Portuguese handwound: winding experience and actual power reserve

Dear colleagues:
Two comments on my new Portuguese handwound:
1. The hand-winding experience, while satisfying, strikes me as being a bit taxing. The winding requires what I consider to be quite a bit of effort. My point of comparison is a humble Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical, which winds smooth as silk with very little torque. The IWC is a stiff wind by comparison.
2. The watch is rated for 46 hours, but I am getting only 38. Is this discrepancy normal, such as when the car manufacturers say "Actual mileage may vary."?
David P. Rose, Brooklyn, NY

Hello David,

First of all, welcome to the Forum. Unfortunately I have no idea if the power reserve is too low but I noticed the other day that there was a substantial difference in winding a 'cold' watch in the morning and winding the same watch in the evening when it was warm just after taking it off my wrist.

I have no idea if this is supposed to be but maybe the seal around the winding stem is stiffer when the watch is cold?

Kind regards,

Clemens

Dear Master Clemens:
Your observation that cold vs. warm may affect the winding action is quite cogent. I will try to do some comparative testing working around this variable, and will post the results. But I can't imagine that ambient temperature during winding would affect the overall power reserve duration.
That would be unfortunate. One hopes for stable, uniform and predictable performance for a timepiece of this quality. Requires further study.
David P. Rose, Brooklyn, NY, USA

I have three 98xxx movements, all sitting in Vintage Collection watches. Two of them wind quite smoothly, the third is quite stiff. Apparently this variance is to be considered normal, in my case it doesn't influence the accuracy of the movement. Luckily the crown of the stiff Portuguese is not too small, so at least for me, there is no problem winding it. All of them have some 40+ hours of power reserve after fully winding them, but I never measured it.

Kind regards,
Paul

I get about 40-42 hours after a full wind of about 30 times.