Being fully aware of stating the obvious, perfect UK replica watches are there to tell the time, right? So, there’s practically no need for a watch to have anything else but three hands. You’ve got the hours, minutes, and seconds – and the rest you can hopefully figure out by way of the human experience. It’s not so simple of course, and watch complications can provide many useful tidbits of information at a glance, and while they may not be as crucial to everyday life as they were, say, a century ago, watch fans still gravitate towards them.
But what even constitutes a complication, and is there a need for anything more complicated than a day and/or date? I’ll use the aforementioned assumption that anything more involved than three hands is a “complication”, though staying aware that designing a date versus a tourbillon is not quite the same. With that in mind, here’s a short overview of what some of the most common Swiss made fake watches complications are and what they’re used for. As for whether we need them, I leave that up to you.
Chronograph
The chronograph is the first complication I think of when the term comes to mind, and its history is long, dating back to the 19th century. Humans have always needed to time things accurately, and while we may not use chronographs for astronomical calculations or lap timing anymore, the charm is still there. The basic chronograph functionality works something like this: you have a large, central chronograph hand that begins to count the seconds at the push of a button, with smaller sub-registers counting the minutes and hours. Press the same pusher again, the chronograph stops, and from there you can resume it by pressing it again, or reseting with a different pusher.
Until Breitling’s 1933 invention, chronographs relied on a single button to operate the function, meaning that you could not continue timing whatever it was you’re timing if you had already stopped the chronograph. Though they’re rare today, monopusher (or monopoussoir) chronographs do exist, and you’ll sometimes find all of their functions controlled by a single crown, like in the cheap AAA replica Cartier Tortue Monopoussoir watches.
As usual, it gets more complicated than that. What if you wanted to read off a particular time you were keeping track of, but also needed to continue timing the event? A usual example is with timing laps on a racetrack. That’s where high quality fake TAG Heuer split-seconds or rattrapante chronograph watches comes in. A rattrapante chronograph has two central seconds hands superimposed, and by pressing the appropriate pusher, one will stop in place, allowing you to read the time, while the other continues. When you’re done with recording the elapsed time, push the same pusher again, and the arrested hand snaps back to the currently running one, and keeps ticking along.
Calendars
A calendar is an expansion on the idea of showcasing a date on the dial, just in case you needed reminding of the month, and sometimes year, too. The simplest form of a calendar watch is usually referred to as a “triple” or “complete” calendar, referring to the fact it displays the day, date, and month, while sometimes also including a moonphase. Much like the majority of top copy watches UK with a date, a complete calendar will not keep track of months shorter than 31 days, meaning you’ll have to manually advance the movement using the crown or hidden correctors in the caseband.
Watchmaking masterminds have accounted for this too – that’s becoming a bit of a theme now, isn’t it? So-called “secular” calendars do have the necessary modification to the usual perpetual calendar mechanism that allows them to keep track of the additional complicated cycle. While perpetual calendars aren’t super common, they’re plentiful compared to the number of brands that have attempted to produce a secular calendar, with even fewer producing them in non-limited numbers. Notable examples include the recent best replica IWC Eternal Calendar watches.
Multiple time zones
Some Swiss movements super clone watches ramp up their utility by adding an extra hour hand to the dial, allowing you to track multiple time zones at the same time. There are numerous ways to do this – from using two completely independent movements to ultra-complicated examples that let you track daylight saving too. Most often, however, a dual time watch will have an separate central hour hand or sub-dial that will track the additional time zone. Depending on the watch, the secondary time zone hour hand can rotate around the dial in 12 or 24 hours.
If tracking the time in just one other location just isn’t enough, you should probably look for a worldtimer of some sort. Recognisable by having a printed ring of city names around the dial perimeter, worldtimers allow the wearer to quickly check the time in any of those cities by quickly referring to a scale on the dial. In the case of the wholesale 2024 replica Omega Aqua Terra Worldtimer watches above, all you need to do is align a city that corresponds to the time zone you’re currently in with the correct time on the inner 24-hour scale, and you’re set!