 |
| Seiko 5 (SRPD59P9) 24 Jewel Automatic 4R36 Movement |
Jewel enhanced bearings to reduce friction in the gear-train + hacking & manual winding. An SRP59P9 via Amazon for $243 total gives 100m water resistance, and a sunburst orange color that echos back to a similar paint color applied to a specific Mazda Miata I am very fond of.
4R36 Movement Specifications!
Movement Automatic
27.4mm Diameter
5.32mm Thickness
24 Jewel Enhanced Low Friction Optimized
21,600 bph or Vibrations Per Hour
53 Degree Lift Angle
Hand Windable Clockwise Only
Rotor Winding Bi-Direction via Seiko "Magic Lever"
Hacking!
Anti-Shock with Seiko Diashock
ETACHRON Regulator System
Features luminous hands for hour, min & second & day & date calendar at 3:00
Made in Japan :)
I love Japan & the Japanese Culture & Japanese People / Exceptional! Especially Japanese Food! Nihon Go 2010, Yoyogi Station, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan *Onuma Family*
My first automatic watch a Seiko 5 with a white 37mm face with black roman numbers & little luminous dots near the hour numbers, the hour & minute hand are luminous too, while the day & date are also displayed via an internal calendar wheel & cutout rectangular window at the 3:00 position. This smaller Seiko 5 with stainless steel link band operates via the 7S26-01F0 movement, I I purchased it via Overstock.com $50 back then (2006), but Amazon Prime the source of the Orange Sunburst dial color SRPD59P9, my latest automatic wristwatch!
Seiko History
A lot of watch snobs praise brands like Rolex or Omega for their heritage, 1848 for Omega SA, while Rolex started in 1905. Seiko watches been making mechanical works of wrist art since 1881 when Kintaro Hattori opened a watch & jewelry shop "K. Hattori ((服部時計店)) in Tokyo Japan.
If a Rolex were an automotive equivalent of Ferrari, then the Seiko 5 enhanced with the 4R36 watch movement kind of like a Toyota. Made in Japan, in the case of the aforementioned Seiko movement, with the winding setting stem at the 4 o'clock position as you can see in the image below.
It's something more eye pleasing than the SKX that it replaces (in the humble opinions of Meg & I), if thats what you want to call it. Accurate to around 3 seconds per day if you keep the mainspring mostly wound, a quartz watch a more precise timepiece with much less style & history. Jeweled watch movements go back to 1704 when they were invented to improve the timing precision of manually wound mechanical wrist watches, via jewel bearings lubricated with natural oils to reduce the steel movement spindle friction & give longer reserve time from the mainspring.
This my friends about wearing mechanical artwork on your wrist from somewhere between $100-$750 dollars USD2022 depending on which model. All said I spent $243 including shipping & tax lol via Amazon.com with a Prime membership for the Seiko 5 SRPD59P9 (orange color bezel) in the following image showing it mounted to my hair fair skinned left wrist!
 |
| Seiko 5 Orange Monster On my left wrist :) |
Meg did not like the watch when she saw it online at first, but really likes it now after seeing it in first person. She like's the sunburst orange color (I love it), but thought the price sounded a little too high (I think ~$250 sounds ok for such a high quality automatic). Meg wore the smaller white faced Seiko 5 automatic with the 7S26 movement for a few hours earlier today, but said it was too heavy & gave it back to me :)
Have a look at a technical drawing of the 4R36
I told Meg she is always welcome to wear any of my watches. She wears an Apple Watch Series 5 that I gave her with a silicon colorful strap that she got for it. I am sure the overall mass of that wrist mounted computer with the ultra low mass strap wears differently (lower profile, smoother) than the stainless link bracelet & steel raised body of the Seiko automatic.
Not everyone into big wrist watches, not that a 37 mm watch big by modern standards. I like watches in the 35-44mm range. My largest watch (& most unusual) a Nixie style VFD steam punk watch operation from ETSY (<- link to similar) that uses an amazingly precise +/- 1 second per month RTC (real time clock) via the DS3231 module featuring temperature compensation & power backup via under the logic board, in the leather band, mounted user replaceable 3V CR1220 lithium manganese dioxide primary coin cell.
Adding another mechanical automatic to my watch collection might sound insane & certainly Meg agrees. And there resides the confusing flawed logic of collecting anything, especially watches where time keeping the secondary function & especially where a cheap quartz watch offers better timing precision. She say's "You already have a lot of watches" when I am looking at a new model. I only own about a dozen, nothing too crazy.
There were others watches in the past, that I broke on accident, that I got water in & then left too close to a halogen desk lamp to try to dry out (Swatch Watch) that melted, thankfully not catching fire, but made a big mess on my desk. I melted a Skagen or badly burned it via a similar method a few years later.
I lost my Timex ironman in a hiking accident when I fell onto rocks & my left wrist was pinched between my body & a large bolder, falling with such force that it not only broken the glass, but bent the watch body badly & broke the movement inside & damaged the skin on my wrist & gave me a bad weird cut & bruised tissue that took many months to resolve & thankfully did not & amazingly so, leave any scaring behind!
Fashion & style are not about logic friends. Its about liking what you are wearing & this can easily & more often applies to clothing & shoes, the color & look & style. Its ok, people are visual & opinionated & like things. I am a technology enthusiast & obsessed with time & energy #physics - you do not have to be a history of science & technology technologist & technophile like me to appreciate a mechanical automatic mainspring powered gear-train movement wrist watch. The diver style with its big clunky heavy metal not exactly lady like for the other half of us.
Similarly, while less popular, manual cars with manual shifting transmissions & a clutch to engage & disengage the tranny from the engine, these offer the driver a more engaging experience the way an automatic or mechanical work of wrist watch art can offer its wearer. Something for everyone, I am not telling you to collect wrist watches with different technologies.
I am into that stuff (science & technology) & that's part of who I am as a person, part of my persona. To deny this fact or claim otherwise about myself would be disingenuous. In a world with so many problems, a new wrist watch like this Orange Monster by Seiko nothing more than a fresh burst of something dope to add to my left wrist as I go about doing all the things I do to comprise what makes up my life, including typing this blog. If you want to know more about this topic, I highly recommend the following YouTube video https://youtu.be/JKmP3XRhEzI where this exceptionally articulate bloke waxes & wanes on with humor about watches as a topic!
Seiko History Extended
When Kintaro Hattori opened up his jewelry & watch shop, he had been working with & selling & fixing watches since he was 13 years old & worked for many other watch & clock makers to learn the art & craft of making precision gearing & the small intricate mechanical parts that make up a mechanical watch movement. He started out learning under the master guidance of Seijiro Sakurai at the Kameda Clock Shop in Nihonbashi, first how to sell watches & later how to repair them.
By 1881 Japan was in a new age of clock & watches with pioneers in Tokyo & Osaka & Nagoya both studying & producing pocket watches based on existing western timepieces they imported. Trading companies in port cities like Yokohama & Kobe allowed Mr. Hattori & others to begin dealing with these foreign companies directly, including C&J Favre-Brandy, F. Perragaux & Co., Zanuti & iCe, and Siber & Brennwald, allowing him to import rare timepieces & specialized watch & clock making machinery & manufacturing equipment.
The rarity of imported watches Hattori was selling allowed him such success & profit that he was able to relocate to a main street in Ginza, Tokyo, the modern epicenter or commerce today in Japan. Once in Ginza, he renamed his shop 'Seikosha' (精工舍). By 1891, Hattoria was 31 years old & was asked to become the director of the Tokyo Clockmaker & Watchmaker association & to become a member of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce. By 1895 Hattori purchased the entire corner of Ginza 4-chome (modern day location of WAKO) & constructed a 16 meter tall clock tower. Seikosha means "House of Exquisite Workmanship" while Seikō means "exquisite" 精巧 In order to avoid an ill omen, associated with the word "Glory" in Japanese, the trade mark changed to SEIKO in 1924.
In 1969 the worlds 1st quartz watch, the Astron, launched into production by Seiko with a cost similar to that of a medium sized car of the same era. The first quartz chronograph also launched by Seiko. By the 1980's Seiko produced the worlds first automatic quartz, entirely powered by its movement on a wearers wrist in everyday life. When the Seiko Kinetic was launched 1991, it was a rebranding of this earlier 1980's technology.
By 1983 the company was remained Hattori Seiko Co. LTD & later in 1990 Seiko Corporation. During & after corporate restructuring, Seiko Watch Corporation & Seiko Clock Inc. subsidiaries were created. By 2001 it became an international holdings company Seiko Holding Corporation by July 1, 2007. Best known for vertical integration of nearly all watch making stages, making the lubricating oils, gaskets, seals, cases, movements, dials, & luminous compounds.Seiko Instruments Inc. was making the parts & Suwa Seikosha Co. (Seiko Epson Corporation) was also making components for every stage of manufacturing for all the functional parts needed to produce a finished wrist watch. Competition between these two operations improved the rate of technological development. Two channels of production also enabled ongoing manufacturing scaling & continued sales if one of the two groups ran into production problems. Today movements made in Shizujkuishi, Iwate (SII Morioka Seiko Instruments), Ninohe, Iwate (SII Ninohe Tokei Kogyo), Shiojiri, Nagano (Seiko Epson) & additional subsidiaries in China, Malaysia, & Singapore. Grand Seiko & other luxury watches made by Seiko are still produce in fully integrated in-house production systems in Japan.
No comments:
Post a Comment