Post pics of your watches ***Please NO QUOTING PHOTOS***

Cienciano wrote: »

Ionised wrote: »

New arrival.



Sometimes it is the small details.

Nice, I want something with "presage" written on it

Wibbs wrote: »

The continuing story of me wearing oddball stuff nobody else would.. It's rare to be fair, even rarer in working order and NOS, but delicate and as prone to damage as a butterfly's wing. In a cement mixer.



I only bring it out a few times a year so it is preserved for the future. I love that it vibrates on the wrist and the seconds hand is smoooooth.


The crown is on the backplate like some of the Bulova Accutrons. Never mind all that, it was the watch world's only cybernetic movement*. CybereffinNetic. Game over. I was sold. Cos me.

They go for around the 1500 quid mark if you can find a working one. Longines themselves don't have a working one. Two styles, my example and one where the seconds hand goes under the dial markers as it sweeps. Very cool. Really only a museum piece TBH. Very delicate to impacts and the time and wear on some components. I believe there's a chap in Germany can repair them, but yeah not really practical, so only for the oddballs. *ahem*

Daftly expensive when new in 71-72, around the 1000 quid mark when an Omega Speedmaster was under 200, though cheaper than the Swiss Beta 21 quartz which was more like 1500 and the Seiko Astron was double that again. Clearly a bargain. Even came with free insurance for the first two years of ownership.

The only replacement part listed was the entire movement, which was built by hand from the miniaturised components normally found in hearing aids(which by their very nature were made as small as tech would allow). The quartz crystal was hand cut from natural Brazilian quartz and hand tuned with microscopic slivers of gold leaf to 9350 Hz(if that blows you're boned) under a microscope. When we think of battery watches today the tech is almost entirely produced by machine processes for the obvious reasons of cost, reliability and scalability.

I love that this is a relic of a time when the tech was new and some were still attempting it by hand using the old labour intensive watchmaking skills of working in miniature. To think at the time this was actually considered a "cheaper" way to produce the new fangled quartz watches, because it didn't use a "silicon chip" which were mad money on their own and supply was patchy. It likely made sense back then(these were first prototyped in 1966) as it kept things more inhouse and less reliant on Motorola or whomever and could repurpose their existing highly skilled staff into the new tech.



*IE the electro mechanical circuit is slaved to the quartz circuit and the latter tweaks the former in an internal feedback loop when it goes out of true. I suppose an atomic radio signal watch might be similar, though at a remove. An atomic watch would be as the display would be quartz driven with the atomic bit regulating it.

Wibbs wrote: »

The continuing story of me wearing oddball stuff nobody else would.. It's rare to be fair, even rarer in working order and NOS, but delicate and as prone to damage as a butterfly's wing. In a cement mixer.
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