Post pics of your watches Part II

SpudCam2000

Back to the egg today. 1914ish American Hampden. The movement is a cracker and as good as the best Swiss and better than most. Well American movements were at this time and the Swiss were playing catchup. Chaton set jewels, micrometer regulation, Breguet overcoil and so on.



Got it from France, so came a fair ways. The movement is 1908/9, but I assume later added to the case(nickel so unlike silver can't date it). Originally had the wrong "civilian" hands, but I got a civvie dial from a US lad, figuring I'd never get the correct handset. Military hands and dials are rare as rocking horse poo from this period). But then I did. Turned out the dial was the rarer.

And this very eve I reckon I may have got life back in this old girl. Yay!



1972 Girard Perregaux early quartz and a scarily rare dial I looked for many years to find, among talk on forums that they were a promo item never sold to the public*. Joke is the quartz crystal, circuitry and stepping motor parts were fine, it was the mechanical keyless works/calender mechanism developed and produced by none other than the "Watchmaker's watchmaker" one Jaeger-LeCoultre that went arseways. I think I may have solved it. *crosses fingers* Time will tell. No pun....


*Made by Singer, the same Singer Rolex among others used for their dials and later bought out. Unlike the majority of dials it's three colour passes and overlapping colour passes, on an fine sunburst type raised dial. Even today the vast majority that run a couple of colours don't risk printing on top of a previous colour because of the risk of bleed.

It would be a lot more longwinded T.

fulladapipes wrote: »

Restrapping my two daily wearers and trying to remember how to play solitaire. The Datejust is on a Colareb Roma, and the Speedie is on a Bulang & Son Newman bund.

I'm very much digging the out of the usual strap combos there F.

njburke wrote: »

Fab looking GP there wibbs, I wonder if the graphic is actually of the quartz controller silicon die.

Well spotted. The very thing NJ. The Motorola chip that controls the gubbins. The watch with that dial was all over their publicity in 72, but vanishingly rare in the wild. Of the few I've seen, less than six in blue, same number in the golden version, four of them were gifted to Motorola employees back in the day. They were an expensive watch when new(double the price of a Speedmaster), so I suspect the vast majority of buyers in that price bracket would have gone for the more traditional dials.

Actually when I was keeping an eye out for one of these Tron dials I came across something even odder from a Swiss seller on the Bay. Girard Perragaux bought another brand back in the 60's called Consul. They mostly seemed to have made ladies pendant watches, though the occasional chronograph shows up(IIRC one of the GP family married into one of the Consul family). Anyway in this example and keeping with the new tech vibe they instead went with an IBM punchcard design for the dial.



IE


Back then for your average person an IBM punchcard was more a known entity as far as "computers" were concerned, so it made sense at the time. Today it would be like finding a watch from the 80's with one of the original floppy disks on the dial. An anachronism today and the Kidz(tm) wouldn't know what the hell was going on. The Tron chip dial still holds far more relevance.

Internally it's all GP and it's a bit rough around some of the edges(case finishing and the like). Back when GP had their own little Q&A forum thingie they themselves had no clue what was going on. Again a Singer dial, though missing the 12 marker and from the back and under magnification it looks like it was never fitted. I strongly suspect a prototype/mockup. When I got it it wasn't working, but I got it going with another GP parts donor(when they were easy and cheap to get). Odd as hell and yeah ugly as sin, but a tiny little bit of watch and early computing history.

I got it for 57 euro, inc postage(the chip dial example I got for 220). Can't go wrong really.

Great to get it back working. I was outbid on a early quartz laureto recently, the build quality of the movement is superb.

Thanks. *crosses fingers*.. Pity about the laureato. They're really popular in Italy and Spain. Maybe check out the .es and .it ebays? They made a nice quartz for a few years. One of the most robust of any and one of the most accurate too. Watches with the movement in my first series one were sent for observatory testing which lasted IIRC 30 days and subjected the watches to vibration and different temperatures as well as accuracy and they all passed with flying colours. The first quartz and one of the few to do so.

They had no jewels, instead they used teflon bearings. No oiling and almost no maintenance required. By the second series movements they went back to jewels as that's what the market demanded, because it sounds more "luxury". They also used a Lavet stepping motor which was smaller, didnt have exposed coils and had way more torque so they could use normal sized hands(but it was pricey to produce, so the cheaper type gained traction, even today in things like Seiko's GS quartz were they need a double pulse to drive the normal sized hands). Oh and GP set the 32768 Hz frequency standard that 99% of quartz watches use right down to today.