Chances are you are reading this on either a cellphone, a laptop, or maybe a tablet. And chances are you may be wondering about the use of a magnet to hold the tip of our new Everyday Carry (EDC) tool and how that might affect your mechanical watch! It’s a great question. You may have read or been told to not let your watch anywhere near a magnet for fear it might damage it! Fears concerning metal detectors in airports may have even led to you not traveling with your favorite timepieces. Hopefully, we can put some of those concerns to rest for you so that you can get back to doing what matters most…wearing and enjoying your watch!
Bottom Line Up Front: Our EDC watch tool does NOT harm, change, or otherwise affect in any capacity the working of your watch!
If we roll back the history marker, before we were quite literally surrounded by magnets in all of the electronics and tech we use to interact with the world today, magnets were a bit more of a concern for watches owned by individuals in certain professions. In fact, in the 1940s and 50s, watches specifically designed to be antimagnetic were developed for people who were engineers, scientists or other tradesmen who interacted with strong magnetic fields frequently. As time has gone on, better and better materials have been introduced into watchmaking to make it that much harder for your watch to be affected by the daily dose of electronics they are subjected to. Our phones, key fobs, laptops, airpods, and even power tools, all produce magnetic fields that, in theory, have the potential to affect your watch’s accuracy. So why then do we not worry about them quite so much as we go about our day?
The answer is quite simple really. The magnetic field produced by these everyday objects is so weak that it is unlikely to affect your watch in any capacity. The same can be said of our latest EDC tool, the Slidecatch. Let’s take a moment to explain why…using math! According to the International Standards Organization (ISO), for a watch to be ISO 764 compliant it must be able to resist magnetic fields up to 4,800 A/m, or approximately 60 Gauss. This is a universal standard and one that virtually all modern-day watches will meet. The Slidecatch measures approximately 1 to 1.5 Gauss (3 to 5 Gauss if held directly against the small internal magnets). For context, if you were to measure the magnetic field whilst only one inch away from a microwave it would be approximately 2 Gauss. Some power tools can produce upwards of 10 Gauss. Even our phones can reach 10 Gauss if measured only a few millimeters from them. Okay, enough math! Hopefully you are getting the gist, and that is to say these everyday items that we have grown to depend on do not emit enough magnetic forces to affect your timepiece (of course, individual circumstances come into play such as length of time left next to one of these devices, how old the watch is, etc.). But in general, you are quite safe to wear and enjoy your watch in nearly every scenario of daily life, including travel! And you are most certainly okay to use the Slidecatch to conduct simple strap and bracelet changes!
Sure, we wouldn’t recommend opening up your watch caseback and poking around in there, but hey if you really wanted to, Omega makes an Aqua Terra that is resistant up to 15,000 Gauss if you can believe it! Perfect for those frequent adventures to visit the inner magnetic workings of the CERN Supercollider.
(Schiffman’s Jewelers. (n.d.))