Everyone has seen them, the 3 little dials inside of your watch. You might have accidentally pressed a button on the side of your watch and it suddenly starts spinning. It can be useful to find out what these 3 dials on your watch are actually for, this is also what we wondered.
A chronograph watch contain 3 dials. The 20, 40, 60 dial is your second hand, the hour hand is the 3, 6, 9, 12 dial of your watch, and the minute hand is the 15, 30, 45, 60 dial of your watch. These 3 dials on your watch always work together as soon as the start button has been pressed.
This is a fairly global explanation of the 3 dials you’ll find on your watch, we are happy to explain a little more about how you can start the process, what you can do with it and further information.
The 3 watch dials explained
The first thing to understand is that the 3 dials on your watch have a name, it’s called a “chronograph” or “sub dials” and are the mini-dials that sit on the watch face or dial. “Chronograph” simply means “time reading” in greek. A chronograph is not a watch in and of itself. We like to call it a glorified stopwatch. Why do we call it that, because these 3 dials, or chronograph is obviously a beautiful and unique way to use a stopwatch.
This has to do with the fact that the 3 dials all work together, they don’t tick at the same time, at least you can’t see that. We will explain all 3 dials and exactly how it works.
Starting with a video, we think that with this video we can indicate as precisely and easily as possible how the 3 dials work and work together. We recommend watching this short film.
The second hand:
This is the dial that is south of your watch. The second hand is the dial that turns first when you press the power button, this is because, of course you start with the second hand.
It almost speaks for itself, but the second hand indicates the second of your stopwatch, so you can keep track of the seconds from the moment you press the start button. It is therefore the first and only hand you see going.
The minute hand/counter:
The minute hand will go off as 2nd, and will not start until the second hand has completed its first round. Then the minute hand jumps to “1 minute”. This process is repeated every minute for the dial.
The hour hand/counter:
This one will also speak for itself a bit by now, but it will go off when the minute hand has tapped 60 minutes. In this way you have a dialog stopwatch on which you can keep track of the time for up to 24 hours.
How do you put a 3 dial on a watch?
Now maybe you want to change the dials on your watch so you can have a more stylish look or you want something different, is this possible?
You cannot directly change a specific dial that is in your watch, what you can change is the entire dial that is in your watch, there are several ways to do this and you can even do it yourself.
The following video gives a good representation of how to change the dial in your watch.
How do you read a 3 dial watch?
Now that you know exactly what all 3 dials on your watch mean, it might be useful to get a precise overview of how you read them exactly. We now know what the dials mean and what we can read from them. Here is a brief summary of how we can read the 3 dials on your watch.
Have a look at the following picture:
In this case, the second hand is on the left of the picture, you can see this by looking at the 20, 40, 60 numbers. The second hand will turn on when you press the top button that you see at the top right of the picture (the top of the 3 buttons) and will go around every second.
The bottom dial in this case counts the hours of the stopwatch. You can tell by looking at the numbers, 12, 3, 6, 9. Each hour will indicate a dash, so by the time the right hand is at “3”, your stopwatch has already been running for 3 hours. The dashes without a number indicate half an hour, in this way you can easily tell how many hours you have already had your stopwatch on.
Finally, the top dial indicates the minutes in this case. These are also easy to read because of the numbers we have at the top of the screen, the hand at the top stands for 30 minutes, and the dashes in between go every minute.
How do you set a 3 dial watch?
How do we set up a 3 dial watch, well that’s a pretty simple question to answer. By pressing the button at the top of the 3 buttons on the right of your watch, the stopwatch will start.
From now on, he will count seconds, hours and minutes. If you want your stopwatch to stop counting and reset itself, press the bottom button of the 3 buttons on the right of your watch. It’s that simple. The moment you reset your watch, all hands will be set back to zero.
The middle button is for setting the time, this is a button that you first have to pull out of your watch, put your nails behind it and carefully open the button. Then turn the knob until your watch is at the desired time. This button in the middle only works for the large clock, so not for the 3 dials on your watch.
If you find these articles interesting, you might also like to take a look at the following article on watches.
https://mensfashionline.com/how-do-watches-know-what-day-it-is/
https://mensfashionline.com/the-3-dials-on-a-watch-exactly-what-you-need-to-know/
