Has anyone recently been experiencing watches getting heavily magnetized during shippng.

I ship only USPS Priority Mail. Recently I have had a number of watches returned for running fast with poor amplitude. All were heavily magnetized.

One was exposed to enough magnetism that it pulled another hairspring coil into the regulator. It was returned, I demagged it and sent it back and it arrived showing big magnetism on the customer's compass again. He bought a demagnetizer on Ebay and fixed it.

I know all of you here ship a lot of watches. I need to see if this is something unique to Priority Mail, if others are having the same problem, and if there is some sort of a container that would be reasonable to ship watches in.

Scott

Scott,

As an engineer I can tell you that although electric fields can be blocked with conductive shielding, magnetic fields cannot.

The only way to block a magnetic field is with an opposing magnetic field, which really isn't practical to do in a shipping situation.

So Edward,
Even a tin shipping container can't protect the watch? So there isn't really anything that can be done.
Scott

I pack mine in a larger box 7x7x6 these are the same rate as a flat rate envelopes, smaller boxes and are also free from USPS.
Best use the largest box you can for the rate fee to keep it away from external sources & influences also you can pack softly allowing for additional protection for dropping.
Demagnetizers are wonderful but like all tools can cause as many problems as cured when used sometime hairsprings will jump and tangle over center wheel, carful timing adjustments maybe nullified, I always re test after using this tool, so please don’t undertake its use as some cure all elixir it may do more harm than good to a watch with other problems

This might be a good time to say that the Sangamo Special I received from Lindell a couple months ago was magnetized. It was off by some 10 minutes a day! It was detected with a dime-sized compass centered over the balance. I'll tell you that compass arrow did a jitterbug - or maybe the twist for baby boomers!

The watch was passed through a demagnetizer and was immediately restored to its normal state.
M.

After reading the 1st post I emailed the US Postal service asking them the question. Today the local post master called & he said that there were only two possibilities he had been able to find that might be causing the problem.

One was if the watches were being sent to the D.C. area they could be scanned causing the magnetism. He said that was the only part of the country where packages are scanned.

The other possibility was during the shipment of priority pages they are flown around the country & are near engines at various times.

He advised that if it was caused by the engines while being flown across the country that parcel post might be a better way, he said parcel post travel by land instead of air.

Anyway, thought I would pass along what they said.

Tom

Tom, I wouldn't be a bit surprised regarding items exposed in flight.

Several years ago we had a student fly in to defend his thesis, and he carried a VHS tape with him to show during the defense. Instead of keeping it with his carry-on, he put it in his check in luggage.

Long story short, when we put the tape in to play it back, it was completely erased. Not just a blank tape, mind you, but cleared of image like it had been held under a video eraser magnet.

Any magnetic field strong enough to clean a videotape of its signal is PLENTY strong enough to mess up a fine hairspring, in my opinion.

Regards! Mark