Putting watch hands in place is one of those critical tasks most of us don't think about all that much – it doesn't seem particularly glamorous, and it's not widely appreciated that the job has to be done right or you can have a whole host of most annoying problems. Watch hands are held on by nothing more than friction, so it takes a bit of care and even finesse to do the job right. Poor hand placement can produce issues such as chronograph hands slipping on their posts and becoming misaligned; hands simply falling off if the watch gets a knock; and more subtly, a watch actually stopping because the hands are binding against each other, or rubbing against the glass or the dial. The procedure is to first fix the dial in place, and then place the hands before casing the movement. You have to be quite careful not to mar the dial; the lady in the picture above is using a manual press that exerts varying pressures to fix the hands in place. However, sometimes more elaborate versions of this tool are used as well.