The Seiko 8F32 quartz perpetual calendar movement has many hidden talents. Aside from it being a highly accurate movement, at 20 seconds per year when worn (running at 196khz instead of the usual 32khz), it also has the ability to show not only today’s date, but the number of years since the last leap year, the current month, and will also correct for varying calendar month lengths until the year 2100.

You’d think with just a date window that wouldn’t be possible, but it is all due to clever engineering and using full advantage of the second hand and date number.

I’ve made a video of the Seiko Prospex Landrek performing these amazing feats!

Here’s what you’ll see in the video. When you pull and push the crown back in, the following things happen:

• The second hand stops and then advances at 5 second intervals, one for each year past the most recent leap year, in the case of 2007, it advances three times

• The date in the date window changes from today’s date and advances its way to display the month number, in our case it displays 1 for January

• The date then advances forward and stops to show today’s date, in this case 22

• The second hand then speedily returns to the current time and then ticks from second to second as usual

You can see a movie of the process by clicking here.

(Any strange visual artifacts are due to compressing the video).

Please let me know if this video example is useful to you as a reader, or would still photos be better?

Thanks for reading (and watching!)

Larry

P.S. Just days after doing the above post, my other (black dialed) Seiko Prospex Landrek battery gave me an opportunity to demonstrate the “two-second tick” the watch does when the battery needs changing. See the video here.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Seiko. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.