The Breitling Watch Source Forums

Sorry to hear about the problems with the BO1... but WOW that shot of your BEB is outstanding!!

As a follow up. I sent my B01 Chronomat in for the two year checkup to maintain the warranty

Is this mandatory for watches sold from January 2012 onwards?

That was what I was told by my AD in upstate NY. Check with yours as it may have changed.
Frank.

I'm really starting to wonder if some of these issues are actually caused by the much vaunted "conveyer" system that Breitling have developed for the B01, whereby movements effectively move along a track between workstations where employees assemble the same part over and over and over again on each movement as it comes round the track. Sure this process may be fast, but I always think that human operators will frankly just loose concentration and get bored after several hours of doing the same task tens (possibly hundreds) of times a day - and it's then that errors can creep in.

You just need to look at any other semi-automated (i.e. fast) and mass-produced product to see that errors can occur with quite a regularity. Compare that to a watch that is hand-assembled by one watchmaker, and the time invested in that movement by one individual performing numerous different tasks is likely (IMO) to engender more care, less boredom and thus less errors on the part of the watchmaker(s). I'm sure that speed of assembly has at least a proportional tradeoff to an increasing error rate.

Of course they may also be issues with the design of the movement purely by virtue of the fact that it's still incredibly new and untested by years of real-world use. IF there is a design issue it would seem to me that it's more a case of the movement just requiring very careful set-up once built, rather than a truly fundamental design flaw. This would explain why some are performing flawlessly while other experience problems.

As always, JMHO, and I should just point out I have no empirical evidence for this - I'm just surmising and spitballing here.

Welcome to BreitlingSource. Firstly, please don't make a habit of baking your watch. When you see or hear rotors spinning it is generally a uni-directional winding movement free wheeling in the non winding direction where there is very little resistance. Breitling's in house movements wind in both directions so you don't have that same free motion.