Some advice:
* If possible, wear the watch before buying it. Seeing a watch on your wrist is different from seeing photos of it.
* Avoid the "grey market" and buy from an Authorized Dealer. Grey market watches won't have the manufacturer warranty.
* Avoid replicas and fakes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHgKMA6Bh6U)
Some links:
* The Urban Gentry (https://www.youtube.com/user/theurbangentry) is a YouTube channel run by a horology enthusiast with a positive attitude who does lots of watch reviews.
* The r/Watches subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/watches/) has lots of photos of watches contributed by the community.
* A video on how mechanical watches work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1XBb7kJJWg
* S-Town podcast (https://stownpodcast.org/) is an intriguing story about a man who repaired antique clocks.
* Affordable Wrist Time (https://www.instagram.com/affordablewristtime/?hl=en) the tagline is "Promoting watches under $1000."
Some terminology:
* A quartz watch is usually powered by a battery. They tend to be cheaper and more accurate than mechanical watches.
* A mechanical watch is powered by a mainspring.
* An automatic watch has a semicircular rotor inside which automatically spins when the watch moves, winding the mainspring.
* Hacking is a feature that stops the second hand from moving when the crown is pulled out.
In particular others like me might enjoy the UTC/GMT complication, which often has a hand that goes around the watch once every 24 hours and can be set to another timezone like UTC.
On another pro-watch note, I've discovered that a non-smartwatch has an pretty amazing feature: the ability to check the time without seeing any sort of notification.
If the watch has problems you'll need to pay out of pocket for repairs, and parts and service can be difficult to obtain for a watch not normally sold in your country.
Quartz won because the mechanical watches that most people could afford in the 1970s were very inaccurate. A cheap quartz watch was more accurate than any mechanical watch and anybody could afford one by the late 1970s -- although they were very expensive at first.
Affordable mechanical watches on the market today are much more accurate than they used to be, and they are perfectly good for everyday use.
Specifically, I'm looking for:
- Waterproof up to ~30m, more is fine.
- Complications of: Chronograph, Date, Tachymeter, Moon Phases (I surf when I have the time, so it's nice to know the tides and to wear the watch while surfing).
- Sapphire/hardened glass for scratch resistance.
- Bezel, as they are really cool.
- Quartz is fine, accuracy is really nice, though mechanical is ok.
- Standard 12 hour clock face, things like a Casio F-91W aren't the best ;)
- I'm a fairly large person, so I can withstand a large/bulky face on the arm, if that helps at all.
Thank you for any and all advice or recommendations, I appreciate it.
The Breitling Navitimer 01 would tick many of your boxes (Chronograph, (Logscale)Bezel, Date) and is an iconic watch. However you can't swim with it.
Another iconic chronograph is the Zenith El Primero with the tri color dial. It is also WR to 100m.
Then there is the Omega Speedmaster "Man on the Moon" Chronograph.
Tudor also has a few nice watches: Black Bay Chrono, Black Bay Heritage, Black Bay 58, Black Bay GMT, Pelagos.
If you want a fine Quartz watch have a look at Grand Seiko and Citizen Chronomaster. These are High Accuracy Quartz (HAQ) watches which means +/- 5-10 seconds a year depending on the model.
For more classic looking watches have a look at Jaeger LeCoultre. I especially like their Masters collection.
Mechanical watches have (and this has been said before) the Rolex problem. On the lower end of the scale, a lot of mechanical watches will borrow design cues from Rolex (e.g., most dive watches will share similarities with the Submariner) and will fall far short of the quality of one.
On the higher end, you quickly end up at multiples of the cost of an entry-level Rolex with very questionable additional value, quality or longevity.
Rolex is really in a sweet spot in terms of value. They're virtually indestructible, tend to keep their (or even grow in) value and make a number of elegant, understated watches that are iconic.
For example, if you want a dive watch, buy a Sub (no date). While you might argue that Blancpain beat Rolex by a year for the quintessential dive watch, Rolex is the one that popularized it. You're not buying a dive watch, you're buying the dive watch as it has stood since the early 50s.
They're not cheap, but they will undoubtedly last two generations, possibly more. Compared to the other luxury watch makers, they're downright cheap. JLC is another value-oriented brand and you're lucky to get into a watch for 2X what you'll pay for a Rolex. Patek and AP are much more expensive.
The problem with the affordable brands is they cut a lot of corners with manufacturing (vs Rolex), use outsourced, less reliable movements and -- with the exception of some Seikos, have none of the cachet of Rolex.
You can go a bit higher to say an Omega, but you're already ballpark Rolex, so is it worth it?
The downside to buying a Rolex is it will probably kill your watch hobby. I used to collect watches and when I decided I did in fact like the story of Rolex, I bought one, strapped it on basically forgot about watches.
The only watches I'm interested in now are so expensive I'll probably never bother to buy one. I will get to gift my Sub to my son in another decade or so at which time I'll get to go shopping again. So that's something to look forward to, but I'll mostly likely buy another Rolex.
I'm personally saving up for an Omega, you can get a timeless design for 2-3k, and those watches are truly indestructible and actually keep time accurately.
Why? These days chinese factories are pushing superb 4130 clones for the price of a decent seiko.
This guy in the video seems to know nothing at all about the chinese watch industry.
some people spent A Lot of money in design for some malicious smartass chinese guy to come and copy and sell by 10 times cheaper....This is Absurd. Some people are loosing their jobs , see , maybe me myself, i am loosing a job because of Falsification...
Besides, Is not really necessary, Come one, people should come out with their Own watch design right?
It should be not so hard to draw a sketch with a New design, right? Its not like painting the Davinci's Monalisa, right...
At least my opinion, like they say in the Good Wife Series.
12 hour day (what is 24 hours in modern time). Daytime is always 6 hours and night time is always 6 hours. The absolute length of the hours changes with the seasons.
I just started using it recently and I really like it. My mood is very much affected by exposure to daylight and it really helps to plan my day around the sun, rather than arbitrary numbers on a clock.
* https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-30/if-you-have-meeting-e...
"Because Ethiopia is close to the Equator, daylight is pretty consistent throughout the year. So many Ethiopians use a 12-hour clock, with one cycle of 1 to 12 — from dawn to dusk — and the other cycle from dusk to dawn. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nsh8llV5dE
Daniels' apprentice and now watchmaker Roger W. Smith has carried on making watches with his escapement and like Kikuno-San makes all of the components by hand and in-house.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2958390/
Smith has uploaded a number of fascinating videos to YouTube, including two old documentaries about Daniels.
https://www.youtube.com/user/rwsmithwatches/videos
There is also a wonderful series of videos featuring Daniels talking about his life. His voice was quite weak in later life due to throat cancer, but it's well worth persevering - he was a fascinating and inspirational man.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzkr4WCsqrh...
If you have a serious interest in learning watchmaking, the British Horological Institute offer a distance learning course on servicing, repairing and restoring clocks and watches. The course is available worldwide, although you would need to travel to Upton Hall in England to complete some of the practical examinations.
(I'm not affiliated with them, but I've enjoyed a few of their classes)
The time required is very long to make the pieces by hand, but I feel any sharp person could do it. Nothing groundbreaking.
So I don't understand people that find this fascinating, inspirational. Just buy a usual watch, and it will have the same pieces.
It's cool that he makes new designs, however make a good market out of that and the chinese will do it too, at better prices.
If it's just worker-bee man-hours I guess it would be better value-for-money to buy a seiko and tell the story of the factory and how it's made using such complicated processes and optimizations (not sure assumption about seiko factory using complicated processes is right).
"but you didnt"
I wonder its because is an Island and one gets inside himself or one just gets bored...
I am a fan of making bamboo and paper little planes , just to thorw them and destroy on the beach...
I found that using Smoking Paper is a good material haha
What I like is the making the fine bamboos longarinas and skeleton of the models. I like boats of bamboo too.
