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The pointless valve

…..or “why no one needs a helium release valve but everyone has one!” If you’ve been reading articles in the watch world for a year or more it’s likely that you will have come across at least one article discussing the presence of helium release valves in modern watches. What most of those articles will quite rightly explain is that you simply don’t need one as most divers don’t dive with their watches – mainly because they now use dive computers, and for those who do, less than 1% are ‘saturation divers’ (the type of diving where a build up of helium on a watch is possible and likely). However what I’m going to explain is why they don’t need one either! Firstly let’s cover the basics of what it is for and why a divers watch might need one. When divers operate at great depths, they either live in…

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An evening with ORIS

This week I had the privilege of being invited to an Oris VIP evening where I had the opportunity to meet with their Chairman Urlich Herzog. I must admit that until very recently, Oris was not a company that I knew much about so this was a great opportunity to dispel myths, learn about the brand, and spend a little time in good company with some beautiful and somewhat unusual timepieces.  Ulrich is not your typical Chairman. He’s warm, friendly and approachable, and certainly not what you think of as a typical “chairman of the board” but then again he’s not come from that corporate culture. You see, unlike many Swiss watch manufacturers, Oris is still a privately owned business and one of the few remaining Swiss watch manufacturers that maintains its independence and is not subject to the influences of a parent group. And to this extent Ulrich leads…

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Movement snobbery

Have you ever looked down at your watch and either felt a sense of pride or dismay at the movement that it contains? For many buying their first “proper” watch, there may be many things that they consider including size, style, aesthetics, complications, and much more but usually there’s a romance with the mechanical. The feeling that inside your watch an array of tiny springs, cogs & gears engineered to the tiniest of tolerances are capable of displaying the current time with incredible accuracy all powered by the movement of the watch on your wrist. I find it interesting that the discussion of a watches’ movement brings great opinion and controversy. Movements generally speaking fall in to two camps. Those that have been developed in-house to which a great sense of admiration is expressed and contrastingly those that have been “bought in” with many feeling a sense of disdain as…

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