Opinion: My Love-Hate Relationship with Accuracy and Precision

I have had a love-hate relationship with accuracy and precision for most of my life. In high school, I used to set my Timex watches to the school bell, so that when my watch hit the mark, class was let out. When I was on the drill team in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, synchronizing our marching was critical and our timing had to be impeccable. I also grew up in a household that firmly believed that if you were not at least 10 minutes early, you were late. The latter has led me to sit on many empty Zoom/TEAMS calls for 5-10 minutes, but at least I am never late.

It has been the same with the accuracy and precision of my mechanical watches. As a serial watch monogamist, I cannot wrap my head around owning multiple watches and swapping one out for another every other day. I just can’t do it. Instead, I wear my watches 24/7 and try to get the very most I can out of ownership. I track both the accuracy and precision of each piece, as well as how it wears and how the watch changes over time. 

Now you may be asking yourself, why is he talking about accuracy and precision as if they were two different aspects of timing. To me, they are distinct. Accuracy is tracking how well a watch keeps time versus established atomic timing, such as www.time.gov. Precision is how precise the time is displayed on a watch. More on this later. For now, let us focus on accuracy.

In the beginning, my initial introduction to mechanical watches was through vintage pieces I was trading back in the 1990s. These were all horribly inaccurate and my pusher at the time even warned me not to expect good timing results. This was pre-smartphones, heck, pre-cell phones altogether. So, if you needed to tell the time, you used your watch, looked at the dash of your car or asked someone. The last two were not an option for me. It had to be a watch, but losing a minute or two every week was driving me nuts.

I eventually went back to quartz watches for a while, more precise, modern and just felt like they could hold up to abuse much better than those vintage watches, with crowns that did screw down, but never quite screwed all the way down. Again, I did not know any better at the time. Eventually, I moved up to contemporary mechanical watches and then COSC watches. That is when accurate timing started getting more interesting. 

I could live with +4/-6 seconds per day, anything above that would bug the heck out of me. Oh, I get it, some have no issues with +/- 10 seconds per day, some even higher if it is on the plus side. I have owned many Seikos that kept horrible time, but my anal retentivity forbade long tenure in my possession. Look how great this looks, build quality is excellent, how about this finishing and then oh… it lost 5 minutes this month… Goodbye! Next!

The worst is when you have an accurate watch, and it would become inaccurate. This happened a few years ago and I blame my wife’s Toyota Prius. The watch went from gaining 2 seconds per day to losing 15-20 per day. Wound up trading it to a friend in California for a much lesser valued watch, as I could not be bothered with getting it demagnetized, as the Prius would have likely eaten it up again.

What has not helped over the years is the ability to track timing on the fly. With so many timing apps available, you basically have a time-graph machine in your pocket. I simply place my cell phone’s mic against the watch, and it listens to the beat. After a few seconds, voila, beats per hour measurement, timing rate and beat error in milliseconds. This is all so cool. However, to the accuracy obsessed like me, this has been trouble.

I have tried to ignore accuracy for the sake of enjoying a cool watch. A couple of years ago I had a Seiko SLA023 MarineMaster, with the most incredible blue dial and bezel. I adored how that watch felt and looked on my wrist. I loved that it was built like a tank. I did my very best to live with it and remarkably it lasted all of a couple of months. Unfortunately, I succumbed to its inaccurate movement and I traded it away. 

Speaking of beautiful blue dials, not too long after that MarineMaster, I acquired an Oris Carysfort GMT Limited Edition, brand new from an authorized dealer in my area. Unfortunately, within a week I realized the Oris was gaining 8 seconds per day and according to Oris, this was perfectly fine and within their standards. Once again, I tried to live with it, but it too gave way to neurosis.

I am not sure if you do this or not, but when I find out the time deviation on a watch, I will either set it ahead a minute or behind a minute and will not reset it again until I am one minute past the correct time or one minute behind. The longer between these resetting intervals, the better. In the meantime, I try very hard to NOT track the time and enjoy the watch. Ideally, if I can go a month without resetting my watch, I am happy. I get it that is basically +/- 2 seconds per day, which is very rare. 

Rare indeed, but not unachievable. Most of my Tudor watches have run within those specs, so has my last Planet Ocean and my beloved Railmaster, not to mention my Rolex Explorer II. I recently reviewed a Circula DiveSport, which was running +3 seconds per day on my wrist. At its price point, that is quite commendable. When I do not have to worry about accuracy, I can focus on other aspects and details, but then this leads to precision, and this is another can of worms altogether.

Precision is very much a pet-peeve of mine. If the watch hands do not line up perfectly with each marker or hash-mark around the dial, I cannot live with it. I do not mean setting it incorrectly. I mean if I set the watch perfectly and the hands line up with most of the marks but misses on a quarter or half the rest of the dial. Worse yet, if the hands hit the hash marks between the markers but misaligns with the large 5-minute markers themselves. This is a no-no. To me this is a sign of poor quality control, or lack of attention to detail by the manufacturer. 

The same goes with precision crafted parts of the watch. If the clasp shuts and there is a lot of play when closed. If a bezel has back play. If the end-links are loose between the lugs and make noise. If a fixed bezel (or any bezel) is misaligned. If there is a tiny piece of lint or dust between the crystal and the dial. All these things are unacceptable. We pay a lot of hard-earned money for these watches, and we are very passionate about them. We deserve the very best they can do to mitigate these issues and not just sweep our issues under the rug. 

I realize after having written all of this, I have come across as quite finicky, on the verge of neurotic when it comes to my watches. You can call me the horological Sheldon Cooper, but over the years I have seen what CAN be achieved, and I believe it is not too much to ask for more accurate and precise watchmaking. Quality control should be a real thing. 

Especially in recent times, as prices have sky-rocketed, I feel that now, more than ever, we should hold manufacturers accountable and demand better. If smaller, independent micro-brands, such as Farer, Oak & Oscar and Fomex can do it, so can the big ones. In the meantime, my 50th Birthday watch has gained 35 seconds in 175 days and I have yet to find any precision issues, and that puts a giant smile on my dorky face.