Setting and Winding Pocket Watches

Hello folks. Today I want to talk about the major different kinds of pocket watches and how you set and wind them. These five represent the most common types. We have pendant set, lever set, pin set, and two different kinds of key wind. This watch is called a pendant set watch. This is the pendant. You pull the crown out and then you turn it to set the time and push in to wind. This works very much like a modern wrist watch would. This watch is a pin set watch. This is common in European watches. You'll very rarely see this in an American watch. It has this little pin that you push in and while you're holding the pin down, that switches the watch from setting mode or when released to winding mode. Many watches, especially railroad watches, are lever set. This is a Hamilton 992B. This is the quintessential railroad watch. This one dates to about 1947 and this is a lever set watch and that means that this crown won't help you. What you need to do is actually unscrew the front bezel of the watch which will reveal this lever. On this watch it's about 130. It's generally in this quadrant of the watch depending upon the kind. To put the watch in setting mode, you use your fingernail and you pull the lever out. There's the lever and then we can set the time with the lever out and push the lever in and now we wind the watch. So why, you ask, did they make watches like this? Well, at the dawn of the railroad, timing was not very well regulated and there were accidents and so they needed to do something about that because property and lives were being lost. So they came up with the idea of a lever set watch because it prevents you from accidentally bumping the time setting capability of the watch while you wind it. You need to wind a pocket watch every day and if your time set mechanism is harder to access, that means you're not going to accidentally bump it, which you could with a pendant set watch. If I'm winding it and I'm uncareful, I could maybe pop the watch into time set mode and then I've lost my time reference and that might put me in a world of hurt if I'm trying to keep a train on the right track at the right time. So lever set watches are a little bit less convenient but the trade-off is if they are set correctly according to a good reference, as long as you wind it every day, you're going to be set. So we have pendant set, lever set, pin set. These two are key winds. There's a couple different styles of key wind depending upon the era. This is the oldest style and this watch, you open the back of the watch and you see there is the winding arbor here. I can take my watch key. These are available new if you don't have a key for your watch and I can wind the watch by putting the winding key in. To set the time, you open the front of the watch and if you look you can see on the center arbor there, there's a little square that matches the key and to set this watch you put the key on the hands. This is obviously a little bit inconvenient and it's also a little bit hazardous because these hands are very fine both in terms of their ease of breakability but also they have to run without crashing into each other and so if you are not very careful you can bend the hands and the hands will catch on each other and then the watch will stop when the hands mesh. So a slight improvement to this was the little bit more modern version of a key wind watch and if you look at this one, the front of the watch looks pretty normal and the back of the watch has two key holes. The one on the side is the winding. You would do this every day and the one in the middle is used for setting the hands. This is attached to the hands and you adjust the time like so. The reason keyset watches came out first is because there are fewer parts involved. In the case of the earliest watches, it's very simple. The hands have to move and so you don't need any extra adjustment parts. You just stick the key right up directly on the hands and then you adjust the watch. The improvement to a rear keyset means you're less likely to mess up your watch by winding it if you do that from the back and you leave the front bezel closed. However, that's still inconvenient because you need to turn the watch over, open it up, and you know be fiddling while you're watching the front of the watch. So the more modern choices of what they call keyless works of the pin set used on many European watches or the lever set used on American railroad watches or the pendant set are much more user friendly but each have their own trade-offs. The pendant set is most convenient because you don't need to open the watch. All you need to do is pop it and adjust and you're ready to go. Pin set similarly is easy. This is perhaps a little bit vulnerable to being bumped when the watch is carried around but it does take a bit of force to push this pin in so I think this is a fine system as well. One thing that's great about pocket watches is you can actually open them up to see the movement. Here's our Hamilton 992B. This is a fantastic quality watch. You can see the decoration on the plates. There's the balance wheel. We have our mainspring barrel. You can see winding the watch there. We have our time regulation on the balance wheel there. To open the watch you unscrew the rear case. There are a few watches that you open by prying the back off but that is very uncommon. Almost all watches either unscrew directly or the watch actually opens through the front. So opening is pretty straightforward. You just spin off the back or the front of the watch but closing that there's a little bit of a trick that's worth knowing about. This is essentially a bolt and a nut. You've got threads that you can see on the case and the inside of the back is threaded and so you need to be very careful to make sure you're not cross threading this and so if I'm not careful you can see that there's no gap on one side and a large gap at the other side. If I were to start tightening I'm going to cross thread my case and I'm going to really damage the threads. That's a very bad thing. So you want to make sure that you have the case straight and if you look at it how I've got this right now there's still this big gap at the bottom and small gap at the top but it feels kind of attached. So what I'm going to actually do is I'm going to turn it counterclockwise loosening and what that's going to do is that's going to help the threads unlock and if I go back and sometimes I can hear a click they're going to line up in the right track and then I can start going forward without risk. This case has been loved by somebody so it's a little bit funny. There we go. So this is very important that you don't damage your watch. You never want to put a lot of force on this. I'll show you this one as well. This is a different style case. It's a base metal case. This is a gold filled case. Gold filled means that there's steel on the inside and they sandwich a layer of gold on both sides to make it look nice. This is just it's nickel, various other metals, less expensive, very durable, obviously doesn't look gold. This is a Hampton watch. You can see another kind of decoration. We've got straight lines on the tops of the plates and we've got kind of a fish scale pattern under the valance wheel. Same deal. I'm going to run the watch backwards a little bit pushing slightly on the back of the case. I'm going to look for a little click or feeling the threads engage nicely and you might have to go almost all the way around. There was the click and you can see that this gap is the same size all the way around the watch. I can then close this gently without using a lot of force and when it's closed it's very difficult to see the seams and so that's what you'd like to see. So if you don't know what kind of watch you have, many of these kinds are obvious externally. You can see the pin of the pin set and the key wind. You can identify a key wind watch because key winds don't have winding crowns at the top. You can see if it is a front set key wind by looking for the square or alternatively if you open the back of the watch and you only find one winding arbor, you know that you set it from the front whereas a rear set has the two winding arbors. The big challenge is how do you know if your watch is pendant set or lever set? I happen to know about these two particular watches and you could start by yanking on the crown and you might be right some of the time but it is actually better if it's a watch of this style. Most vendors I've found if you are careful will allow you to unscrew the front bezel to verify that the watch actually can be put into setting mode so people won't look at you too funny if you're very careful and you take the bezel off or they'll maybe do it for you and you look for the presence of a lever. If you have a lever, don't be yanking on your winding crown. If you don't find a lever, which is what we'll find in this pendant set watch, there's no lever between one and two. That gives you a very good indication that this is probably a pendant set watch and you can start pulling on the crown to see if you can get it to go into setting mode. So thanks for riding along. I hope this is helpful as you learn how to use a pocket watch you have or to perhaps evaluate one that you're thinking about purchasing. Thanks for watching.