Quartz movements are more accurate, cheaper to produce, and need far less thought from the person wearing them. So why does the Ironside 200 run on a Seiko NH35 automatic instead? The answer comes down to what a watch is actually for.

The Case for Quartz

A quartz movement uses a battery and a vibrating crystal to keep time, typically accurate to within a few seconds a month. It's a genuinely better solution if raw timekeeping accuracy and low cost are the only priorities — which is why most inexpensive watches use one.

What Automatic Gives You Instead

An automatic movement is wound by the motion of your wrist rather than a battery, and it's built from dozens of small mechanical parts working together rather than a chip and a crystal. It will drift a few seconds a day rather than a month, and it needs the occasional wind and eventual service. In exchange, you get a mechanism that's genuinely interesting — visible through a caseback, serviceable indefinitely, and never dependent on a battery running out at the wrong moment.

Why That Fits a Dive Watch

Dive watches have always leaned mechanical, partly out of tradition and partly because a self-winding movement never leaves you checking a battery indicator before a trip. The NH35 is also one of the most widely serviced movements in the industry, so keeping the Ironside 200 running long-term isn't a specialist problem.

Not a Downgrade, a Different Trade-off

Choosing automatic over quartz for the Ironside 200 wasn't about avoiding cost — a quartz version would have been cheaper to build. It was about giving the watch the mechanism that fits its category and gives the owner something worth winding, not just wearing.