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Whether you wear your luxury watch only on special occasions or whether it’s your essential everyday timepiece, just like your car, your watch needs regular servicing to keep it in top condition.
Regular servicing for your watch will prevent damage, extend its lifespan and potentially protect your investment. However, many people ignore this essential task. After all, luxury watches keep working for years!
The trouble is that you can’t see what is happening inside your watch. You may think it’s completely sealed, but over time these seals degrade and corrode. Minute particles of dirt and dust can make their way into your watch movement. And what happens next?
Dust and dirt cause friction. Friction causes wear and tear. This reduces the accuracy of timekeeping and long-term can cause extensive damage.
On top of all this, all moving parts need lubrication. Delicate oils are used to protect moving parts and over time these oils dry up. Regular servicing ultrasonically cleans your watch inside and out. Seals and gaskets are replaced. Oils are topped up. And where relevant (we don’t do it for all watches) your watch will be polished back to a showroom finish, making it look and perform as good as on the day you first bought it.
Many people leave servicing their watch almost until it’s too late. They wait until it stops keeping accurate time, running too fast or too slow. They might have dropped it and a rattling noise appears. They wear it in the shower and condensation appears on the glass.
All these are serious issues, which bar dropping your watch, could easily be avoided. Waiting until a fault appears is like driving your car until black smoke comes from the exhaust. By then any repair will be extensive and arguably far more than regular servicing combined!
The manufacturer of your watch will recommend regular service intervals. Most recommend servicing your watch every 3-5 years.
Firstly, our expert watchmakers will disassemble your watch. Mechanical watches contain over 100 separate components, many of them barely visible to the naked eye. Each component is checked for damage to identify what may need replacing.
We then carefully clean each part using ultrasonic wash baths. This gently cleans each component without causing additional wear.
Specialised oils are then applied as we reassemble your watch, carefully aligning the gears and springs to ensure accurate performance within the manufacturer’s tolerances.
Each watch will then undergo up to 5 days of testing to ensure performance before being ready to return to you. And the final stage is to polish the case and bracelet.
We employ one of the very best polishers in the UK. He is skilled at laser welding techniques where, rather than polish out scratches, we infill with the appropriate metal. This builds back up the metal rather than wearing more away and leaves your watch looking almost better than new.
You can watch our polisher in action here >
Polishing isn’t appropriate on all watches, and we will happily advise if we think the value and integrity of your watch will be diminished by polishing.
As an Accredited Service Centre, we have access to genuine spare parts from the leading premium watch brands. This maintains the value of your watch and ensures its continued performance.
Non-authentic spare parts may look the same but may be made of inferior materials. They may have defects that in the long run will simply not work as effectively in your watch.
Repairing and restoring luxury watches is our passion. We care deeply about bringing beautiful luxury watches back to life and to maintaining their character. And that guides our philosophy towards repairs.
Unlike some of the major manufacturers, we work to maintain the authenticity of your watch. We will only replace parts and movements when strictly necessary and they have no more useful life left in them.
We do everything your watch needs to last a lifetime (with regular servicing).
Call our expert watchmakers at Steven Hale and we will be glad to help.