The man who makes £100,000 watches

Whilst appreciating the efforts gone into handcrafting such great items, I do think that at the end of the day, a watch is a watch and any old Timex, seiko, Sekonda,etc, will keep the time just as good or bad as a Hublot, rolex or Omega........

So, I don't see the point in spending all that money on a watch......

Funny enough, I have a Seiko too...

A quick google and I saved myself the trouble of editing........

http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-watch-cocks.html

That is the correct term, yes............

"ROLEX" is nothing else than an abbreviation for ...

""Horological Excellence""... Not many people knew that...........

Yep very interesting story.

My own deeper interest has only recently been kindled I had not carried a watch for many years until I decided to buy one on the spur of the moment back in 2005 in Schiphol airport, it was only cheap about 40 quid but very slim with a nice simple face and nice band, quartz Swiss movement and pretty accurate with a 3 to 4 year battery life, at the same time Ana bought me a very nice Seiko 5 with the standard 7s26 movement and it was a great mechanical self winder and cheap at the time in the Phils but the particular model tended to feel a bit top heavy and I wore the Gassan more often than the Seiko but tended to wear the Seiko more often when I was in the Phils.

Anyway I had almost given up wearing a watch at all again as the battery had died in the Gassan and the Seiko 5 had a fine long scratch on the Hardlex crystal and I had largely, like everyone else, been using the mobile as a timepiece, however earlier this year I started looking on Amazon for an every day watch replacement for the Gassan and just somehow got interested in all of it again.

Then when I started getting into it again I started remembering my dad's old Omega's from the 60's I don't think they were top end (he had a couple) at the time but they were good, don't know what happened to them over the years.

Anyway I got interested again but my main interest is in high accuracy watches that provide their own power and theoretically have the ability to run for twenty years or more, possibly even without a service, and as such there is really only the Seiko Kinetic range that does this, most others are Solar but I'm a night owl so Solar has always struck me as more work to keep it charged.

I'm also interested in watches that have complications such as the Perpetual Calendar complication, my ideal perfect watch would be a Seiko Kinetic high beat quartz with Perpetual Calendar, with a very plain dial and Sapphire crystal and while I love Titanium watches I do like the solid weight of stainless steel case and bracelet as well, unfortunately most current and recent Seiko's that have all the complications and features I want don't tend to come with a nice plain face, most tend to be overly gaudy.

I would really fancy an Omega, of all the big names that is the one that I like the most however I find it hard to justify the expense and the very idea of a hundred grand for a watch is quite tickling but who would ever be happy carrying something of that value on their wrist and I feel much the same way about most of the cheaper expensive watches too.

When I got my bargain basement Seiko on eBay this year for just 80 quid I was really made up, it's not perfect the 5J32 movement while very very accurate is sloppy about the positioning of the tick, the second hand does not accurately hit the markers and it is only really a fault in that particular movement later ones are much better, however I love that Seiko the weight of the case v the band is just right and it does not feel top heavy, the Sapphire crystal is absolutely flawless not a hint of a mark on it and the face is fairly simple which is the style I really like, I admire it every day when I put it on simply for the technical elegance of the device, the same way I used to love the sheer technical beauty of my old Honda S2000 and oddly enough my ThinkPad laptops, all great engineering and none of them horribly expensive.

I had a read of the Daniels web site and it is very very interesting however there are mistakes on that site that don't make a lot of sense particularly in terms of the quoted accuracy of some of the tiempeices, as far as I can see some of the modern Japanese movements are more than capable of beating the 100 or so second a year accuracy quoted (calculated), saying that the watches are beautiful, works of art really, and it is a very impressive story.

Thanks for posting John!