Quartz Tribulations

Back in the 1980’s, bon vivuer and jet-setter Lazlo Delgrande convinced me that quartz was elegant and timeless, and more importantly, that it was the future of watches. As a “Friend of Lazlo Delgrande” (the FLD is a rag-tag collective of quartz watch wearers spread across six continents mostly clustered around cities with an opera house) I began my decades long relationship with the quartz watch.

I have worn multiple Timex, Fossil, and Gucci in the intervening years. The loud twitchy second hand never bothered me as I sped headlong into the horological future. Particularly with the Gucci, I knew that I was in the presence of a “fancy” watch. It was the 1980’s. The Berlin Wall had yet to come down. A Gucci watch with Roman numerals was what a Friend of Lazlo Delgrande aspired to.

Flash forward a few decades and I am now clearly a mechanical watch collector. My ties to the FLD have weakened. I had two Pulsar but gave one away. I have sold an old Fossil, a beat-up Swiss Army chronograph, and an embarrassing Stauer for nominal amounts. I also sold a Timex that had been a gift (I felt a twinge of guilt). I sold a Seiko Railroad Approved. I still have an old Columbia, but recently the Indiglo-like feature has stopped working. A pattern was developing.

So, to break out of my quartz funk I purchased a unicorn. The Chaika Rezonator was the U.S.S.R.’s attempt at a quartz watch. It had eleven jewels (a lot for a quartz movement) and a stepper motor. It was big, and heavy. Oddly, it is the approximate size of an Apple watch. The Soviets did not have any of the patents available to them that the Japanese, Swiss, and American (or formerly American) watch companies controlled. They had to reverse engineer this thing. Its production run was from 1978 to about 1983. After that date, Slava and Raketa would carry the quartz torch for the U.S.S.R.

I tried to install a battery. Surely, I can do that right? I have swapped out batteries before. So, I found a suitable battery and accidentally bought it in bulk. I took off the case back and popped the battery in and saw the wheels clicking. Put the case back on and…nothing. So, off and on for an hour. The watch would run dial down with the case back off. I can’t use a watch with such restrictions. I took the watch to my guy, the guy that lets me indulge in this silly hobby. After a half hour of tinkering his conclusion was that it was more than just battery connections, it was electronic. It was a dead soldier.

One of the problems with collecting Soviet watches in the United States is that they are truly exotic. Canada, the U.K. and most of Europe imported a fair number of Soviet watches. (It can be argued that the popularity of Sekonda in Britain helped suppress the native watch industry in the 1960’s and 70’s.) Only collectors brought Soviet watches to the U.S., so the numbers were far smaller. As common as Vostoks are, they are less common here.

And Chaika Rezonators, well they were for Party elite. There are no spare parts on this side of the Atlantic. I tried to return the watch. I was refunded but told to keep it. It was obvious this problem was not new or properly disclosed. I am not going to be chasing a replacement movement all over Europe. It just isn’t worth it. I now have a dead unicorn in my Drawer of Shame.

My quartz tribulations don’t end there. I also bought a 1990’s dual timer. The dual time is just two watches, two movements, merged together. I prefer dual timers to GMTs. I have wanted one ever since I missed a Golana mechanical one a few years ago. This is a cheap N.O.S. quartz watch branded with a Korean University’s soccer team.

And I can’t get the snap back opened. It has never been opened before and I am gouging the living hell out of it. I have been defeated again. So, sometime in the next several weeks I am going to trudge down to my watch guy again and pay him to do what I can’t, put a couple of batteries into a watch that is not  worth the effort or money.

I may just turn in my FLD membership card. I have lived long enough to see my future and it is not quartz.