Quote:
Originally Posted by Driver8
And that's all fine and perfectly correct. I totally agree with you on all of the above.
What isn't fine and perfectly correct however, is when something suddenly changes for the worse and an 18 month old, lightly worn watch that was previously consistent, predictable, easy to self-regulated, and highly accurate, very suddenly starts losing a number of ever increasing seconds per day. In my case, no matter how I wear it or how I rest it (crown up, crown down, dial up, etc) nothing makes it speed up; it just consistently loses more and more time. I'm now up to circa -10 secs a day. This is a problem.
I've owned mechanical watches for nearly 30 years and I've owned Rolexes for almost 25 of them. I also moderate another watch forum dedicated to a different brand. Consequently I have plenty of experience and I don't have rose-tinted glasses about expectations of quartz-like accuracy - far from it. If my watch was an isolated case, I'd just ship it off to RSC and be thoroughly confident it would be fixed. However what we're seeing are numerous cases of the same issue even in this microcosm of Rolex owners here. We've also seen watchmakers telling us that this is caused by a key part wearing ABNORMALLY fast and that this part is currently just replaced with like-for-like as part of the "fix". We are also seeing some people having to send a "fixed" watch back after a matter of months for the same issue. In some cases multiple times.
This is nothing to do with the fully expected and accepted tolerances and limitations of mechanical watches, and everything to do with a problem. A problem that Rolex refuses to publicly acknowledge and are apparently currently unable to permanently fix. Yes, I'm sure that over time Rolex will fix it, but 5 or 6 years would seem to me to be a more than reasonable time for a company with Rolex's resources to resolve it.
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I am not a watchmaker, and I didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night (American TV commercial joke for those of you out of the US) but one thing I just can’t understand.
If, and I am not doubting your assessment, if, all this issue is caused by a single part wearing out excessively fast, why couldn’t Rolex solve the problem by replacing it with a more robust part? Or modifying the part it connects with to offer less resistance/friction/wear? I realize there are microscopic and extremely complicated interactions between all the parts in an automatic watch, and it may not be THAT simple, (just make the part out of a higher grade metal) but Rolex has been in business for 100 years making fine timepieces, I am sure if they identified the problem as this one part, WHY can’t they come up with a permanent solution?
