Meca-quartz is a hybrid watch movement that mixes quartz and mechanical parts. A battery and a quartz oscillator keep the time, while the stopwatch works mechanically. That puts traditional chronograph parts, such as heart cams and reset hammers, inside a battery-powered watch.
How does a meca-quartz movement work?
The movement runs on battery power. Coils and a quartz oscillator keep the time, so the quartz section handles ordinary timekeeping. The stopwatch is different. It works mechanically, with the parts found in a traditional chronograph: heart cams, reset hammers and levers. Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Caliber 630 shows how the two sides were split. It had two motors. One moved the time hands. The other drove the mechanical chronograph. In short, the quartz side tells the time and the mechanical side does the timing.
Where it comes from
Jaeger-LeCoultre and Frédéric Piguet developed the system during the 1980s. Jaeger-LeCoultre’s calibres 630 and 631 are named as the first true meca-quartz movements. In 1988, IWC used Jaeger-LeCoultre’s meca-quartz movement in its IW3470 pilot’s chronograph. The type later mostly faded away, until Seiko’s hybrid movements brought it back. Today Seiko’s VK-series meca-quartz calibres are used by many brands, from Autodromo to Seiko itself. No maker owns the name as a brand, and its spellings are used interchangeably.
Not to be confused with
A pure quartz chronograph is a different thing. In one, each stopwatch function is driven by its own stepping motor. A meca-quartz does not work that way. Its chronograph is mechanical, built from heart cams, reset hammers and levers. The difference matters when the chronograph hands fall out of line. In a pure quartz chronograph, they can be re-zeroed from the circuit board. In a meca-quartz they cannot, because the chronograph is mechanical.
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