Several months ago I started wearing my Speedmaster 3570.50 on a daily basis. I have been quite pleased with this watch as it has been, for whatever reason, my best timekeeper. I am talking about quartz-like accuracy. Of course all good things must end and as usual the root of the problem was human error. I wore the watch too close to the MRI scanner. It wasn't so close that I could feel any pull on the watch but I noticed I still had it on and got it the heck out ASAP. I actually thought I had gotten away with it but over the next several days I noticed it was gaining about 5 sec per hour. I was pretty sure of the problem and I contacted a local watchmaker who told me two things that were dead wrong. First he said the watch could not be demagnetized without taking it apart. Second he told me magnetized watches tend to run slow, not fast. Suffice it to say this guy will never touch any of my watches. So the choice was either send the watch away or order one of those demagnetizers they sell online. Cheapest one I could find was about $70 plus shipping. I had read somewhere that all you need is a coil to make your own demagnetizer. I called my buddy who owns a scrap metal company. Twenty minutes later I ripped a fan out of a junked fridge.
Then I pulled the coil, wired it with an old cut extension cord, and hooked it to a power strip with an on/off button.
After three passes through the coil my speedy has 0 net gain or loss over almost 72 hours. It cost me nothing but an old extension cord and a half hour. It was a lot of fun. I post this for entertainment only. Messing about with electricity can be dangerous. It would have been more rational to just buy a commercial unit but this was more fun!
- steelheadangler