Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

The hand soldered surface mount components are a horror. I was a design engineer on an automated optical inspection machine that inspected solder joints.

So you'd be in a position of that giving you nightmares. 😁

Does that ultra quartz use a quartz to pump a mechanical resonater?

It's "cybernetic" and was advertised as such.

😁The resonater, which yeah is along the lines of a tuning fork movement(and the bit that usually fails on these) drives the hands and is the slave timekeeper, with the master quartz part nudging it back to true when it deviates. With the Beta 21 movement the quartz directly drives the tuning fork stepping motor via a motorola chip in the "normal" way. The stepping motor part seems to have been an issue for the Swiss. Seiko had the one beat per second type in their first quartz(which was a barely working prototype). Their marketing tagline was "Have you ever seen a second". Then GP came out with the 350 series. Longines were in the partnership to build the Beta 21, but also had this on the go internally. It was meant to be a cheaper way to build a quartz using discrete components(from the hearing aid industry) rather than the very expensive at the time "silicon chips". The more handmade aspect meant it wasn't much cheaper at all and they were very delicate. There were no individual parts for it, the part was the movement. Few survive in working condition today. Even Longines' example has a later ticking quartz movement in it. The sweep is so smooth and the thing buzzes like a marital aid. Really loud.

I rarely wear it. It's more a museum piece tbh.

Two items that are in the post to me at the moment ,the first is a second 9943-8000. Yes, I'll have twin twin quartz. I landed a working one for the cost of the OEM bracelet.

The second is a Girard Perregaux 9575 KA. The Motorola chip is not hermetically sealed in the gold plated metal case, it's a later model with 73 week code on the chip, it's a 352 calibre. As you say, it's all dry assembly, Teflon bearings.

Nice. The twin twin quartz is a rare one. The early quartz are so much harder to find these days and prices have gone up. Time was you'd have a few pages on ebay with the things.

Your Tron dial 350 is very rare, I'm glad it's in good hands. I love the semiconductor die dial, a master stroke. A quartz watch with that dial would sell very well at the big semiconductor trade shows.

Thanks NJ. I was looking for one for over five years and then got very lucky with a French ebay auction with the worst pics ever. 220 quid. At one stage the online buzz was they were only an internal marketing thing. They were in all their adverts, but clearly not many were made. I suspect because they were expensive watches and the buyers with the money to buy them wanted more traditional designs. The dials were made by Singer(later bought by Rolex), the normal GP dials were Beyeler. Of the ones that have shown up with background stories they were owned by people who worked for Motorola. Like you say they would have a fair bit of crossover with the early computing collector market. I also found in a joblot from Switzerland for 50 quid a GP movement Consul(which GP had bought out) with an IBM punchcard dial. So far that's example of one. I strongly suspect it's a prototype as it doesn't show up in any of their brochures of the time and up close looks not quite finished.

I'll post pics when I get them, I've had too many watches turn into vaporware when it comes to shipping and I get a refund from the seller. A disappointment when you want the watch and not the money.

Really? That's never happened to me. So far. Touch wood. though things have changed quite a bit since I was more actively buying.

The phase loop sounds familiar alright. It was a clever way of doing away with using a chip to calculate the impulses. I have an original brochure for one somewhere explaining it in English, but can I find it...

This is an ad for one from 1972 as part of the in flight magazine on Concorde.

Dependable my left one. 😂 It gives a general overview of what it apparently does. That's the coolest model of them, where the seconds hand sweeps under the indices that look like some futurist stonehenge. Longines took risks with tolerances on their seconds hands. My Ultronic seconds hand misses the indices by barely a blonde one.

Here's a page from a Swiss industry magazine from the late 60's showing an early working version(they patented it in 1968, two years before Seiko and the Swiss Beta), in French though:

It shows just how much cash and resources a company like Longines had back then. Omega were the same. And how willing they were to embrace and develop the new tech. Companies like Patek and AP were very small fry by comparison. Some of the smaller houses like to market the fact they never offered a quartz. They don't market the fact they quite simply couldn't afford to. AP were on the ropes when they brought out the Royal Oak. That was their Hail Mary.

Like I have noted before it wasn't a "Quartz crisis" that did the Swiss in, it was a "Digital crisis". The Swiss were well ahead on and heavily invested in analogue quartz tech and were selling well, but never saw the digitals taking over to the extent they did. They were initially an American enterprise, but when the Japanese and later China/Hong Kong took over the Swiss had pretty much nada to offer, or what they had was two years behind the Far East. Good night Irene. Then of course they marketed the mechanical revival on the back of the huge war chest they'd built up from selling cheap plastic and quartz fashion (S)watches.