21 Watchmaking Mistakes in Five Minutes

Most of my restoration videos are shot live in realtime with up to eight cameras. While some of them are cut down to make them more watchable, the uncut versions show everything for a reason: to quote Ernest Hemingway, “Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” The same is true of watchmakers, and of watches.

I almost called my channel, "How Not to Repair a Watch," because I had documented so many of my own mistakes in preparing to launch. I also thought about cutting out the mistakes. But in the end I decided to leave the mistakes in as I try to do better, and emphasize what my camera system is good at: documenting my actual experiences; and what YouTube is good for: sharing those experiences.

Many watchmakers on youtube show you where every individual gear and screw goes as they carefully place every part perfectly without context. This can be interesting to watch, but the moment you try it yourself you're going to discover that it's not as easy as they make it look.

When I started looking at watchmaking videos I found that the watchmakers that showed their mistakes were the ones that I learned the most from because they showed that it was difficult. I always keep that in mind as I face the challenges of doing it myself.

The chapter indexes in the descriptions of most of my videos allow quick navigation to different sections. This will allow you to jump to lume, or case work, or specific parts of the movement work directly without having to search for it. It also allows you to check how long any given step actually took me by looking at the time difference to the next chapter marker.

Comments are welcome, especially comments that show how much more you know about watches and watchmaking than I do. These will give everyone another reason to laugh and may provide educational benefit as well.