As a hobby / side income I’vd picked up a couple hundred vintage Jap/Swiss wristwatches over the years,
....very few of which I ever intended to wear regularly, and none of which have ultimately succeeded in that role…
I’d altogether given up trying lately, a vintage Seiko 5 with black military dial being the latest victim of my sustained abuses (this shot taken prior to the sad results).
But monitoring time from the wrist is undeniably still (as the world first discovered a century or so ago) a lot more practical / safe than repeatedly hoisting a time-keeping device out of one’s pocket…
What an arduous search it has been, finally, to find a daily-wear piece suitable for my typically rough and varied uses – something slim enough to slip in and out of my tightly-cinched jacket sleeve while motorcycling, lightweight and unobtrusive enough to hardly be aware it’s on my wrist when walking around (which rules out clunky dive watches and the ubiquitous G-Shocks), but still water / damage resistant enough to hold up to the rigors of my ongoing metalworking / mechanical and other DIY pursuits. Oh, and with superior legibility both day and night (I’m pushing a half-century after all), something that of course tends to decrease with watch size (and price)...
Dress-style watches (like the 5mm thick, rectangular Citizen my mom gifted me in the early 90’s) – can be plenty slim and as such are less likely to take hard hits in the first place - but their thin bezels/glass/lugs lack robustness and the requisite WR-ratings, and lume tends to be sparse.
Military/Field Watches could fit in well, but not all have the improved 100M/10bar WR ratings, or offset/protected crowns; And even these can get thick / clunky, while others (like Citizen / Seiko’s excellent solar 8180 / SNE095) are a bit over-polished for my tastes, and lack – like the majority of the Wenger / Swiss Military / Victorinox options - scratch-proof sapphire crystals, at least within the modest price target in view for a true “beater” watch. Moreover while I’m not at peace with outright bling, a perfect circle with a crown sticking out of it could become a little uninspiring to look at after several hundred days.
So a very tall order, as I was to discover over many evenings scouring the web for my “ideal” watch. Like so many other things this side of heaven (incl. cars/bikes/tyres/), conformance to one particular requirement often pits it at odds with others, and while there are many appealing pieces out there, extremely few seemed to meet all my requirements.
The Titanium-cased, purposeful Bertucci’s were the most tempting for awhile,
but their double-edged benefit of a raised bezel/recessed glass to protect the latter has the downside of making the watch case as thick as some divers, and the robust pinless strap-mounts require one-piece straps which raise the cases even higher off the wrist. The high bezel also ensures that if the crystal does get scratched, there’s no easy way to polish it out again, and its sharp edge tends to get dented / nicked up a lot from what I’ve seen.
The St. Moritz/Momentum lineup (seen above in black) also has some nice pieces of equal or greater utility, some with alarm / GST functions – but the affordable ones are too plain-looking, and the more interesting / sapphire-glassed pieces pretty pricey.
The Russian Vostok Amphibians - the AK-47's of the horological world, they say - 200M WR and come in a wide variety of cases and dials, a few of them attractive, but they're automatics, the cases won't be especially lightweight, and the acrylic crystals, while easily polished, also scratch easily.
So at long last, here we go:
One of the other smaller makes that specializes in titanium cases is
Boccia. Many of their offerings are style-oriented pieces, but this one seemed highly practical, and being pre-owned, cheap enough to work for me, while filling I think just about all my requirements pretty well:
-100M WR
-Light/strong/practically corrosion-proof Titanium case
-Scratch-proof, high-end Sapphire crystal
-Accurate / simple / lightweight quartz movement w/ date indication
-Midsized at 37mm diameter, not ridiculously large as is the current (but sure to pass) fashion.
-Protected crown
-Enough bezel to take some knocks, also polish-able if (/when) scratched/nicked
-sizeable luminous markings
-Not very thick as it's not a true dive-watch (sport-diver at most)
-Not a current model, bit unique, unlikely to find anyone else wearing one.
-$50 U.S. shipped!
Thank God!!! Now I can go to bed early, and try to forget about watches for awhile! Really looking forward to getting this one on my wrist, maybe with a NATO/ZULU-style strap, if not a vintage rubber diver piece... Let's see if I can keep it there pretty much 24/7...
Regards,
-Eric