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About Dial & Lug
We haven't tested these watches. Nobody who covers this many has. Here is what we do instead, and why we think it is worth more.
By Sawyer V. · Published
Dial & Lug exists for one kind of buyer: the person who wants to buy a watch once and stop. Not a collector building a rotation, not somebody chasing this season's release — someone who hates rebuying, wants to know a thing can be repaired, and would rather pay more once than twice.
That buyer is badly served. Almost every watch guide online is organized around what is new and what looks good, and stops at the purchase price. Nobody publishes the second number — what the watch costs to keep running for the next twenty years — even though for this buyer it is the number that decides the purchase.
We haven't tested these watches. Nobody who reviews this many has.
Every guide in this category claims hands-on testing of dozens of watches. We don't make that claim, because it wouldn't be true. We have no test lab, no drawer of reference samples, and no watchmaker on staff.
What we do instead is read the manuals, compile the published specifications, and do the arithmetic — including the one number nobody else publishes: what a watch costs to keep running over ten and twenty years. Every figure on this site is cited to a document you can open. Where we don't know something, the page says so in those words.
Who writes this
Sawyer V. writes Dial & Lug. Not a watchmaker, not a collector with a safe full of references — just someone genuinely interested in the question of which watches actually last, and stubborn enough to go read the service manuals and work out the arithmetic.
That framing is deliberate and it is the honest one. There is no certification behind this site, no panel of experts, and no editorial staff beyond one person doing the reading. What there is: a published method anyone can re-run, and a rule that nothing gets stated here unless it came from a manufacturer document, a published standard, or a named source.
What we actually do
- Read the specification sheet, not the marketing page. Every spec on this site — movement, case, crystal, water resistance, lug width, warranty — was read off the manufacturer's own product page and is linked from the watch it belongs to.
- Compile the warranty terms. Across the ten competitor pages we analyzed before building this site, not one stated a warranty term. We state it on every watch, or state that the manufacturer doesn't publish one.
- Compute the cost to keep. Purchase price is half a decision. What it costs to keep is the other half, and it is the page this site was built around.
- Score the same way every time. The Keep Score is arithmetic over six published specifications. Same weights on every page, so a 7.4 here means the same thing as a 7.4 three clicks away.
- Name something to skip. Every roundup on this site says which watch we would not buy and why. A list where everything wins is a list nobody should believe.
How this is funded
Dial & Lug earns affiliate commission from Amazon. If you buy through a link here, we get a percentage and you pay exactly the same price. We hold no inventory, take no payment for placement, and accept no free product — which means when the cheaper watch is the better buy, we can say so, and we do.
Where a watch we rate is sold direct by its maker rather than on Amazon, we say that and link to the maker. We earn nothing on those links. See the affiliate disclosure and the editorial policy for the whole arrangement in plain English.
What we get wrong
Specifications change, models get discontinued, and manufacturers revise service pricing without announcing it. If you find something here that is out of date or plainly wrong, tell us. We fix it, note the correction on the page and date-stamp it — that commitment is written into our editorial policy, not just implied here.
Sources
Every specification and figure on this page came from one of these documents. Where a manufacturer does not publish something, the page says so rather than filling the gap.
Read next
How we pick
The Keep Score formula in full: six specs, fixed weights, all of it checkable.
Editorial policy
Independence, sourcing standards and our written correction commitment.
What a watch actually costs to keep
Published service intervals and prices, computed over 10 and 20 years. The number nobody else publishes.