Why You Need to Know If Your Watch Is Actually “Shock Resistant”

These days, we tend to take shock protection in our watches for granted. Shocks, however, have long been the enemy of the mechanical timekeeper, as even a simple blow to a timepiece from smacking one’s arm against a table could be enough to cause damage to the intricate movement inside.

Some watchmakers today claim that their watches are particularly shock-resistant. What does it mean and why is it important?

A history of shock resistance

Watchmakers have been battling the problem for centuries, with solutions dating as far back as the 1700s, when Abraham-Louis Breguet invented the pare-chute shock protection system and installed it in some of his more exclusive models.

Photo by Hunter D. Kelley for Gear Patrol

By and large, watch manufacturers would continue the search for an ideal shock protection system until the year 1932, which saw the introduction of the Incabloc system that could be adapted to fit in any watch.

It took some time for manufacturers to equip their watches with the technology, which is why we see watches made as late as the 1950s that didn’t utilize any form of shock protection.

Why shock resistance is essential

A typical mechanical watch movement is made of over 100 tiny parts, many of which move and interact with each other. It’s easy to imagine that anything getting shaken loose would make the whole Rube Goldberg-like contraption fail.

More specifically, though, every gear has an axle, or arbor, running through the middle of it and a pivot on the end of that axle. These pivots get progressively smaller from the mainspring barrel — the source of energy — down to the balance, which is responsible for timekeeping regulation.

The balance has particularly fine pivots that are extremely breakable, and watches that lack shock protection would only need a small blow to shear them off.

How does shock resistance work?

Most watch brands are not equipped to make their own shock protection systems, and so they purchase them from specialist suppliers. Today, Incabloc is the main supplier of shock protection systems for mechanical watches, but there are many others on the market, such as ETA’s Nivashoc, Seiko’s Diashock and Citizen’s Parashock.

Whichever system is used, they all work in a similar manner: when the watch receives a shock, a spring-loaded system absorbs it and allows the balance to swing freely. The Incabloc system in particular has three main parts: a jeweled bearing, a cap jewel that sits over top of this bearing and a spring.

When the watch receives the shock, the whole unit is able to move, which absorbs the energy and stops the balance pivots from breaking. Some high-quality watches, such as those built by Rolex, will use similar technology on other wheels in the gear train.

Other important factors

Other factors like case materials and design can also contribute to shock absorption. Casio G-Shock’s creator Kikuo Ibe was famously inspired by having seen a child bouncing a ball to suspend (or “float”) his watch module within a similar structure. Even the band was designed with shock resistance in mind, and its plastic (“resin”) construction surely also absorbs shocks better than a rigid material.

We’ve mostly been talking about mechanical watches and protecting their delicate regulating mechanisms but quartz watches are naturally far more shock-resistant. They have fewer moving parts, and their timekeeping is regulated by quartz crystals, which are very hard-wearing by nature.

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