Older timepieces naturally need a little more tender loving care than modern watches, but does this translate into regular professional maintenance? Our vintage watch experts weighed in on this issue and came up with some valuable recommendations.
Maintenance Will Protect the Value of Your Timepiece
Any vintage watch owner will want to protect the value of their timepiece for as long as possible, and the only way to do that is through frequent maintenance. Unlike brand new watches, replacing damaged parts on vintage timepieces like a dial and hands can be very hard, if not impossible.
And even if you can replace the parts, keeping vintage watches in pristine condition from the day of manufacture is what makes them highly desirable and valuable. This means that constantly having to replace parts can actually devalue the timepiece.
As such, in order to protect your investment, it is vital that you make it a priority to schedule your watch for an inspection by a qualified professional who can ascertain the watch’s true condition and perform maintenance where necessary.
Maintain Pristine Condition to Ensure Longevity
As anyone who owns a vintage watch knows, maintaining its pristine condition is essential to ensuring its longevity. While mechanical watches are built to last, they still require regular care and maintenance to keep them running smoothly. Vintage watches often have sentimental value and can be passed down as family heirlooms. In addition, many vintage watches are quite valuable, and even a small repair can increase their resale value.
But perhaps the most important reason to maintain a vintage watch is simply to preserve a piece of history. Vintage watches are often well-crafted and offer a glimpse into the past. By keeping your watch in good condition, you can ensure that it will continue to function for years to come.
The most important part of vintage watch maintenance is keeping the movement clean and well-oiled. Over time, dust and dirt can build up inside the watch, causing the gears to stick and eventually lead to a breakdown. By disassembling the watch and cleaning all of the parts on a regular basis, you can prevent this build-up and keep your watch running efficiently.
Half-Year Maintenance Works for Infrequent Use
I think a vintage watch should not be maintained regularly until and unless you are a collector, then you might want to pamper and maintain the vintage watches. For a regular user who likes to wear a vintage watch occasionally, half-yearly maintenance should be good enough to keep the vintage watch running.
Five Reasons for Regular Vintage Watch Maintenance
Yes, maintenance of vintage watches is necessary. Vintage is a word mostly associated with anything that has withstood the test of time, and in our case, vintage watches are no exception. These need to be maintained for several reasons:
• Heritage preservation: Most vintage watches came to their current ownership via generational hand downs. These are treated as family heirlooms. They are treated as special heritage preservers. They are used in storytelling during family reunion conversations as a way of easily reincarnating ancestral roots and family origins, hence the need to maintain them.
• Saving on new purchases: Maintaining and repairing vintage watches ends up being a sound economic decision considering that modern watches are expensive when aspects of material and functionality are put into consideration. Vintage watches also tend to be less complicated in their mode of operations hence they save on the complexities of digital evolution that have not spared the watch evolution.
• Investing in collectibles: Some vintage watches appreciate in value as time goes by. They are categorized as collectible items. These can be used to diversify one’s investment portfolio at auctions and trade-ins hence they serve to provide economic gains in the long run.
• Tastes & Preferences: People are choosy when it comes to what they want and need, and when it comes to watches, there is no exception. The simplicity of design and the aesthetic value that comes with vintage watches, not to mention the feeling of belonging to a class of some sort because of the vintage brand watch, serve as reasons enough to maintain the watches and keep them running.
Preventing extinction: Some owners just maintain their watches in order to prevent the brand from going extinct.
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