Screw the rain and screw the camel bag. I left the water at home and started walking in the rain. I wasnâ€t at the end of our street that my feet were already soaked. Bad start indeed.

It rained intermittently for another 2 or 3 miles and then the sun started timidly piercing through the clouds. Frenetically looking at the weather app on my phone, it looked like it was going to be a cloudy day with no more rain. Perfect!

The problem was that I was wet. My feet were what bothered me the most. I considered calling Tina to come and meet me with a towel and dry clothes, but again, I said screw this, Iâ€ll deal with what Iâ€m given, which is wet clothes and cold and wet feet.

I started getting thirsty at about mile 6 so I stopped by a 7-Eleven to get a small bottle of water and a snickers, because, well, I hadnâ€t eaten anything that morning except for 4 Advils.

The first 13 miles or so are easy but then everything below the belt begins to hurt. The butt cheeks, the knees, and the feet, which by that time were almost dry. Or maybe they just felt like they were dry?

I stop every now and then to stretch my legs. It feels so good. My butt cheeks hurt the most and I know theyâ€d feel much better if I would just sit down for 10 minutes, but ainâ€t nobody got time for that! I want to do the 26.2 miles in under 7 hours so Iâ€m not taking any break at all except for stretching. No sitting!

Iâ€ve gone more than half way now without listening to anything and quite frankly, my own thoughts are starting to bore me. So I listen to an episode of The Daily and then start listening to the new Joe Rogan with Elon Musk (much better than the first one btw). Quick aside: Joe Rogan still feels like a broken record with his “California this, Texas that, more freedom, blah blah blah”).

Tina is periodically checking on me, asking if I need anything or if I want her to pick me up. “Iâ€d rather die” was my answer. A bit dramatic maybe, but it conveyed the idea.

Now walking on the 101 along the beach, my morale feels reinvigorated. Probably the ocean air. But my butt cheeks still hurt and Iâ€m starting to get sand in my shoes. I eventually stop and sit down in Cardiff to remove the sand off my shoes and clean up my socks. A minute later Iâ€m back on my feet. Almost there! Well, another 9 miles.

I stop at another 7-Eleven to get another small bottle of water and another sugary treat.

Now walking in Encinitas and Leucadia, I feel the excitement of knowing exactly where Iâ€m at and how much closer Iâ€m getting to home.

I really have to pee though but nowhere to stop. A few porta potties from construction sites along the way are locked so I canâ€t use them. Damn. Nowhere to pee really. Iâ€ll hold it until I get home, itâ€s ok.

Iâ€m now about 5 miles away from home when I see Tinaâ€s yellow car driving my way. They slow down to wave at me. Seeing their smiley faces was so nice. Just the little pick-me-up I needed.

Almost there! The last mile is always the hardest one, especially because we live at the top of a hill. My feet are now really hurting. So are my butt cheeks. But at least itâ€s not the burning pain I felt on my first marathon walk (that was because of bad soles in my shoes).

Finally home and did it all in 6 hours and 34 minutes. Honestly Iâ€m not sure I can make it faster than that because I walked at a pretty good pace all along without really taking breaks besides stretching.

The minutes per mile range showing on my Apple Watch shows an average of 15 minutes per mile but this is skewed by all the time I wasted stretching or waiting for the light to turn green to cross a street. I think my actual walking pace is at or slightly below 14 minutes per mile.

I took another 4 Advils when I got home and sipped on a delicious “medicinal” drink, which might have helped reduce inflammation.

Now the next day, my butt cheeks and my legs feel sore. This is nowhere near as painful as it was on my first marathonian walk where I was basically incapacitated for 2 days. Again, having better shoes made a world of difference.

The post Marathonian walk #2 first appeared on Sebastien Page.

This build is an homage of sort to this beautiful time piece.

Parts selection

Obviously, the first step of the watch build was to source the right parts which can be easier said than done. More specifically, I think the most critical parts to find were the dial and the bezel insert, which are really what make this build look like an Explorer II.

As with my first build, I went for a build based on the popular SKX007 because of the abondance of parts available for it. Below is a list of parts I used along with links to each one of them:

• Case from Crystal Times
• Caseback from Crystal Times
• Crown from Crystal Times
• NH36 Movement from eBay
• Day/date dial from DLW
• Mixed Mercedes hands from DLW
• White chapter ring with black markers from eBay
• Bezel from DLW
• Bezel click spring from Crystal Times
• Bezel gasket from Crystal Times
• 12-hour bezel insert from DLW
• Double dome crystal from DLW

I made sure to order the hands and the dial from the same vendor (DLW) to prevent having a mismatch in the finish and lume. When possible, I really recommend doing so.

Speaking of DLW, a great thing about them is that they offer some flexibility in your choice of hands, allowing you to mix and match certain hand styles. In this case, I was able to choose 2 gun metal Mercedes hands along with an orange seconds hand. Most part vendors do not allow such flexibility.

I hesitated between a red and orange second hand for a while but I eventually settled for orange. I was afraid the orange would contrast too much with the red text of the dial, and at the same time I was afraid a red second hand would bring too much red to the face of the watch. In the end, I think orange is the right decision.

As mentioned above, the dial and the bezel insert are the flagship items of this build, but itâ€s clear that the bezel itself is very important as well. I spent quite a bit of time looking at photos of the Polar Explorer II online to try and find the best possible match for the bezel. I settled with the one listed above from DLW.

Now you may have noticed that itâ€s a 12-hour bezel insert instead of a 24-hour one as found on the Explorer. The reason is two-fold. First, I couldnâ€t find any 24-hour bezel insert, but maybe more importantly, such insert would be useless because the NH36 movement doesnâ€t have a GMT function.

That said, with this 12-hour insert, I can track the time in two time zones, which can be done by rotating the bezel to the desired time difference. For example, I am tracking time in both my time zone and in France, which is 9 hours ahead of my current time. I rotated the bezel to show 9 at the 12 oâ€clock position, and I can quickly find out the time in both location at the blink of an eye.

Cost breakdown

Clocking at $475 (strap and taxes included), this is not a cheap build, and as most would rightfully argue, it would be more cost effective to buy a Seiko from any online merchant.

But of course, money is not whatâ€s important here. All the fun is in building your own watch and handpicking each individual part. That said, yes, itâ€s pricy…

Building the Rolex Polar Explorer mod

Learning about the movement

This was my first time using the NH36 movement. I did use its sibling in the past, the NH35 movement, but I was unsure about how to use the NH36 properly. So a quick look online and I learned about the different crown positions of the NH36:

• Crown at 0, clockwise: normal winding
• Crown at 1 clockwise: day correction
• Crown at 1, counterclockwise: date correction
• Crown at 2: hacked time setting

Fixing the dial on the movement

There is no difference here between the NH35 and the NH36. All you have to do to mount the dial onto the movement spacer is to clip two of the four legs of the dial. Before doing so, youâ€ll first have to place the dial on top of the spacer to find out which legs must be cut off. Your dial may already have only two legs, so obviously skip this step if need be.

To prevent any mistake, I mark the legs that need to be removed with a marker, as you can see on the photo below. When working on the dial, I always make sure to use finger cots to avoid unnecessary grease on the dial.

Best practice would probably require the use of cutting pliers but I havenâ€t found any that feature a flush blade to cut the leg as close to the dial plate as possible. My workaround is to use a cutter as a saw of sort and slowly cut the legs flush. Then I use a fine file to remove any excess from the plate.

Once the dial is ready, you can just set it using gentle pressure on the movement spacer. Once fixed properly, I then use Rodico to clean the dial and remove any possible dusts specs.

Hands setting

Here we are for the most tedious part of a watch build, at least in my opinion. If youâ€re the kind of person who doesnâ€t mind to do things approximately, then you should be just fine. But if like me you like things to be perfect, your OCD could have you spend an hour on this task.

First step of hands setting is to put the crown in its hacking position and slowly turn it until you see a date change.

The good thing is that the NH36 does give you some warning about a day change as you start seeing the date move around 11.30. All you have to do at that point is to very very slowly turn the crown until the date changes. At that point, you know you are at midnight and if you did a good job, this is where your hour hand should be.

The hour hand is undoubtedly the easiest one to set. Armed with my bronze tweezers, I put the hand in place, slightly rotated it with my plastic stick, and pressed it using my Horotec hand press. Once in place, I check for clearance between the hand and the dial, making sure the hand is as parallel as can be to the dial. If necessary, you can apply a little bit of pressure with your plastic stick to adjust the angle and make sure itâ€s parallel.

Then of course, you should put the crown in position 2 and turn it for about 23 hours. At that point, you should slow down and prepare for the next day change.

The process is pretty much the same for the minute hand. Wait for the date change to click, then set the hand, and press it down onto the cannon pinion.

Again, you want to check for clearance between the two hands, and make sure both hands are still parallel to the dial. Still in position 2, use the crown to check hands alignement and clearance in difference positions. Typically, I like to check for 12, 3, 6, and 9 oâ€clock positions as these can really highlight any misalignment. If thatâ€s the case, remove the hand(s) and start again.

When youâ€re ready, move to the second hand, arm yourself with patience and go ahead. It doesnâ€t matter as much at what time you set the second hand. To do so, I usually move the hour and minute hands at 6.30 to get them out of the way, and try to set the second hand at 12.

I learned during my watchmaking course that there are specific tweezers used to set hands (or course there are). Unfortunately I do not own such a tool, and after trying to put the second hand in place with my bronze tweezers, I gave up and eventually used Rodico. This is blasphemy to a watchmaker, so good thing I am not a watchmaker… It took me a while but I got it down thanks to Rodico, and once again using my hands press, I put it in place.

I did a final check for clearance and parallelism. Then a final check for proper time alignment. 12, 3, 6, and 9 all looked good, so we are ready to move forward after doing a quick clean up of the hands using Rodico.

Chapter ring and crystal installation

Before putting the chapter ring in place, I thoroughly cleaned up the inside of the case using Rodico. It was clean, but you can never clean a watch enough, especially during the build process.

I then installed the chapter ring, which was very simple. Just drop it in, and if your ring has a little bump, make sure it fits into the case notch. This is made to prevent the chapter ring from moving around. You may even use 3M tape or instant cement to keep in place but I donâ€t find that necessary.

Then make sure the crystal gasket is in place in your case, clean up the crystal thoroughly, and itâ€s time to press it in.

For my first build, I had a cheap crystal press which I found was quite crappy, so I had purchased a better crystal press.

Turns out this one wasnâ€t much better than the previous one and I struggled to put the crystal in place to my liking. Again, maybe most people wouldnâ€t care and would call it a day quickly, but I wanted the crystal to be set in perfectly. It took me about an hour to do this right. Even then, Iâ€m just 98% satisfied with my work. That said, the quality of my work can only be as good as the quality of my tool in this case. I just couldnâ€t do better. Chances are, you wonâ€t even be able to tell, but I know I will.

Click spring and bezel

No big problem here. Simply place the click spring onto the case, making sure the two legs fit in the two holes of the case.

Then apply some silicone grease on the bezel gasket, and put the gasket back in place inside the bezel. This can be a bit tricky but patience once again goes a long way.

Finally, press firmly on the bezel to click it in place. If it is your first time installing a bezel, donâ€t be afraid to press hard. You may use a crystal press for that, but you can also do it with your hands, which is what I did.

Then of course, turn the bezel a few times to make sure it clicks and rotates well. I must say that this bezel from DLW has a much more satisfying click to it than the crystal of Crystal Times that I had ordered for my previous build. I shall stick to DLW for bezels in the future.

Note that I donâ€t install the bezel insert until the build is completely done. This is because I want to have the movement in place to perfectly line up the insert with the dial.

Fit movement in the case

Of course, first step is to clean the crystal and the dial as well as you can because this is pretty much your last chance to do so. I suggest using Rodico to remove any fingerprints or dust specs that might have accumulated inside the case or on your dial.

Then fit the movement into the case by gently pressing the case on top of it. Make sure it is aligned perfectly. If not, you can slightly rotate the movement from the back of the case using a plastic stick, or even a small screwdriver. Be careful to not slip though, or else you will leave unrepairable marks and maybe even damage the movement altogether.

Once aligned properly, use a plastic stick to press the movement at 12, 3, 6, and 9 oâ€clock. Flip the case over and make sure the movement is not only aligned perfectly, but that there is no space between the dial and the chapter ring.

Fitting the stem and crown

Using cutting pliers (or a cutter in my case), trim the stem to the correct length. Unless you have a caliper, it will take a bit of trial and error here until you reach the right length.

Between each cut, I screw the crown onto the stem and insert it into the movement through the case. If itâ€s too long, remove the stem, unscrew the crown, trim some more, and repeat until you get the correct length.

When you do, file the rough end (the one you cut) of the stem thread a bit, apply some blue Loctite 242, and screw the crown in. The Loctite takes about 10 minutes to dry and 24 hours to cure. I suggest not playing with the crown for 24 hours after applying the Loctite, just to be safe.

Finally, add some silicone grease to the stem gaskets and insert it in.

Time to close it in

The project is almost done…

Clean the back of the case and the movement using Rodico. Grease the gasket using silicone grease, place it on the back of the case, and screw the case back in.

Installing the bezel insert

Some bezel inserts come with 3M tape already applied, and some come with double sided tape that youâ€ll have to install yourself on bezel. That was the case this time around.

So remove one side of the tape, set the tape on the bezel, remove the other side and apply the bezel on top of it.

Obviously, you want to me as precise as can be so you donâ€t end up with a bezel marker improperly lined up with the chapter ring or dial markers.

Lesson learned from this build

This isnâ€t necessarily a mistake, but rather a lesson that I hope I will learn… Before settling down for the parts listed above, I had decided on a different case and crown, which I had ordered and received.

This change of heart ended up costing me over $100. I will be able to reuse this case and crown in a future build, but still, this is money that I spent unnecessarily at this time.

For my future build, Iâ€ll try to make sure not to get carried away by the excitement and give myself some time between the time I decide what to build, and ordering the parts. This way, I wonâ€t rush into purchasing something I might not use in the end.

How I could improve this build

Something I should have done prior to building the watch was changing the day wheel language. Itâ€s currently showing the day in English and Spanish. It is not a huge deal in itself, especially because I know my days in Spanish, but Iâ€d rather have the day wheel in French/English or maybe even better, English/English. These date wheels sell for about $10, so that wouldnâ€t be a big expense.

The other improvement I could make is to make some adjustments to the movement to regulate its timing. The NH36 uses the Etachron regulating system, which I conveniently learned to adjust doing a watchmaking course. I havenâ€t put it on my timing machine yet, but it seems to be running at -3s/day so far. Itâ€s totally acceptable, but this is also not a scientific test at all since I didnâ€t put it on the timing machine. This is a project for another day though.

I will build you a watch for free

If youâ€re interested in having me build a watch for you, I will do it for free as long as you supply all the parts and cover all shipping costs. Feel free to hit me up either by email or on Twitter.

The post Rolex Explorer II Polar Dial Homage Build first appeared on Sebastien Page.

Then I stumbled upon watch modding, which as the name suggests, is about taking an existing watch, and changing a few things here and there to make it your own. It turned out that Seiko watches are the most popular watches to mod because there are just tons of parts for them out there.

I didn’t want to mod a watch but rather build one…

So I decided to source all the parts to effectively create a watch from scratch. Obviously, I didn’t build the movement, but everything else was sourced from various websites so I could assemble it all.

What type of watch do I want to build?

I’m not the creative type and I definitely needed inspiration when it came to figuring out what kind of watch I wanted to build.

It was fairly easy to settle on a design because I’ve recently been obsessed with the Tudor Heritage Black Bay 79220N, so I used this as my inspiration.

While I set out to recreate a replica of sort of that watch, it became clear pretty quickly that it wouldn’t be as easy as I imagined, simply because I couldn’t source the proper dial. So I slightly went off track while still retaining the inspiration from the Black Bay.

Parts selection

I decided to go with parts for Seiko SKX007, which seems to be the most modded watch out there, which again means there are many options available as far as parts go.

Here is a run down of the parts I ordered:

• Case from Crystal Times
• Caseback from Crystal Times
• Crown from Crystal Times
• NH35 movement from Crystal Times
• Dial from Lucius Atelier
• Snowflake hands from Watch & Style
• Chapter ring from Long Island Watch
• Coin edge bezel and bezel click spring from Crystal Times
• Ceramic bezel insert from Namoki Mods
• Double domed sapphire crystal from Namoki Mods

Although I had my eyes on a few watch straps, I pulled the trigger and bought a sailcloth strap from Brady Strap.

Estimated cost of this first build

From the get go, I kept everything in a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the parts, the cost, shipping, etc…

Total cost is approximately $439. I know! It’s a lot of money when I could have bought a cheap Seiko brand new for $200 and start from there.

It’s actually a little more than that since I ended up buying two straps and a different set of hands. So we are now over the $500 mark for this build.

To me, it wasn’t necessarily about the money, but rather about the process of starting from scratch (well, sans the movement), and building my very own watch.

On top of the cost of parts, you have to add watch making tools that I had to purchase, which adds another $200 or so to the cost of the project. The silver lining is that if I really stick to watch building, the cost of tools will be amortized over time.

Putting the pieces together

Preparing the movement

First step of the watch build was to mount the dial onto the movement. My dial doesnâ€t include a date window (it was a personal choice), but the NH35 movement does come with a date wheel. While I would never see the date using this dial, I still wanted the date to change at midnight, so before mounting the dial, I made sure that I changed the time to midnight and waited for the date change. Of course, because there is no dial or even no hands already installed, itâ€s a bit of a tedious process where you basically turn the crown slowly until you see the date wheel engage. On it is engaged, indicating an imminent change of date, you have to turn the crown even more slowly and stopping right on time at midnight. Perfecting this process is I believe extremely difficult, but I managed to get an acceptable time change.

Mounting the dial onto the movement

The dial I ordered can be mounted with a crown at 3 or 4 oâ€clock. There are 4 pins under the dial, 2 of which will have to be cut off. Depending on your configuration (3 or 4 oâ€clock), you remove a different set of pins to fit your movement ring. So after carefully laying the dial on top of the movement, I made a note of the pins that had to be removed and cut them off, or rather sawed them off using a cutter.

Once done, you can mount the dial onto the movement by inserting the pins into the movement ring holes. Of course, because the pins are very thin and fragile, it must be done very gently in order not to bend a pin, or worse, break one.

Applying gentle pressure onto the dial is sufficient to mount if properly in place.

Setting the hands

Properly installing the hands onto the central pin of the movement is definitely the most challenging part of the build because you have to use utmost precision and carefulness. The hands are so small and fragile that they can easily be bent or scratched, depending what tools you use to set them.

I believe there are some special tweezers that can be used to set hands, but I do not own such tool. Instead I opted to use Bergeon Rodico putty, a watchmakerâ€s best friend.

With the Rodico, I gently pressed on the hour hand to have it adhere to the putty. I then carefully placed it at exactly 12 oâ€clock onto the central pin. Using my watch hand tool press, I gently pressed onto the center and successfully set the hour hand. To verify the quality of the work, I used a loupe to carefully inspect the setting. It seemed perfect, so I proceeded with turning the crown until the next day change, which if everything was fine, would happen when hitting 12 oâ€clock again. It worked perfectly.

Next step is the minutes hand, which has a slightly smaller hole, making it slightly more difficult to set. So the hour hand wouldnâ€t get in the way, I rotated it using the crown to exactly 6 oâ€clock, and I then used the same method as prior to instal the minutes hand. Once again, I verified it was properly set using my loupe. I then turned the crown and made sure everything worked fine.

It seems to be a common mistake to not properly set one of the two hands, which can cause them to actually rub onto each other. I didnâ€t have this problem. I then rotated the crown until the next day change, which once again should happen at exactly 12.00. Well, it wasnâ€t perfectly at 12.00 but it was close enough, especially for a first build.

Finally, I installed the seconds hand. This one gave me a bit of trouble because it is so tiny, and so much smaller than the hour or minutes hands. Again using the Rodico, I tried to set it on the axle, but every time I would try to press on it with the hand tool press, it would just slide off the axle. Eventually, I simply set it by pressing gently on top of it with one of my fingers. It worked perfectly, as I was able to confirm with a mandatory loupe check.

I made a final round using the crown and set the watch to the current time.

This was by far the most difficult part of the build, but it felt incredibly rewarding once I had the dial and the hands situated. Everything really started to take shape, especially when I inserted the movement and dial into the watch case.

Installing the chapter ring and crystal onto the watch case

Next step is to install the chapter ring into the case. The case does include a little notch to facilitate the installation of marked chapter rings, but because the I one I used was a very basic one with no markings, there was no wrong way for me to install it. I just laid it there in place and cleaned it like a maniac with Rodico. That process is very important because it is your last chance to easily clean the chapter ring from any fingerprint or dust. Once cleaned to perfection, the next step was installing the crystal.

The crystal is one of the most expensive parts of a watch build, and one that can easily break if not properly pressed in.

Once again, I took the time to thoroughly clean the bottom part of the crystal, because again, it would become much more difficult to do so once itâ€s set.

The crystal gasket came pre-set on the case, so I didnâ€t have anything to do here. You donâ€t even need to grease it.

After selecting and installing the correct dies on my crystal press, I set the case in place with the crystal on top, and started pressing to set the crystal. Because I bought a cheap crystal press, the precision wasnâ€t ideal but after a few minutes of rotating the case and applying more pressure, I finally attained a satisfying result. The crystal was installed properly and evenly.

To reward myself with what I had accomplished so far, I once again put the movement into the watch case. Things looked really close to being done at this point.

The poor manâ€s waterproofing test

I donâ€t have the equipment to perform waterproofing tests, but I did want to make sure that the crystal and case back gasket were installed properly by performing a poor manâ€s waterproofing test.

To do that, I first removed the movement from the case, then screwed the crown all the way in, greased the case back gasket with some silicone grease, and closed the case back.

I then dunked the watch into a glass of cold water. It stayed in there for a few minutes, after which I took the watch out of the water and put it directly in the sun behind a window. I figured that if a tiny amount of water had made its way in, I would probably see some condensation form behind the crystal.

Iâ€m fully aware this is not a great way to test the waterproofing of a watch, but this is as good as I could do given what I had.

The test turned out successful.

With the build now having been completed for several weeks, I can say that I have taken the watch in the shower on multiple occasions, and it doesn’t show any sign of water damage. I wouldn’t go surf or dive with it, but I certainly feel comfortable taking a shower with it.

Click spring, bezel, and bezel insert installation

With the hard part of the build behind me, I continued to the next step by putting the click spring in place and pressing the bezel on top of it.

There isnâ€t much room for error when setting the click spring because it has 2 pins that go into 2 small holes on the case. You canâ€t go wrong there. I then pressed the bezel on top of it until I heard that loud satisfying click sound.

Of course, I immediately started rotating the bezel, hoping to hear the clicks but I could tell something was off. The clicks didnâ€t click right, and worse, the bezel was sometimes harder to rotate, as if something was in the way. This is where I made my beginner mistake number 1.

Using a bezel removal tool, I popped the bezel out and tried to adjust the click spring by pressing on it with a tooth pick. This turned out to make things worse. I have since learned my lesson: you should never try to adjust the click spring.

I also noticed that the gasket inside the bezel was slightly coming out. I tried to put it back in place but it appeared to be too big for the bezel itself. I figured out that this was probably what was causing the bezel to be hard to rotate at times. I donâ€t know if the gasket wasnâ€t right from the start but fortunately, I had another gasket handy. I lubricated it with silicone grease, set it properly, and pressed the bezel again.

The clicks were even worth than before I “adjusted” them, but the bezel was at least rotating fine. I ordered another click spring  (an OEM) which I installed correctly, but the clicks still aren’t that satisfying to me. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the bezel itself. I will live with it but I’d lie if I said it doesn’t bother me.

Finally, I applied the bezel insert, making sure the red triangle at 12 oâ€clock was exactly in the center. This was made simple by the fact that the bezel I bought from Namoki had 3M tape already applied to it. All I had to do was peeling the tape off and sticking it to the bezel. Fairly simple.

I am not very impressed by the quality of this bezel insert. Not only the red color of the triangle at 12 bleeds to the first couple minute markers, but if you look at the 30-minute marker on the insert, it is not centered properly. And no, this is not because of the angle of the photo. It’s just not made right. I ordered another insert from Namoki which has the exact same issue.

Stem sizing and crown installation

The last step in the watch build was to properly size the stem and of course install the crown. Once again, because I lack the proper tools, it took me a lot of trial and errors to get the size of the stem right.

I probably spent over an hour cutting the stem, filing it, screwing the crown, and checking whether it was the right size. I must have repeated these steps at least two dozen times, but I eventually got it right.

I applied a bit of Loctite 242 threadlocker on the stem and screwed the crown on it. I let it sit for a few minutes and inserted the stem and screwed the crown down onto the case.

Project completed!

A lesson learned

For my first build, I am quite pleased with the result, which I think looks really nice as a whole.

A major downside of my initial build is visible when you look at the dial on the photo below. Can you see it? Look carefully. Most people didn’t notice, but most people arenâ€t as picky as I am…

If you look at the color of the hands, you can tell it doesnâ€t match the color of the hour markers of the dial. Thatâ€s because these two parts were sourced from two different suppliers. The mismatch isnâ€t horrendous, but itâ€s bugging me enough that I ordered another set of hands from Lucius Atelier, the same supplier as the dial. I would have done so in the first place, but at the time I purchased all the parts, the white snowflake hands were out of stock at Lucius Atelier. And frankly, I didnâ€t even think for one second there could be a mismatch in the color. Thatâ€s definitely a lesson learned here. Update: I have received new hands from Lucious Atelier. The only photo where you can see the old hands is the one above.

The satisfaction of wearing your own creation

After settling for a sailcloth strap for this watch, I have been wearing it almost daily as it has quickly become one of my favorite watches. Of course, it barely stands a candle to my Panerai or my Omega Seamaster, but the satisfaction of wearing something I built from scratch is incredibly exhilarating.

What is also exciting to me is that I can actually tweak this watch should I want to by changing the dial, the bezel insert, or the hands now that I have all the necessary tools.

It turned out to be a pricy little project, but a very exciting and rewarding one. If youâ€re reading this, I assume making your own watch is something that you have considered, so I really encourage you to do it and not to worry too much about things going wrong, because in the end, itâ€s a fairly simple process.

If you have any question about anything regarding this build, feel free to hit me up on Twitter @SebastienPage. Iâ€ll be happy to answer any question you may have with my very little knowledge.

The post Building my first watch first appeared on Sebastien Page.

After a bit of digging around, it appears Seiko watches are the easiest to mod, mostly because there are tons of parts available for them.

Instead of bookmarking these and keeping them to myself, I figured it would be better to simply list all of my findings here for everyone to benefit from.

List of Seiko mod parts suppliers

AJuiceT: a small collection of hands, dials, cases, and more.

Crystal Times: probably the reference of everything related to Seiko mod parts, including crystals, cases, movements, and more.

Dagaz Watch: a messy looking site with a small yet good selection of parts.

DLW: various parts including bezels, bezel inserts, chapter rings, etc.

Komo: a small collection of high quality parts.

Long Island Watch: various parts for Seiko mods.

Lucius Atelier: various parts including some amazing dials you won’t find anywhere else.

Lumed Ceramic Bezel Inserts: high quality ceramic bezel inserts for Seiko.

Namoki: large provider of pretty much every parts you may need for a mod.

One Second Closer: custom watch parts such as bezel inserts, dials, and more.

Raffles Time: a small selection of non-branded dials and hands.

Seiko Crown: a site specializing in personalized and tailor-made crown engravings.

The Happy Sushi: rare parts for your watch built and mods.

Watch & Style: quality Seiko mod parts.

Watch Parts Plaza: mostly OEM Seiko parts.

Yobokies: a mix bag of everything for Seiko mods.

The post Where to find Seiko mod parts first appeared on Sebastien Page.

B&R Bands: quality replacement watch bands and straps at an affordable price.

Brady Straps: the original Sailcloth pattern watch strap. Good quality and affordable.

Cheap Nato Straps: the name says it all… They have a wide selection of styles to choose from at very affordable prices.

Crafter Blue: high quality rubber straps.

Crown & Buckle: custom-styled, high-quality nylon and leather straps at reasonable prices.

Strap Code: original straps.

The post Where to find good quality watch straps first appeared on Sebastien Page.

But without doing anything in particular, I noticed that after a few days, some of the scratches had almost entirely disappeared, leaving just a faint mark. This made me wonder, is stainless steel actually capable of healing itself?

Turns out it is. Website worldstainless.org explains:

Due to the alloying elements in the stainless steel, a thin, transparent “passive layer” is formed on the surface.

Even if the stainless steel surface is scratched or damaged otherwise, this passive layer, which is only a few atoms thick, instan- taneously reforms under the influence of oxygen from air or water.

This explains why stainless steel does not require any coating or other corrosion protection to remain bright and shiny even after decades of use.

This won’t be enough to fix the massive scratch you can see on the picture above, but it is enough to fix smaller scratches of everyday life.

Another interesting remark I made myself is that the stainless steel of my Omega Seasmaster Aqua Terra doesn’t seem to have as good healing properties of my Panerai. Could that be due to the different alloy used to make both stainless steel cases? I’m definitely no engineer but that could explain why.

The post The self-healing properties of stainless steel first appeared on Sebastien Page.

After several years of discussing our eventual move to France, Tina and I decided last year that 2017 would be the year we’ll be moving there. The move won’t be permanent as we plan on staying there for no longer than two years.

To make this happen, Tina will have to quit her full-time job. I won’t have to change much to my routine since I work for myself and just need a laptop and an internet connection. Both kids will of course attend school in France. Luca will enter kindergarten, and Chloé will enter elementary school.

While we originally planned on moving to the tiny village where I grew up, Tina is feeling anxious about living in such a small place, so we might adjust our location by just a few miles by moving to the next town over. It’s still small by US standards, but it’s what I’d call a self-contained town with enough amenities to make it feel like you’re in a “city.”

The main reason we’re moving there is that we want our kids to spend time with my parents and the rest of my family. We also want the kids to become fluent in French, and despite me speaking to them exclusively in the language, the only true way for them to become fluent is to be completely immersed.

So this will be a great opportunity to spend time with my parents, but most importantly for my parents to spend time with Chloé and Luca. Being an only child, it’s been hard on them to see me move so far away from them. And now with two grand children growing rapidly, it’s become even harder for my parents to witness their growth through FaceTime.

Living in France will also be a great opportunity for us to travel through Europe, something I didn’t really do when I lived there. We have several places on our to-go list, including Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, with many more countries probably added as we go.

Now that we are getting closer to the move date (set for July 23rd), I am starting to feel anxiety. Not so much about moving there, bur rather about preparing for the move and making sure everything, including our house and furniture are taken care of.

Of course we have a lot to do, including changing our address, finding a management company to rent out our house, finding storage space for our furniture, packing, figuring out Tina’s legal situation, and do the all around planning. The planning might actually be the hardest part of it all because there are so many things to take into account.

Pretty exciting times ahead! I’ll do my best to document our adventures as we move forward, and who knows, maybe revive this blog altogether?

The post We’re moving to France first appeared on Sebastien Page.

Having run a blog for seven years, I’ve always been aware of ad blockers but never realized they were so popular. Considering the savviness of iDB readers, I would even think much more than 27.6% of our readership uses them, which of course is not good news for us since we rely almost exclusively on ad revenue to make a living.

Online advertising is huge. It hit $141.2 billion worldwide in 2014. This is great news for online content creators, and it should be great news for content consumers. As your favorite websites make more money, they can continue to produce more of the articles and videos that you love. Now for the bad news: According to a 2014 study conducted by PageFair, “27.6 percent of U.S. Internet users surveyed said they use ad-blocking software.” This is a problem for content creators.

Yet it seems that with the world going mobile, ad blockers should be the least of my worries. Services like Readability, Pocket, and Instapaper are the new ad blockers. Of course, they provide a better experience for readers, but they prevent us from generating ad revenue.

I won’t lose sleep over it, but it’s something to be aware of, and an additional motivation to try to think outside the box when it comes to monetization.

I personally don’t use ad blockers for two reasons. One, I like to see what kind of ads websites serve me, as well as learn about new formats. Two, I think it’s wrong to take money away from sites that provide me information for free.

Image: Technewscentral.co.uk

The post Ad blockers and the loss of revenue first appeared on Sebastien Page.

I’ve long had this daily goal, but I didn’t put my mind to really meet it every single day until December 19, 2014. Sitting all day at the computer just isn’t healthy and is causing terrible back problems. Walking on a daily basis won’t fix my broken back (I have a cracked annulus), but it helps relieve some of the pain.

It is believed that people should walk at least 10,000 steps a day, but I don’t know how you can do that on a daily basis. If you look at my progress on the image above, you’ll see that I rarely walk 10,000 steps, which would take about 1.5 hours of walking at a steady pace. Honestly, who has the luxury of walking 1.5 hours a day?

I use Pedometer++ to track my steps, and of course, all this is possible thanks to the motion coprocessor found in iPhone. For those wondering, 10,000 steps equals to about 5 miles. 6,000 steps equals to about 3 miles.

With Apple Watch just around the corner, I think it will make my step tracking even easier, but most importantly, the Activity app will likely provide an additional source of motivation, something that I haven’t found from any app in the App Store so far.

Here is to the next 100 days at 6,000 steps!

The post Achievement unlocked: 6,000 steps a day for 100 days in a row first appeared on Sebastien Page.

If you run a website and have basic interest in SEO, you probably heard that Google recently released their so-called Panda update, a change in algorithm aimed at getting rid of the shitty sites such as eHow.com and similar content farms.

The change in the algorithm came in 2 iterations. The first one came out on February 24th, in the US only, affecting about 10% of search queries. The second one was released on April 11th and was rolled out in the rest of English-speaking countries, also making a slight change to the US algo, which supposedly affects an additional 2% of US queries.

On the morning of February 25th, I was glad to see that my iPhone blog had gone through the update and came out unhurt. Even better than that, it seemed I was doing even better in search engines. It was nice to see Google recognizing me as a good resource. Then on April 12, everything changed when I realized the second iteration of the Panda update had slapped me in the face. Big time!

A quick look at my Google Analytics account revealed the damages. Week over week, I lost 31% of my traffic, going from an average of 90,000 visits/day to about 60,000. That really hurts, believe me.

At first, I kinda panicked a bit. Oh my god, what am I gonna do? You know, that kinda ritual every time Google tweaks their algo. Then I tried to rationalize all this.

First, this is not the end of the world. Taking a 30% traffic decrease sure isn’t pleasant, but I was there before and I did fine. As a matter of fact, this 30% slap takes me back where I was about 4 months ago, when I was averaging a little over 60,000/day.

Second, and maybe most importantly, I felt like the growth I had seen in the last few months was just insane, almost unnatural. Yes, I do admit that I was surprised I was receiving so much traffic from Google for very important keywords.

What really bothered me the most was the drop in revenues I expected from this. I now have several writers that I pay to write on iDB, and a drop in revenues means either a drop of my writers’ pay, or at least the freeze of their pay. To this day, I’m still not sure how the Panda slap will affect my bottomline so I haven’t really strategized about it, but a drop in pay for my writers is very unlikely.

So after the freak out period came the relaxed period. I just dealt with it, sucked it up, and moved on. It’s just the way it is, I said to myself.

Then I had a chat with my friend Shane from TC Geeks. Shane had been hurt much more than I was as he had seen a 50% drop in traffic. Ouch! And, as ironic as that can be, Shane, who wanted to work full time on his blog, had happened to give his 2-week notice the day of the Panda slap. Double ouch!

Shane was kind enough to tell me about what he had learned about Panda while browsing the various forums and blogs posts about the topic. Shane found out that we were not the only sites being affected, and that a large amount of web publishers were hit by the panda. Some of them just lost their business overnight.

The most interesting find to me is that Panda appears to hit those sites with numerous ads or affiliate links. iDB sure is one of those. I admit I have more ads than I really would want to have on the site, but again, this is my only way to generate revenues, allowing me to pay myself and the other writers.

What’s strange is that after the Panda update, many sites that rank better than me actually have more ads than I do. Even worse, Google now seems to rank crappy spammy sites better than my own blog, that is 100% original and legit.

I tried to analyze what had happened, or rather how I was affected. Turns out that instead of ranking #1 for many high value keywords, such as “iPhone 5”, I now rank much lower. It’s not as if Google had kicked me out of their SERPs, it’s just that they lowered my ranking, and you know as well as me that being anything but #1 for a query doesn’t bring you much traffic.

So I still have the graces of Google, simply not as much as I did before.

One of the advice that Shane gave me was to not do anything drastic to the site. When Google changes their algo, many publishers freak out and completely change the way they manage their sites (ie. by changing the URL structure), but this is actually the biggest mistake you can make. As Google is fine tuning the Panda, things might get better, and those spammy sites ranking better than me today, might even be gone tomorrow.

This whole episode confirmed my realization that we, web publishers, are extremely dependent on Google. One slight change in the way they rank websites and my business loses 30% of traffic, and most likely revenues. What can you do about that?

The logical and somewhat stupid answer is to get traffic elsewhere. The obvious is to not be dependent on Google. Sure, but how do you do that?

I think a real answer to that question could be a blog post in itself, but in a nutshell, I believe you have to build your reader’s loyalty. If they’re loyal, they’ll come back, and even better, they’ll sen people over to you.

But of course, creating a loyal readership is easier said than done. It involves great quality content, a compelling voice, constant engagement of your audience, an omnipresence on Twitter and other social media avenues, and a lot of luck.

I have decided not to over-analyze what happened with Panda because I’m tired of SEO. SEO good practices change all the time. What doesn’t change is Google’s quality guidelines and this is where I’m going to focus my efforts for my blog, and so should you.

The post The Panda Slap first appeared on Sebastien Page.