Mechanical wristwatches employ spring drives for their motive power. However, when unworn, after about forty-eight hours, the mainspring fully unwinds and the watch stops. Many automatic watches not only keep time, they also provide “complications” such as day and date (the calendar watch), or, in more sophisticated automatic watches, display month, year, leap-year, lunar phase, tide time, elapsed time, world time zones, etc. Naturally, each additional complication also consumes some spring power and further reduces the operating time between windings. All such watches, when fully unwound, must be reset in order to wear them. Just resetting the time, date and day can be annoying. As the number of complications increase, so does the task of completely resetting the watch.
All of the ORBITA watch winders employ a unique and safe design concept for watch winding. Our design employs a solid-state microprocessor which controls a DC gear motor which is battery or AC powered and which intermittently drives a rotating cup. The cup carries the cushion mounted watch and rotates for a short period of time (one or two minutes) and then “goes to sleep.” The sleep period is easily programmed by the user based on the make of the watch. This provides sufficient motion to keep the watch wound while, at the same time, eliminating any concern of over-winding.
We are the only Watch winder company in the world offering a winding technology that actually replicates the oscillating movement of a watch being worn on a human wrist. We call this patented technology “Rotorwind”. This design is unique in that it swings an automatic watch, rather than rotating it, mimicking the natural action of the wrist. Then, with a series of oscillations triggered by a single revolution of a low-current draw-drive motor, power is only needed for a few seconds every 8 or 12 minutes. Battery life can be measured in terms of years, not months.
About Orbita – Founded by Chuck Agnoff in 1996 in Wilmington, North Carolina, Orbita is now the leading producer and provider of premium watch winders in the world. While Orbita did not invent the mechanical exercising of watches, the company did introduce a new, unprecedented level of quality. We began our endeavor by learning everything we could about mechanical watches, and then we researched the gentlest way to wind them. From inception, Orbita’s company philosophy has been to create products of lasting value and exceptional attention to detail, as well as products that people enjoy using.