Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

I'm probably going to get this wrong. 😁

The C in second on the bezel thingie is rough and the chronograph hand is slightly off true. The bracelet to case gap isn't exactly toight either.

I think Zenith first screwed the pooch a few years ago now when in the middle of a year without new models they overnight upped their prices and by a fair bit. All the 'luxury' Swiss brands have increased their prices, but they did it steadily over time, slowly enough to not put off the consumer base. Zenith did it too openly and quickly.

Their other problem is that their deep history is very much of the early part of the 20th century and post WW2 they were pretty invisible with very few known models to reference for marketing. The Defy was one. They had chronograph history too, but again couldn't capitalise on it. When they 'did a Longines' with their Zenith Extra Specials they made them too blood big just as too bloody big was going out of fashion. If Longines did the same with their version of the 1930's Pilot pattern they'd make it look the same, not far off the same size and add a date.

If that was seen on a press release of a 300 quid Seiko it would be very bad and there'd be scenes of hari kari in the boardroom. For 10k it's baffling that it wasn't spotted by the people working in Zenith.

Trust me B. You want to remain in ignorance. 😮🤢😁

Well after fiddling about with my heuer and its oddball 'waterproof' case I went down the rabbit hole looking into its origins.

First off I found the patent for the 'waterproof' case design from 1935 I gather.

You can see how i works from these pics of a Gallet chronograph.

The main case and movement and crystal are in one peice and mounted into the case and held fast with screws.

Note how the rear of the Heuer "Bund" is the same, only because it's a much larger watch(43mm) than the Gallet(35mm) scales are a little different.

The first watch to use it was the Gallet Flight Officer chronograph Flight Officer chrono from 1938. The first 'waterproof' chronograph.

Rotating bezel, chrono, timezones marked, dead cool. Issued in small numbers to the USAF and worn by President Truman. Their ads for the watch followed the time honoured option of stick it in a fish tank Ted.😁

"Guaranteed WATERPROOF!" Also note the "Clamshell" thing. A suspiciously small step from "Oyster" ...

So why did they go this route? Well screwbacks were already around for ages and worked fine for circular watches, but were about as much use as a chocolate fireguard for any other shape and chronographs were also problematic as they had recently gone two button and a crown. The 20's and 30's saw high popularity in tank style watches so this worked well for them and then Gallet adapted it to the chronos. It's more expensive to manufacture and the four screws have to be torqued down equally and well to seal, and they can back out too easily, so the case design didn't last much longer than the 1950's in common use. Except in the Leonidas Italian military issued watches.

Which Heuer bought and copied lock stock and barrel(the case is slightly different, but everything else is interchangable).

So an archaic case design unchanged from the 1930's lasted until the 80's in common military use and hung on in very specialised areas and is still on the stock list for some specialised areas today. Interestingly the bundeswehr spec called for 3 bar water resistance, but the case design surpassed that.

True dat and that was the epitome of low quality tat.

Reversos are a very nice watch indeed.

While they always added a premium, the Tiffany dial thing has gone nuts of late, that six and a half million quid auction/money laundering/dubious sale has egged it on even more.