You probably don’t give much thought to when you set your watch –if you notice that your watch is not showing the proper time or date, you set right away. However changing the date when your watch is showing between 9pm and 3am can cause damage to the watch – the date should never be changed during this time period. The reason for this is simple. The day/date gear for most watches begins to engage at 9pm and does not fully disengage until 3am, well after the date has changed. If you use the crown to change the date during the 9pm-3am “danger zone”, you can damage the day-date gear or dial and earn your watch an all-expenses-paid trip to Govberg for repair ;-).

Even if you put your watch on in the morning, you need to be aware of this potential problem in the event your watch stopped while in the “danger zone”. Always make sure to advance the time first to sometime in the “safe zone” (say, 7am) and then advance the date setting. If the date is only off by one or two days, it is always safe to manually advance the time past midnight until the correct date is shown.

Of course, the best way to avoid this problem is to keep your manual watch fully wound and to use a winder to store your automatic watch so that it is always showing the correct date! If you do notice that the date function has stopped working, just contact us and we can provide a free estimate to get your watch back in working order in no time!