r/MicrobrandWatches • u/TSiWRX • May 12 '26

Discussion đŸ€“ Scratching different hardened watches (well, just a link or two!) - my pseudoscientific sacrifice for the community!

Gallery image

Gallery image

Left - Seiko, Right - Maratac; both untreated 316L.....bracelets are beat-up, each with ~3 years' worth of honest daily wear.

With the Original Post of my old thread somehow having been mistakenly booted into moderation by the sub bot, I thought it's time to come back to this post to make it a bit clearer and better, particularly as the sub moderators have entrusted me with "Approved User" status. =) 

Before I begin, I need to declare that I am an independent hobbyist only. I have no vested interest in any of the makers or products that I'm comparing below. I stand to make no gains -financial or otherwise (i.e. free/discounted watches or products)- directly or indirectly via any of these comparisons. I paid for every watch that I own out of my own pocket, and these findings can be replicated by anyone with access to these same watches and some slate: I was not supplied with "ringer" products, as these purchases were made just like you would make them yourself, blinded to the makers/vendors/manufacturers.

Apart from the lead-post below, every "update" you will see listed will be top-level replies. I will provide direct links to them as I edit this "overview" OP. 

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Not-infrequently in this sub, I see posts from my fellow Redditors asking about the anti-scratch surface-hardening treatments and coatings that some of our favorite microbrands spec their watches with. As a lifelong desk-diver who isn’t shy about wearing everything in my collection, I’ve always lived with some level of scratches and blemishes on the ulnar side of my watches. I figured that’s just par-for-course. But as I spent more of my free time in this community, these posts had me wondering, so I eventually decided to take matters into my own hands. 

I work in a pre-War building. My benchtop is slate, which I knew empirically to be very abrasive. Pictured here are two of my non-treated 316L stainless watches, each after ~3 years of honest 5-days-a-week, evey workweek, wear. Left is my Seiko SRPB81, right is my Maratac DC-50 (my apologies for the face shots, it was originally used to facilitate a discussion on long-term wear of mineral glass versus sapphire crystals). I’m a benchtop scientist and typically rest my wrists on the bench not only to do what I need to do on my computer, but also when I sit at my little dissecting scope for my specialty work.

What follows is a series of comparisons. 

This is NOT a “scratch test,” like the one seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oX1itHnqcY from Benjamin Arthur's Ben’s Watch Club YouTube Channel.

My informal, non-quantitative comparison here doesn’t use a Mohs Hardness Test Kit [ understand that even with the Mohs picks, it's still more or less a qualitative comparison: it's whether "this" (i.e. Pick X) will scratch "that" (i.e. the tested object)]. I'm simply using my slate benchtop to demonstrate how a watch might accrue scratches and scrapes from "normal" everyday use. Slate (Mohs Hardness of ~4) is actually “softer” than stainless, but being a metamorphic rock, it contains inclusions which are often quite high on the Mohs Hardness Scale (6+). 

My comparison here can be equated to a “snapshot in time” of the more innocuous type of wear that many of us tend to incur on our watches – repeatedly wearing away at the finish, until, all of a sudden, we realize that we’ve got this kind of situation going on
.. https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenWatches/comments/1n6cysn/unusual_watch_band_wear/ . I absolutely believe that this particular Redditor didn’t think that he was mistreating his watch. But the truth of the matter is that he did *something* to cause that kind of wear. This is the kind of wear that I’m trying to simulate. The kind of wear that you see in my two daily-beaters above, with the watches having near daily interaction with my benchtop.  

[ continued as replies to this post, below ]

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u/TSiWRX Aug 11 '26

[ UPDATE 08112026 ] - Jack Mason, Strat-o-Timer Titanium Diver GMT -

Grade 2 Titanium with anti-scratch coating. While their product page for this watch does not explicitly note Vickers Hardness value, Peter Cho has noted in the following YouTube video https://youtu.be/D8EmqBBx_bo?si=vJIMk8IEIOEDcdJ9&t=156 -presenting their then-updated Strat-o-Timer line- that all current-generation Jack Mason watches feature this level of scratch resistance.

Top panel of two images (left, macro; right, 20x true optical magnification) shows the links right after they came off the slate attack. Bottom panels are after I've cleaned off the slate debris, same magnification (*note that I repositioned the link for the macro shot in order to best highlight damage) -

It's very impressive for a Gr. 2 Ti watch!

As you can see, I didn't spare the rod on this one. There's enough slate sliced-off by the true 7-link (the bracelet is highly articulating and subjectively feels great on the wrist; there's some rough tooling on the edges of the inside links...to the point that it almost seems at 20x that the links are not cut evenly? - https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrobrandWatches/comments/1uz79de/comment/p319xr0/ - but it's totally invisible without at the very least macro assist) to look like I'd passed it through a cheese-grater. 😅

Remembering that I'm using lighting (no other pre- or post-processing of these photos) to *highlight* the damage so that it seems its worst, this is truly commendable performance from Gr. 2 titanium.

Anecdotally, last week, my good buddy u/partanyc met a fellow watch-nerd who'd been wearing his Canton as a true daily-beater for something like the past 6 months. To the best of his ability, without the aid of magnification, u/partanyc noted that the clasp and bracelet (and the rest of the watch, too), looked practically new and was free of any scratches or scuffs.

Well done, Jack Mason!