[Marrin]

For all those who dont like reading long posts here are the main punchlines of this post:

- GET your 7S26 regulated - you will be amazed at the performance

- DONT do it yourself and LET A PROFESSIONAL DO IT!!


WHY SHOULDNT I DO IT?

1. you will most likely end up scratching the caseback as i did - the damn thing was WAAAAY tighter than i asumed it to be, so the tool popped out and scratched my beloved caseback on 3 places.

2. You WILL NOT regulate it right the first 10 million times which means you will keep opening the caseback and with that you risk getting more dust (and some other particles, like a guy whos eyelash fell onto the spring) with every new regulation.

3. the Lever From Hell takes such a small touch, where you think it didnt even move, to make the watch fast or slow by tens of seconds!!

4. You have to wait for a couple of hours to see the effect which means you will be doing it a couple of days, and although i love to fiddle with such things, it does get frustrating when you keep overshooting the goal!!

Why should i let a PRO do it?


1. He will not scrach your caseback

2. he will do it with one opening of a caseback

3. he will get INCREDIBLE results (in two days my OM has lost 2 seconds)

4. It will be over in 3-5 minutes

5. It is either cheap or (in my case) free of charge!!!!

The story:

i have had my monster for half a year now and most of that time it was in a 6-10 sec/day window!
I thought that was quite good, since i had another 7s26 (snk805) and it ran 12-15 sec/day!
It was acceptable for me, although the first mechanical i bought (Orient STI) was better
always being around +5sec/day!

This changed when i dropped my Monster (the clumsy idiot) on to a tile floor from about a meter (i think it comes to 3 feet, hehe) and since then the monster ran constantly at -15 to 20 sec/day!!
that kind of got annoying so after i recieved my watch tool set (we all get one eventually ) i tried regulating it myself!!
Someone on this forum i think once called the lever with which you regulate a Lever From Hell, and that is SUCH a fitting name for the damn thing!!!

My endevour started on friday!
tried opening my OM and what do you know, the robots that screw casebacks must be the ones that have enough torque to spin our planet, because nothing else can explain the amount of tightness in the caseback!!!
this resluted in me scratching the caseback and getting pissed!!!
But since i already scratched it i decided to continue with it anyways! So after another try where i used my inner animal spirit, i succesfully unscrewed the caseback!!
Since my watch was loosing time i nudged the little lever to the + side (being carefull not to touch the "NEVER TOUCH THIS" thingie that adjusts the ticks).
i closed the caseback but not tighten it with the tool since i asumed i will have to open it up again.

i then timed my watch to the online atomic, and wrote down when i measured it and how fast or slow it was at that moment, relative to the atomic.
I wrote it down cause i thought i will have to check the result in 24 hours and wanted to make sure i dont forgett what the difference was!!
Writing it down was SO not neccesary, since i noticed a difference within half an hour, and what a difference it was.... i calculated it to be about +60 and more sec/day.

to cut the long part short, i kept nudging the lever in the oposite dirrection of the watches tendency but ALWAYS overshot the right position. And before some of you say "you have to think about moving it, but not ACCTUALLY move it", i did! i did it like that, all damn day, and the next, and the next!!!
the closest i got was worse then when i began so i gave it up afraid i might damage the spring by slowly losing my nerves!!

On monday i went looking for a professional (something i should have done right away), and found out that most "watchmakers" in my town sell quartz watches, change batteries and resize bracelets, and thats about it.
No one regulates mechanicals anymore (the excuse being their timing device is broken, with 3 out of 4 watchmakers, i mean what are the odds of them all having the same problem at the same time)!
I guess they just didnt have requests like these anymore and probably sold their timing devices!!

They all pointed me to some guy who still does mechanicals (that being the 4 out of 4).
i went to this guys place and the difference between him and the others is that he had only about 5 watches on display for sale and a whole lot of disasembled watches in front of himself working on them!!

I knew he is THE GUY, i mean he even had the loupe on one eye!!

i showed him my watch and explained the problem, expecting him to say to come back after couple of days, but he opened it, hooked it on to a machine and started fiddling with it.

in about 2 minuted he gave it back to me and said it should be within a couple of seconds a day!!

i asked him how much does it cost and he just waved his arm, said its nothing and went back to the parts in front of him!!

i cuoldnt believe it!!

i told him i have some more mechanicals that i would like to regulate but only if he would charge me, and he said bring them, and pay me whatever you like!

I have to say i am a very happy man these couple of days!!

the only question that remains is, how long will the monster act like this?

To conclude, REGULATE YOUR SEIKOS!!!!!

Cheers from the owner of a Chronometer Monster :-d!!!

 

[defendnola]

I've always done it myself, but a freebie is always better espeially if a pro does it with proper measuring equipment. Congrats.

 

[j-san]

Same here. Always regulated my own 7S26 movements. Used a G-Shock atomic as the reference and took about a week to get things dialed in to about +/-7 seconds a day. I managed to get one more accurate than that, but it was purely dumb luck.

 

[wilson_smyth]

What strap do you have on that OM? It looks awesome

 

[Ottovonn]

Your watch guy's a rare breed, that's for sure. My watch guy charges 10 bucks for bracelet changes.

 

[smittythepig]

lol, classic post, and exactly how we all feel when we try to do the same. i've scratched plenty of casebacks with my awful caseback opener. i think the primary purpose of the thing is to scratch casebacks, and the secondary purpose is to open them up. i was lucky with my new monster. i was very careful and didn't scratch this one, and somehow within about 5 tries i managed to get the watch perfectly regulated. as with any 7s26, the rate also depends largely on the way you wear the watch and the state of wind. so the more i wear the watch the more accurate it is.

but i have definitely had some bad experiences (see previous post of mine) where i've almost given up entirely. seikos are frustrating. swiss watches with ETA movements are so much better. usually much more accurate out of the box, and regulating them is super easy with the fine regulation screw. a mm turn of the screw and you've only changed the rate by a couple seconds per day.

just got a new skx007 in the mail and it's about +15-20 seconds per day. not accurate enough for me but after the last experience i think i'm just going to be ok with it for now and enjoy all other aspects of the watch. at least it's gaining time and not losing it. my monster was losing 20 seconds per day out of the box and that's an absolute no-no. if i get bored i may try and regulate the 007 somewhere down the line.

 

[Marrin]

What strap do you have on that OM? It looks awesome

It's a Morellato orange silicone!!

It is incredibly comfortable and i love the looks of it, since its exactly the same shade of orange as the OM!!

Installing it was a problem since it doesnt take in fat spring bars, and i was affraid the regular ones would brake.

Luckily there is another watchmaker in my city who did some other things for me in the past and he asked me to leave him the watch for a couple of days.

when i came back, he made custom bars for it, he took a collar from a regular spring bar and thru it he put a single piece of a steel bar which he flattened a bit on one end, so it gets stuck inside the monsters lug (like the bracelet resizing pins).

It's a simple and VERY sturdy solution!!

Of course it wouldnt have been possible if not for monsters drilled lugs!! :-!

 

[Marrin]

Your watch guy's a rare breed, that's for sure. My watch guy charges 10 bucks for bracelet changes.

well acctually it has something to do with living in a [edit]ty country and a one of the [edit]tiest cities of the same country (by [edit]ty i mean poor).

resizing a bracelet here is charged 5-10 Kn which is about 0,90-1,75$!!

a service of a 7s26 is 80 Kn or about 14$!! (i asked the guy who was regulating it)

but i think it reflects more the poor standard of the people and the fact that most of them dont service their watches!!

the bad side of living in this kind of a place is that a Monster is considered a luxury (i was saving money for mine for a while)

 

[Dangermouse]

I did my 7S35 with amazing results, then did the wifes with catastrophic results destroying the hairspring in one adjustment when the holder came out of the adjustment lever, if anyone does try it themselves REMEMBER if you dont think the lever has moved, it HAS leave it a while and check the timing.

 

[Canuck]

I like my new OM but the two problems I have with it is that it's power reserve just isn't quite as long as I like (definitely less than my Sumo) and it gains about 15-20 seconds per day. I'll maybe see about getting it regulated.

 

[andy1m]

I regulated my Black Monster and it certainly got fews scratches, and the term LEVER FROM HELL was very true!!!

But everything worthed it because I'm VERY AMAZED AT THE PERFORMANCE!!! I never expect automatic watch can keep near perfect time.

 

[stratct]

Your watch guy's a rare breed, that's for sure. My watch guy charges 10 bucks for bracelet changes.

My watchmaker let's me take home watches and then pay for them in payments lol. That's dangerous for me lol

 

[DeepEye]

Since the Seiko low end movements (like the 7s26) perform very differently depending on the position and on the state of wind ( mine skx013 was +20sec dial up, -20 dial down), they sometimes are very difficult to regulate perfectly even with the right equipment.. I regulated mine muself, with tools bought from Amazon, and i did not scrathed the watch . Anyway at (+7 , +12, +2) it is way less regular and precise compared to my ETA Fortis, which is constant at -4s/d regardless of the position. I guess with higher end Seiko movements, starting with 6r15, the story will be different.

 

[tanwill]

For ease of fustration........... a timegrapher is reccommended.

 

[Will_f]

If I'm going to wear the watch frequently, I get it regulated after the first month or two. My watch maker charges 30-40 bucks depending on the watch, but totally worth it. The comments about isochronism (consistency independent of position and temperature) are true though. Some movements just vary too much to be worth regulating tighter than 5-10s per day. Also, if your watch has a free sprung movement it's going to cost more to regulate, but it's likely to be very accurate.

 

[Stamos]

My seiko monster's accuracy is between +20s per day when the watch is fully wound (when i wear it all day long, plus 5-6 minutes of swirling it!) and -5s with normal use (8-10 hours).
Is something wrong with the isochronism? I would like it to be more consistent...

 

[Will_f]

My seiko monster's accuracy is between +20s per day when the watch is fully wound (when i wear it all day long, plus 5-6 minutes of swirling it!) and -5s with normal use (8-10 hours).
Is something wrong with the isochronism? I would like it to be more consistent...

Sounds like the indexing pins that control the active length of the hair spring have a little too much play. As the spring winds down, the amplitude of the balance wheel is less and the hairspring isn't touching the index pins as much, allowing a longer effective spring length and slower oscillation. A competent watch maker can certainly fix it, though it might cost more than you're comfortable spending on an inexpensive watch.

 

[Stamos]

A competent watch maker can certainly fix it, though it might cost more than you're comfortable spending on an inexpensive watch

Understood, i'll leave it as it is! (until it gets worse...)
Thanks!

 

[j.e.t.]

+1 on this. I obtained an new SKX007 late last year, which was stable at approximately -17 a day. After having it regulated approximately 2 weeks ago, and even while doing various positional tests overnight, it has lost only 9 seconds in the 10 days that I've been monitoring it! It loses a few seconds a day while I wear it and gains them back resting (to varying degrees depending on position). But it will be even more accurate once I have determined what all the positional effects are on the watch of course. Needless to say I'm very pleased with the result of the regulation...

 

[andy1m]

For ease of fustration........... a timegrapher is reccommended.

There is actually a FREE software for PC with WinXP called BIBURO that works as a timegrapher. But it need a good mic to work.