Please help with advice on setting my Submariner

[rinket]

High all, long time reader only occasional poster. Hope your all well and having a great New Year so far. I have a question to ask, if I may. Since I bought my brand new V series sub back in May '09. It had been running exactly 12 secs fast a day. I tried all the usual leaving it on its side crown up, crown down at night. This made no difference whatsoever. Finally I passed it to my local AD for a regulation. They in turn sent it to Rolex London and after approx 2 months it was returned to me. No explanation, care in wrapping or polish. Just the watch and an attitude from the AD. (However I am not surprised to say that the AD is no longer in business.) Anyway for a few months everything seemed fine +2/3 seconds a day. Though in the last month had wild discrepancies ranging from 1- 3 min per week. I know this is unacceptable and expect much better from a £3.5k watch. But when setting my watch again tonight using my Mac's clock, I noticed that when I set the minute hand to the desired time with the second hand at twelve. The minute hand kind of rolls back a minute or so... Is this normal? Should I In-fact set the time slightly ahead then roll back the minute hand to the precise time then wind it? Or not... I don't really want to send it back for a couple of months and find no improvement... So I wonder with so many professional Rolex enthusiasts on this forum if anyone could give advice on how best to set my watch for optimum accuracy. Apologies for the tedious and possibly boring length of post. But any help would be gratefully appreciated. I might add that I have previously owned £100. automatic watches which had kept much better time. Crazy Eh!

[JBat]

I would be sure to use a reliable time source, like time.gov for the sake of consistency. As far as setting the hands go, you are going to have some play there. What I like to do, and what I learned here, is to roll the hand slightly past where you want to set it, they carefully roll it back to the desired setting. I hope that makes sense.

As far as precision goes, yes, 1-3 minutes/week is too much. Your watch should easily be able to keep time within the COSC standard of -4/+6 seconds/day. If it's not, I'd send it back to the RSC and have them do it right.

[rinket]

Thanks buddy, I'll give it a try and see how i get on. Am i to understand then that the clock on my mac/PC is not accurate? I thought they updated automatically... Thanks for the advice time.gov it is...

[JBat]

Originally Posted by rinket

Thanks buddy, I'll give it a try and see how i get on. Am i to understand then that the clock on my mac/PC is not accurate? I thought they updated automatically... Thanks for the advice time.gov it is...

It's probably pretty close, but I like to use sites like the one I gave you, or timeticker, to keep things consistent. Good luck.

[Tools]

Originally Posted by rinket

Thanks buddy, I'll give it a try and see how i get on. Am i to understand then that the clock on my mac/PC is not accurate? I thought they updated automatically... Thanks for the advice time.gov it is...

Computer clocks drift.. And they update from different sources periodically...... It is not something to use if you want to calibrate a watch or other time piece...