Trying to buy a Rolex…
2 Likes
Undercutting dealerscum I guess…
Don’t give in… 
The guy serving in Majestic yesterday was wearing a lovely old Omega tuning fork. He seemed genuinely pleased that the mad old berk buying tonic water recognised it for what it was. Apparently it had belonged to his father in law.
Anyway this got me wondering this morning whether watches of that era would have been 18ct or gold-filled so after a quick poke around this was the model
(the day-date and the red square around the logo were quite distinctive)
If you’d asked me I would have made a wild stab at a price of around £2k-£3k. I wonder wai no love for such a nice old thing?
4 Likes
Servicing costs, which wouldn’t be too far off purchase price, plus very limited availability of spares.
Really bloody nice watch though.
1 Like
I love them and learnt to phase them for modern batteries when I was still working on watches.
Great movement to work if you knew what you were doing and had a good enough microscope, but the time required to do them properly meant you have to charge big money. If you needed spares then it was buying up dead ones on eBay to get a stock of parts or send it back to Omega for an insane service cost.
Either way, you don’t want one of those you really want a Megasonic it was the ultimate and best tuning fork movement ever made.
2 Likes
That is rather iconic looking!
I used to own this one (not my photo) it was very under the radar looking.
2 Likes
I am large; both reasonably tall and also being corpulent with it. Once we head into the world of sub 40mm, it starts to look a bit childlike on me. I suspect THIS would be as small as I’d be tempted to go. Equally, smaller and less pudgy men have been ill served by new watches in the last few years so I think it’s welcome that smaller sizes are coming back.
2 Likes
I’ve got a CWC G10 watch and that is 36mm, wear it occasionally as it’s confortable but it is bloody tiny on my wrist
That IWC seems bigger on the wrist than my CWC, is it really 35mm?
(cue Father Ted memes)
2 Likes
I’m not a particularly big person.
40mm for comparison.
I showed the 35mm to the wife and by the sound of it, it would be in serious danger of going on extended loan.
The bracelet on it is commensurately slimmer and lighter.
As always, I miss my old 34mm Ingenieur, they are lovely 
1 Like
I am starting to appreciate slightly smaller watches recently but it very much depends on the watch. 42mm has been my usual norm but I have adjusted that down to 40mm. I wouldn’t consider anything under 38mm personally.
I think the 40mm looks better and this is very much due to the lug design on that model.
2 Likes
I’ve come to hate size-trends. The wrist-clock thing from back when Arnie and Sly were considered taste-makers ( 
) led to a fashion that took way too long to die, I hope things won’t get equally silly the other way.
Sensible makers, like Swatch Group, make their big sellers in multiple sizes, but often seem to get the scaling from large-to-small wrong.
Some seem to keep almost all the big watch dimensions and just shrink the overall diameter, which looks shite.
Smarter ones shrink everything in proportion, with maybe a few tweaks for legibility.
Most seem to do what IWC did there and get most of it right but manage to include something jarring - in this case the hands of the 35mm look clumsy on that teeny dial. This is just a matter of personal preference of course.
The one dimension makers really need to shrink as much as possible is the thickness of most mechanicals - way too many of any diameter are massively thick and clunky, and not always because they’ve been specified for use at pointlessly abyssal depths underwater. Hate thick watches.
In terms of diameter, my smallest is a Walt-y 38mm Marathon, I wear it a lot because it’s good for telling the time, which is the #1 reason I own a watch; the #2 reason is I Like It; I don’t care in the slightest if it’s any way fashionable, or deeply not-so… As I type, I’m wearing a 45mm Sinn - it’s too big, and everyone hates it, but I like it and it’s easier to wear than it might be because it’s not absurdly thick or heavy…
40mm seems to be the sweet spot for me personally, but no reason it should be for anyone else.
2 Likes
I love my 36 Explorer (and the 36 Seamaster it replaced).
I don’t mind the larger sub I have, but I’d take the 35 over the 40 IWC in a heartbeat.
1 Like
I tried the 40 Ingenieur in Harrods a few weeks ago and loved it.
It is not all about the overall diameter but how the watch fits.
The Ingenieur wore very well and I would happily own one.
The other watch on my wish list is the Piaget Polo which is 42mm but with a squarer shape wears more like a 39mm. Conversely the GO SeaQ Panorama is 43.2mm but wears like a 45mm .
Just proves that you have to try these things on to really understand them.
1 Like
Me too.
Mind you I don’t particularly like the big diameters either.
I did buy a few huge watches back in the day, a Suunto something-or-other and a Citizen altimeter watch both of which caused piss takes by colleagues. I had never considered watch size to be a fashion issue back then and was just as likely to wear my standard sized Reverso.
In fact in recent years I have been disappointed watch size has become part of a fashion I never remember it being! But I am very old.
Yes the thing I really hate is thick watches, particularly in winter. I hadn’t realised how stupidly thick a watch I bought on the internet, because I liked the dial, would be, I have never worn it and now check thickness first out of all parameters.
It is presumably because thin requires higher manufacturing and assembly tolerance so is more expensive to make.
1 Like
That and a sudden interest in building models with a crush depth that exceeds a nuclear submarine. Anything rated for much more than 200m is never going to be very thin. If you then decide to make something with a movement more complicated than day/date and want that sort of resistance, it’s going to be massive.