Watchwinding Technology

Mechanical wristwatches employ spring drives for their motive power. However, when unworn, after about forty-eight hours, the mainspring fully unwinds and the watch stops. Many automatic watches not only keep time, they also provide “complications” such as day and date (the calendar watch), or, in more sophisticated automatic watches, display month, year, leap-year, lunar phase, tide time, elapsed time, world time zones, etc. Naturally, each additional complication also consumes some spring power and further reduces the operating time between windings. All such watches, when fully unwound, must be reset in order to wear them. Just resetting the time, date and day can be annoying. As the number of complications increase, so does the task of completely resetting the watch.

All of the ORBITA Watchwinders employ a unique and safe design concept for watchwinding. Our design employs a solid-state microprocessor which controls a DC gear motor which is battery or AC powered and which intermittently drives a rotating cup. The cup carries the cushion mounted watch and rotates for a short period of time (one or two minutes) and then “goes to sleep.” The sleep period is easily programmed by the user based on the make of the watch. This provides sufficient motion to keep the watch wound while, at the same time, eliminating any concern of over-winding.

We are the only Watchwinder company in the world offering a winding technology that actually replicates the oscilating movement of a watch being worn on a human wrist. We call this patented technology: ROTORWIND

Frequently, owners of automatic watches have more than one watch. They may have a stainless-steel watch which is used for sports events, swimming, diving, etc. They may use another watch for normal daytime office or business activities and yet another for evening or formal social events (frequently, a gold watch). Clearly, the task of keeping several watches continuously wound can be challenging and many multiple watch owners employ one or more Watchwinders to accomplish the task. Check out some of our winders below: