High accuracy has long been the ‘holy grail’ of many serious watch collectors. This stripe of enthusiast demands much more from their choice of timepiece than simply that it color-coordinates with their wardrobe. And these collectors are likely to monitor their chosen watches carefully – and frequently – for any loss of precision, whether resulting from shock damage, magnetism or moisture.
It’s for these collectors that new Swiss-based company, ONE OF, has launched a set of three devices, two of which are pocket-sized, built to assist them as they check their watches. ONE OF offers measurement tools that quickly check a watch’s health and wirelessly transmit that information to a smart phone or tablet.
ONEOF offers the accuracy tool/app in three different function levels, with versions designed specifically for collectors (Accuracy2, pictured above), for boutiques (Accuracy Boutique Edition) and also for watchmakers in a retail or professional setting (AccuracyPro).
The Accuracy technology automatically detects your watch when placed nearby. It then amplifies every single vibration within the mechanical movement, converting those sounds into a digital form and creating a full ‘health’ record visible on your phone or tablet.
Analyzing the watch movement’s myriad internal vibrations, ONE OF’s technology quickly calculates the watch’s rate accuracy, frequency, beat error, amplitude, lift angle and stability (known as integration time).
As a bonus, the new products use an integrated magnetic field sensor to check whether a watch movement is magnetized. Owners can scan their watch from various angles to see if it suffers from magnetization.
Additional functions
While the compact Accuracy2 ($320) tool will check for magnetization, with the card-deck-sized Accuracy Boutique Edition ($1,270), collectors can also demagnetize a mechanical watch, also using a smartphone or a tablet. The collector need only press the DEMAG function on the application. This generates a short but powerful electromagnetic pulse that demagnetizes the watch’s spiral balance.
“The ONE OF Accuracy Boutique Edition’s sensor is provided with a piezoelectric microphone that is very sensitive to the vibrations of the regulatory organ, the ‘ticking’ of the watch,” explains Alexis Sarkissian, founder of Totally Worth It, the tool’s distributor in the United States. “The application’s algorithms process the acoustic signal in real time and measure, among other things, the chronometric accuracy”.
As its name implies, the professional-level Accuracy Pro provides the watch owner with much more data. It can perform measurements manually using its integrated accelerometer to check the watch in multiple positions. It provides the watchmaker with amplitude and oscillation flaws and displays the acoustic characteristic of the escapement in diagrams and cumulative graphs.
See the ONEOF USA site for additional details about all three Accuracy products.
Prices: Accuracy2: $320 / Accuracy Boutique Edition: $1,270 / Accuracy Pro: $3,330
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