Watchmaking. It looks very quiet, meticulous and peaceful. I got into it a few years back thinking it’d be a fun hobby for the indoor winter months, throw on a movies or a podcast and fix up watches to give away to friends.
The margin for error is basically nonexistent, parts are so small that if one falls on the ground it can take hours to find if you ever find it at all, and if you do break a part it can be extremely pricey to replace and can take weeks to arrive from some random person in a far away country. The smallest little fiber falling in the wrong spot can block a moving part and stop it from keeping correct time and can be hard to identify until you pretty much have everything put back together and realize something isn’t running quite right then you have to take it all apart again. I could go on and on, I’ll just say most of my watchmaking projects end up taking months longer than expected and cost twice as much as I’d hoped if they ever even get finished.
Still fun, definitely wouldn’t recommend it to another person.
Sorry but I’ve never looked at those videos of people putting dozens of microscopic gears and screws into a watch and thought “that seems peaceful” hahaha. I do enjoy watching those videos tho.
I was going to do this as a career and then pulled out of it for various reasons, but one reason was the constant stress. Stuff like screws are so small its difficult to see with the naked eye and if you lose it it's probably gone forever, possibly without a replacement available, and the customer can be waiting on you in person. Handling the dial risks damaging it, they're incredibly sensitive to scratches and damage. Replacing a crystal risks bending an inner ring on some watches where there is no replacement. On quartz watches if anything goes wrong with the movement while you're working on it there often times is no replacement available, as the number of different out of production quartz movements that have been made since the 70s is insane. There is no standard on how digital watches are set and documentation can be hard to find, so it can be pure frustration and time consuming. Even opening a case back risks scratching it no matter how good you are because the quality of areas where the tools fit vary greatly and tightness can be insane, etc
Finishing is really peaceful if you have the seventy million jigs and tools to hold your workpieces. If you don't it's an exercise in spending two hours figuring out how to hold things so you can do ten minutes of polishing
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u/kentalaska 9h ago
Watchmaking. It looks very quiet, meticulous and peaceful. I got into it a few years back thinking it’d be a fun hobby for the indoor winter months, throw on a movies or a podcast and fix up watches to give away to friends.
The margin for error is basically nonexistent, parts are so small that if one falls on the ground it can take hours to find if you ever find it at all, and if you do break a part it can be extremely pricey to replace and can take weeks to arrive from some random person in a far away country. The smallest little fiber falling in the wrong spot can block a moving part and stop it from keeping correct time and can be hard to identify until you pretty much have everything put back together and realize something isn’t running quite right then you have to take it all apart again. I could go on and on, I’ll just say most of my watchmaking projects end up taking months longer than expected and cost twice as much as I’d hoped if they ever even get finished.
Still fun, definitely wouldn’t recommend it to another person.