Post by J. F. Sebastian on Nov 3, 2013 13:50:56 GMT -8
Got my first automatic in the mail yesterday, a 7019-7190 from 1974:
I got this for the low, low price of $7.50, and you can see why. The crystal is a mess. In various places it's scuffed, scratched, chipped and cracked. It even looks a little burnt in one place, can't imagine how that happened. It also came on one of those Speidel stretch bracelets. It seems to be an unbreakable law of eBay that all really cheap watches come on Speidel.
Even though the crystal is a wreck, I didn't hesitate to bid on this for two reasons. One is that, as you can see, the lume looks great: white, smooth, sharp edges, looks basically new. Seikoholic taught me that a bad crystal and good lume together are a good sign that a watch is original. I also noticed that the caseback was in pretty good shape:
No evidence of somebody who doesn't know what they're doing trying to open it up with needle-nose pliers and slipping 5 times before finally getting it open. So I figured this thing was likely to be in good shape crystal aside. And for $7.50, if I was wrong, I wasn't going to be the end of the world by any means.
I have to say that this watch is not really my style. But I've been wanting to try an automatic for a while now, to see if my interest would basically fade once I'd had one on the wrist for a while, or if it would (God help me) only intensify. And also to see how well I could tolerate all the downsides compared to quartz (I can appreciate mechanicals for what they are, but I'm also a pretty practical guy). The traditional way to get one's feet wet in the automatic world nowadays seems to be to buy a SNK809/5 on Amazon for $55, but I thought I'd try something a little more interesting and see what kind of vintage bargains I could get from patiently trawling eBay listings. I thought I'd try to snag myself a super bargain by looking for things nobody else seemed interested in. After a few failed attempts (mostly on DXs, which seem to be under a lot of people's radars), I found this and thought that, while not really my thing, at the very least it wasn't too ugly for me to wear in public, and the price was definitely unbeatable. I figured that if I ended up deciding it wasn't for me, a nice leather band and a new crystal would probably let me resell it recoup most of my costs. The dial, hands, markers etc. all seem to look in pretty good condition. Who knows, maybe after I do it up a bit it will grow on me after all.
Even though I prefer bracelets to any other kind of band, I think those Speidel stretch things look terrible, so for now I'm wearing it on a black NATO I had spare:
It's definitely an improvement, and even though I'm a bracelet guy, I think that a black leather band, possibly with green stitching, would really suit this thing best.
Mechanically speaking, I seem to have done okay. It starting running as soon as I gave it a gentle shake. I had some trouble setting the day of the week. It advances when you push the crown in, and I got about half way through the week before it got kind of stuck - it would partially advance but seemed to meet some kind of springy resistance it couldn't quite overcome, bouncing back to its current setting. After a few tries it got stuck between two days. I gave up and moved on to setting the date and time and after that noticed it had actually clicked forward. I wasn't paying attention and didn't see when that happened, I guess maybe moving the date provided a little bit of an incidental push that helped? Anyway, it seems like the day quickset mechanism could use some care. It did move rom Sat to Sun after midnight with no problems, though. Otherwise, it seems to keep time pretty well. I haven't done any careful checking yet, but I think it's certainly within a minute or two a day. It didn't quite last through last night, but I opened it around 3pm and had a pretty sedentary Saturday night, so maybe that's not a surprise.
I think that the green dialed version of this watch is actually pretty rare. I've managed to find about 5 photos online of blue dialed ones, but no green ones except for this one's auction listing. There are a lot of green JDM Actus models with the same movement (but without the cushion case), but none of these. This is true whether I search for 7019-7190 (which is on the caseback), or 7019-7280 (which is on the dial under 6 o'clock) - by the way, is it normaly for those numbers to differ slightly?
That's about it, I think. I'll wear this guy to work for the time being and see what I make of it.
I got this for the low, low price of $7.50, and you can see why. The crystal is a mess. In various places it's scuffed, scratched, chipped and cracked. It even looks a little burnt in one place, can't imagine how that happened. It also came on one of those Speidel stretch bracelets. It seems to be an unbreakable law of eBay that all really cheap watches come on Speidel.
Even though the crystal is a wreck, I didn't hesitate to bid on this for two reasons. One is that, as you can see, the lume looks great: white, smooth, sharp edges, looks basically new. Seikoholic taught me that a bad crystal and good lume together are a good sign that a watch is original. I also noticed that the caseback was in pretty good shape:
No evidence of somebody who doesn't know what they're doing trying to open it up with needle-nose pliers and slipping 5 times before finally getting it open. So I figured this thing was likely to be in good shape crystal aside. And for $7.50, if I was wrong, I wasn't going to be the end of the world by any means.
I have to say that this watch is not really my style. But I've been wanting to try an automatic for a while now, to see if my interest would basically fade once I'd had one on the wrist for a while, or if it would (God help me) only intensify. And also to see how well I could tolerate all the downsides compared to quartz (I can appreciate mechanicals for what they are, but I'm also a pretty practical guy). The traditional way to get one's feet wet in the automatic world nowadays seems to be to buy a SNK809/5 on Amazon for $55, but I thought I'd try something a little more interesting and see what kind of vintage bargains I could get from patiently trawling eBay listings. I thought I'd try to snag myself a super bargain by looking for things nobody else seemed interested in. After a few failed attempts (mostly on DXs, which seem to be under a lot of people's radars), I found this and thought that, while not really my thing, at the very least it wasn't too ugly for me to wear in public, and the price was definitely unbeatable. I figured that if I ended up deciding it wasn't for me, a nice leather band and a new crystal would probably let me resell it recoup most of my costs. The dial, hands, markers etc. all seem to look in pretty good condition. Who knows, maybe after I do it up a bit it will grow on me after all.
Even though I prefer bracelets to any other kind of band, I think those Speidel stretch things look terrible, so for now I'm wearing it on a black NATO I had spare:
It's definitely an improvement, and even though I'm a bracelet guy, I think that a black leather band, possibly with green stitching, would really suit this thing best.
Mechanically speaking, I seem to have done okay. It starting running as soon as I gave it a gentle shake. I had some trouble setting the day of the week. It advances when you push the crown in, and I got about half way through the week before it got kind of stuck - it would partially advance but seemed to meet some kind of springy resistance it couldn't quite overcome, bouncing back to its current setting. After a few tries it got stuck between two days. I gave up and moved on to setting the date and time and after that noticed it had actually clicked forward. I wasn't paying attention and didn't see when that happened, I guess maybe moving the date provided a little bit of an incidental push that helped? Anyway, it seems like the day quickset mechanism could use some care. It did move rom Sat to Sun after midnight with no problems, though. Otherwise, it seems to keep time pretty well. I haven't done any careful checking yet, but I think it's certainly within a minute or two a day. It didn't quite last through last night, but I opened it around 3pm and had a pretty sedentary Saturday night, so maybe that's not a surprise.
I think that the green dialed version of this watch is actually pretty rare. I've managed to find about 5 photos online of blue dialed ones, but no green ones except for this one's auction listing. There are a lot of green JDM Actus models with the same movement (but without the cushion case), but none of these. This is true whether I search for 7019-7190 (which is on the caseback), or 7019-7280 (which is on the dial under 6 o'clock) - by the way, is it normaly for those numbers to differ slightly?
That's about it, I think. I'll wear this guy to work for the time being and see what I make of it.