If you have ever owned an automatic watch you might have shook your wrist and listened to the rotor spinning inside while asking yourself how long it will take for it to fully wind itself.
Unfortunately this question is a little more difficult to answer than you might think as there are so many factors affecting it, but we will go through everything below.
How Do Automatics Watches Work?
Automatic watches work in a very similar way to a normal manual wind watch. They both have a main spring that needs to be wound up, which is then allowed to slowly unwind. This unwinding transfers power into the various cogs and wheels inside the watch to make it run.
The main difference is that an automatic watch can do this by itself. Normally you need to wind the spring up by twisting the crown, in an automatic this is all done automatically.
Automatic watches have a weighted rotor attached to the movement. This weight is balanced in a way that it will very easily move, which means that as you move your arm throughout the day, this weighted rotor will spin. The weighed rotor is attached to a number of cogs, which in turn are attached to the winding mechanism. Every time the rotor moves it will wind the watch a little bit.
Basically just wearing the watch will cause it to keep winding itself slowly throughout the day.
What To Do When An Automatic Watch Is Fully Unwound?
Just like a normal mechanical watch you will need to wind it up to get some power back into the watch. You can do this through winding the crown or you can give the watch a shake. This will spin the rotor and get the watch winding itself.
You can wind your watch fully by hand or you can just do it enough to get it going. Once the watch is running and you have set the time you can put it on your wrist and allow it to continue to wind itself as you go about your day.
(You can read more about – Can You Over Wind A Watch?)
How Many Times Should You Turn The Crown Of An Automatic Watch?
Normally if I do hand wind my automatic watches I give them around 30 turns of the crown. Usually anywhere between 20-40 turns is going to be fine and give it more than enough power to get going while it continues to wind itself.
How Long Do You Need To Wear An Automatic Watch Until It Fully Winds?
This is a difficult question to answer, basically it depends. It depends on a lot of different things.
It Depends On the Watch
Firstly it depends on the watch you have. Every watch will have a different winding mechanism and the rotor will be a different weight as well as the fact some can spin in both directions while others cannot.
A full spin of the rotor on one watch is not going to give the same amount of charge as another watch also doing one full spin.
It will also depend on the mainspring. Some watches have a power reserve of 72 hours, while others may only be half of this, so of course one watch is going to take a lot longer to be fully wound compared to the other.
It Depends How You Wear The Watch
Basically the more movement there is, the more winding there will be. If you are shaking your wrist in some sort of vigorous fashion, your watch will wind itself a lot faster than if you put it on and then lie down and take a nap.
It Depends How Much You Hand Wind The Watch
It is pretty obvious but if you give the grown 50 turns, your watch is probably going to be pretty much fully wound, meaning it will wind itself up to the maximum level a lot faster than if you only give the watch 5 quick twists of the crown before putting it on your wrist.
Don’t Worry About It
Just don’t worry about it. Just get the watch going, set the time and then wear it. It’s an automatic, you don’t need to worry about it, it will just do it thing.
You will hear different estimates like it can take 90 minutes for it to be full, while other will say you need to wear the watch for 8 hours.
As you can see from above there are too many factors that can affect how long it takes, so it is nearly impossible to give a time scale without opening up the watch and testing things, but even then you might not know exactly how long it takes, so just don’t worry about it.
Could You Test It?
Maybe, but why would you? You would need to let your watches fully unwind, then place them on a winder and record how long you wind them for, then you would need to take them off and record how long it takes for them to stop again. You would need to repeat this for a number of days. Changing the amount of time you wind them for and seeing how it changes thing.
However, even if you get a time from this, it probably would just get thrown straight out the window the second you wear the watch. You wrist is not going to wind the watch in the same way as a winder will, so it’s nearly impossible to replicate this study into real life.
You just need to give you watch a little hand winding every now and again and then wear it. This is more than enough and if it stops, well, that’s the nature of mechanical watches, so just start winding it and wearing it again.
Conclusion
As you can see, we can’t really answer the question of how it can take for an automatic watch to wind itself. There are too many factors at play. So long as you are wearing your watch, it will be doing its thing and slowly adding power to the watch.
Don’t worry about it and just enjoy the watch for what it is. If it is on your wrist, it’s not going to be running out power.
(You can read more about – Why Do People Say Mechanical Watches Have A Soul?)
Ian is the main writer at Horology Dream and is a lover all things watch related.
He has been a watch collector for over a decade and brings his knowledge and experience to this site to help you on your own watch collecting journey.
You can connect with him on Social media and talk anything watches or read more about him on his Author Page.
