. Before You Buy
A mechanical watch may suit you no good if you have no knowledge of it.
Mechanical watches will easily fail your expectations on time keeping comparing to atomic clock’s accuracy. Your iPhone or Android phone, which synchronizes time with your wireless plan carrier every 24 hours, will tell better time than a mechanical watch.
A Ginault watch is not a necessity. It is a compilation of craftsmanship and skill set that takes years to acquire. It is an art form of labor, dedication and passion to microscopic elegance.
There are certain restrictions in adjusting date and time on a mechanical watch. Failing to comply will break the movement and cause malfunction. To repair would require the watchmaker to disassemble every part of the watch movement, replace the broken parts, reassemble every bit of the movement piece by piece, replace the watch with a new set of hands sometimes even a new dial, water seal gaskets, and so on. It would then be placed onto an automatic winder for the movement to be regulated and fine tuned which may take up to 6 weeks to complete.
Unlike quartz or digital watches, mechanical watches are prone to magnetization. Laptop speakers hidden beneath the keyboard, your cellphone speakers, and your high end stereo system, etc, are all powerful magnetizers. Although we designed the watchcase to function like a Faraday cage, placing a mechanical watch near any kind of magnetizer for just a short period of time will magnetize the caliber, causing the watch to run wild. That is to say 30 or 40 seconds a day fast. In some extreme cases, it can be as bad as a couple minutes fast per hour.