What watch do you wear?

[mrk]

Good to see the Coniston arrived safely!

^They're quite a young company but make some stand-out watches each one with a story (and journal post usually) behind its creation. The sandwich dial is lumed on the underside.

I like Turtles.

I ever understood why on some Seikos the seconds hand counterbalance was lumed. Seems counter intuitive on a dive watch where timing is of importance so you'd want the forward head of the seconds hand lumed not the opposite end.

Decided to spend a few minutes flashing in my Kitchen tonight.

What I found was raising the watch slightly like on something cylindrical and using a wider aperture gives some depth to the piece against the background/foreground. Anything that's right sized and hides behind the watch cases perfect! You can then use blutac etc if needed to "hold" the watch in place at whatever angle for the shot

I came across the new Offshore releases from AP today and I'm really liking the green and blue versions. I just need a spare £34k to drop on a watch

Not sure if there's a single AP out there that to my eyes doesn't look ghastly! Not for me certainly, even if I had the money I'd be rocking a rotation of Hamiltons, old school Casios, Marloes etc.

 

[Janesy B]

Think it looks better like that tbh, helps with legibility on the dial when the lume pip is close to the centre. I'm sure there was a need to counterbalance on older movements, now it's just a styling choice.

 

[gitbags]

Think it looks better like that tbh, helps with legibility on the dial when the lume pip is close to the centre. I'm sure there was a need to counterbalance on older movements, now it's just a styling choice.

Allegedly it's a to make it easier to tell if your watch is still running whilst diving, part of the iso standard, but the location is purely down to the manufacturer. I guess it's at the back to make it a little larger so easier to see underwater.

 

[mrk]

I doubt there a technical reason to have the counterbalance since modders replace the hand(s) with all manner of styles and no issues have been reported in this regard so must be a styling choice. It's not like the counterbalance is closer to the centre than it is the edge of the dial either! Seconds hand counterbalance do look nicer though, just I don't understand why the lume is on that end and not the tip of the needle hence my comment. Any good lume is visible wherever it is on the dial/hand. Seiko's Lumibrite is bright and lasts long enough really.

 

[hughtrimble]

I doubt there a technical reason to have the counterbalance since modders replace the hand(s) with all manner of styles and no issues have been reported in this regard so must be a styling choice. It's not like the counterbalance is closer to the centre than it is the edge of the dial either! Seconds hand counterbalance do look nicer though, just I don't understand why the lume is on that end and not the tip of the needle hence my comment. Any good lume is visible wherever it is on the dial/hand. Seiko's Lumibrite is bright and lasts long enough really.

If you are relying solely on your dive watch to know when you need to resurface, and further to that, are pushing it to monitoring the seconds you have left, then you've gone very wrong!

It's a sign of life indicator first and foremost.

 

[SDK^]

If you are relying solely on your dive watch to know when you need to resurface, and further to that, are pushing it to monitoring the seconds you have left, then you've gone very wrong!

It's a sign of life indicator first and foremost.

It's unlikely a diver will be using seconds to monitor resurface time and most apply extra minutes tolerance using the bezel timer/indicator.

 

[SDK^]

£34k for one of those? They look like a tenner watch from the Amazon bargain bucket...

They look like knock off G-Shocks

Interesting opinions.
Visual aesthetics is very personal but i'm pretty sure if you were to hold a G-Shock and an AP Offshore in your hands the material & craftsmanship difference would be very obvious

 

[hughtrimble]

It's unlikely a diver will be using seconds to monitor resurface time and most apply extra minutes tolerance using the bezel timer/indicator.

That's my point exactly. Along with the fact that dive watches are backups, or even backup backups to dive computers.

 

[Bluecube]

Interesting opinions.
Visual aesthetics is very personal but i'm pretty sure if you were to hold a G-Shock and an AP Offshore in your hands the material & craftsmanship difference would be very obvious

True. And if you like a watch and you’ve got the cash to splash then go for it. I won’t criticise your decision especially given some of the rubbish I’ve wasted money on!
But to my eyes those are not £34k watches by a long chalk.

 

[InvaderGIR]

Even £3.4k is a stretch for them, going on the looks alone which is what most people are doing in this thread.

 

[SDK^]

Even £3.4k is a stretch for them, going on the looks alone which is what most people are doing in this thread.

Wouldn't it be great if the sale price was set by how a product looked - everyone would say it looked rubbish and get it cheap

A few areas which make these watches expensive:

• The materials are higher quality- Ceramic, Titanium and Gold.
• It takes a highly skilled team a lot of time to produce each watch - hand decorating and finishing hundreds of tiny parts.
• They are made in limited quantities.

 

[mrk]

A G-Shock you could drive over with your car and wear it the next day and it would look not much different than the previous morning. Try that with an AP?!
(yeah I know it's a silly comparison but it amused me in the moment )

You can get £1k watches that use the same grade Titanium as high end brands for example and the fit and finish of many other watches is just as good as ones costing much more nowadays as machining and tooling across the board is so much better than what it used to be even just a few years ago.

IMO the extra price is a good factor when looking at exclusive watches, one-offs or bespoked limited editions for the customer. An RW Smith watch commands anywhere from £90,000 to the cost of a house and it deserves it because it's built by one man and no two will ever be the same. These APs are being mass produced so the exclusivity aspect is down to your bank balance really and nothing more. I checked out the specs of the above out of curiosity in-case I'd missed something too and nothing really stands out to explain their reasoning but then again as we have discussed in previous pages here, watches from Jacob & Co featured in Producer Michael's videos cost a lot more than any AP and look even more horrendous!

This is all personal preference but realistically for me if big bucks like that were one day spent, they'd be spent on something that I damned well know would not be spotted on the wrist of anyone else out there not because of its price, but because no-one else can make a watch like that.

 

[SDK^]

These APs are being mass produced so the exclusivity aspect is down to your bank balance really and nothing more.

Yep all valid points
Just for comparison - AP limit watch output to 40,000 unit's per year and Casio shipped over 9 million G-Shock watches in 2019. [Rolex limit production to around 800,000 per year]

 

[Chewie]

Thanks, the value for money that you get on some vintage Seiko pieces is quite astonishing.

Indeed, lots of nice watches available when it comes to vintage Seiko.

Congratulations

I came across the new Offshore releases from AP today and I'm really liking the green and blue versions. I just need a spare £34k to drop on a watch

No thank you.

Purely from an aesthetic point of view, and so from own subjective opinion, I found them hideous.

My Marloe

Congratulations my good Sir, enjoy

 

[Derek W]

Thanks for the tips @mrk

Curve ball question to the watch folk.

How do the different watch movements work / what sort of design processes do they got through to make sure they work as they should?

I stumbled on this after googling https://grabcad.com/library/eta-6497-1-complete-watch-movement

It got me thinking on how the different movements vary between a cheap automatic through your Rolex type watches up to ones as complicated as the Jacob & co / patek Phillip grand complications type watches.

 

[Minusorange]

Visual aesthetics is very personal but i'm pretty sure if you were to hold a G-Shock and an AP Offshore in your hands the material & craftsmanship difference would be very obvious

Now these look like $50k+ watches

 

[majestyk]

I like Turtles.

Me too.

 

[mrk]

Thanks for the tips @mrk

Curve ball question to the watch folk.

How do the different watch movements work / what sort of design processes do they got through to make sure they work as they should?

I stumbled on this after googling https://grabcad.com/library/eta-6497-1-complete-watch-movement

It got me thinking on how the different movements vary between a cheap automatic through your Rolex type watches up to ones as complicated as the Jacob & co / patek Phillip grand complications type watches.

It's down to the complications as well as craftsmanship in each component. The in-house movements in watches that cost 5 figures are almost always finely finished by hand, each brush rotation or movement is unique to that movement in that watch and takes considerable time to do. There are many Grand Seiko Spring Drive videos on YouTube showing what goes on in making these movements and not just the movement but the dial and hands themselves from hand stroked texturing on a dial to the hand polishing on the underside of hands that GS watchmakers do, even though you are unlikely to ever notice such detail, it's all there.

The basic principals of a watch movement have not changed in all this time. Escapement variations have remained constant too but what has evolved is how modern materials and computer aided engineering have allowed for insanely accurate movements now, even in the off the shelf cheaper movements and watchmakers that use these movements can further increase their accuracy by doing their own adjustments and regulations in up to 5 positions, something that only the higher end watchmakers tend to do in their in-house movements.

 

[Chewie]

And it finally...stopped. Ran for 12 days and a half, not bad

I did notice that past the 10 days mark the small seconds seemed to lag a bit behind but honestly nothing you couldn't live with for 2 extra days of power.

 

[hughtrimble]

I did notice that past the 10 days mark the small seconds seemed to lag a bit behind but honestly nothing you couldn't live with for 2 extra days of power.

I think there's enough pretty there to be able to distract you from the small seconds lagging.

Good finding on the 12.5 day reserve. It's welcome that they've gone with the stated power reserve with decent timekeeping, rather than trying to claim it's a 12er.