Diving every weekend and often one night per week, "playing at the beach" and beach fishing, along with caving etc. All potentially dirty environments (especially caving) will decrease the life of your watch bezel.
Here we see (or rather don't see) the Citizen 200m Eco Drive dive watch a super companion for over 20 years! with the bezel missing; lost in action in the surf one day. This watch was constantly getting grit in the ratchet mechanism of the bezel (even with care) since I was wearing it all the time for diving EVEN in crap conditions as I just had to go diving and this was the result after some years! Oh well!
The bezel failed because the actual case worn in a critical area from abrasive sand particles and hence was NOT possible to be repaired!
Let's see how to avoid this undue wear and tear (or how to live with it!).
Dive watches, usually characterised by having a uni directional rotating bezel are synonymous for being rugged watches by default in relation to their intended usage, ie diving!
However, this ruggedness can soon be destroyed by some simple mistakes, mistakes which are not related to dropping or smashing the watch.
Here's how:
Wearing your dive watch in a hot bath or spa or even a hot shower. The reason being is that the watch rubber seals can expand and thus with this movement it is possible to alter the seal between the rubber O-rings and the watch back or watch crystal and or watch crown, therefore allowing the ingress of water. This amount of water is impossible to tell unless a full on failure and you'll see your watch hands swimming around inside the case!
You may not even see any evidence of liquid water after such repeated treatments. You may just start to notice that condensation has now been occurring within your watch when it was never present before (always an indicator of a service could be required dependent upon the amount of condensation present).
Don't bathe in hot water with your dive watch!
How about surfing and simply going to the beach for a bit of light swimming etc or lazing around on the sand? What harm could this possibly do to such a tough watch impregnable to the ingress of water at depths ususally from 200m plus?
Here's the thing, some beaches (and it is not uncommon) contain very abrasive sand particles know as Zircon.Yes, that's right Zircon, it's a very hard mineral (hardness 8 on MOH's scale) and is indeed mined from what are known a "placer deposits" and these placer deposits are almost exclusively located close to beaches (or what were once ancient beaches). These super hard particles of "sand" can enter the tiny gaps (in ALL DIVE watches regardless of who makes them) under the rotating bezel and remain there, no matter how hard you try to "wash them out", with the only way to clean the bezel is to have it professionally removed and cleaned. Constant or regular swimming in dirty or rough beach surf with a lot of fine sand particles in the water column will also reduce the life of your dive watch bezel mechanism. Once these particles are lodged within the mechanism, constant rotating of the bezel will act to abrade metal (in the best) and or plastic ratchet mechanisms within the bezel and watch case.
If one plans to actually use their watch bezel, especially for diving then it's always best to avoid/resist diving in very poor visibility water (professional divers don't get that option!), to avoid fine sand particles which are ALL abrasive (even quartz SiO2 is abrasive with a hardness of 7) from giving you extra chores of cleaning your watch bezel after a trip to the beach or diving in sand filled waters.
Check my videos on watches and after care especially for dive watches, that will by default "get dirty"!
@BushCampingTools
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