Round table #18 – vintage trifles

Chris: Greg had an idea for a vintage round table…

How about, vintage desires and vintage regrets? Why you have or have not dipped your toes in?

Todd: My vintage regret is a birth year Timex. I thought I wanted a birth year watch, but after receiving one and wearing it a few times, it just felt off. I guess, for me a birth year watch is about more than a watch that happens have been made the same year I was born. It needs to have more meaning behind it than me just buying it. 

I was browsing a second hand store website and found a couple of vintage watches, bordering on antique, and bought them for under $100 total. The Elbon I’ve posted on WatchCrunch a fair bit and a Hamilton. 

The Hamilton winds and I can set the hands, but it doesn’t run & the Elbon does run & keeps decent time over a 24 hour period. 

But my dream vintage would be an Omega DeVille or Seamaster from the 50’s. I’m still relatively new to the obsession and don’t have a large knowledgebase yet, so I do reserve the right to not be a basic bitch eventually.

Greg: I am in a bit of a change in my business life but that hasn’t stopped me from buying vintage watches. I have more than one toe in. I am in up to my waist.

Back in January, when Chris was in the middle of some sort of mid-life crisis involving 1990’s style sports watches, I bought a no name jobber that happened to be a tank style. I was informed that I “have a type”, an observation that is obviously true. Nearly half of my watches are rectangular. A vintage desire is a rectangular automatic watch. I have bid on many, and they aren’t that common. I have yet to win one. I am still looking for a Zenith Respirator X that is not an Italian frankenwatch. I may find one yet. I also have my eye on an obscure Tucah. But to be perfectly honest, nothing really lights a fire on me right now. I have two months’ worth of functioning vintage watches that cover all of the bases that I need covered. I have a few projects. I am buying things because I am bored, which is not terribly expensive, not the way that I do it anyway. But it is not fulfilling.

The only regret that I have is that I haven’t taken the time to learn basic repair and restoration. I have given up on many watches that were beyond my meager skills and that I did not have the means to properly bring back into service. My eyesight, especially near, is going. My fine motor skills were subpar thirty years ago. I do try to leave watches better than I found them and re-home them in a way that gives them a chance to return to service. Some people we know have received care packages of non-runners from me. I have also had watches serviced and then sold them at a loss. I don’t regret that. Someone else gets an old watch to treasure.

Paul: My experience with vintage watches has been pretty hit-or-miss. 

Generally, I like classic looking designs, but not ones that still exist now. I’ve owned a Glycine Vacuum because it had unique features (block applied indices and a unique crystal), and a Swank skin diver because the name was unknown, and it used a simple  Valjoux hand-wound movement. There’s a lot of cool and forgotten designs out there, and I can appreciate stumbling upon them. 

My misses have been from buying a deal without really loving the watch. Simple things like inexpensive Bulovas and Caravelles or older Omega dress watches from the 1970s. I’ve since learned to give myself more time before buying, to make sure that I really like what I’m looking at before buying. You’ve also got to factor in that you likely will not be getting a pristine watch, unless you fork over a lot of dough. It is important to understand that the watch may need parts, a service, or just some external cosmetic work too. 

I’ve only got five watches in my collection now, and two of them are vintage. One is an old Tag Heuer quartz diver, and the other is a 1990s Omega Seamaster diver. Both watches appealed to me because of their design, and the size. The Tag wears very svelte (about a 37mm case), but is extremely thin at 9mm. Where in 2025 are you going to find a 200m WR diver that is 9mm thin? The Omega is similar, in that it wears very well at 42mm-ish wide, and about 11mm thick. Many modern watches have gotten fat, which has made me appreciate the thinner, better proportioned watches of the past. 

I love a good vintage watch, but I also understand that they’re all projects in some form or another.

Chris: I do well with vintage, on the whole, which is probably justified since this was my topic and one of the reasons people still speak to me over on WC.

Vintage is easy, but the learning curve is steep.

I inherited vintage, and my early forays into watches were vintage, and expensive (at the time, before this all went a bit Pete Tong). I consider myself lucky that I considered certain brands and avoided others, and that was more through snobbery than any other reason. Vintage Enicar, Roamer, and Omega were seen (to me) to be a safe bet, especially becuase of the resources that were available even in the early 00s internet.

I think vintage hits come from knowing my movements, my brands, my market, and genuinely hovering around sub 36mm from the 1940s – 1960s. I bought a highly weathered Bentley for £8 which housed a perfectly functional AS1130 that has yet to drop a second, and I think you cannot beat that for class. My £35 Talis Skin Diver has lasted me nearly two decades, and travelled the globe, so that’s definitely been a good investment.  I even think my 1936 sterile Vertex fixer-upper was a good investment, I couldn’t see myself without it.

One does overstretch, however…

1972 Omega Seamaster f300Hz Chronometer – for all of its charm and novelty, this was the watch that taught me that vintage servicing can hurt. I paid £300, which was half the ticket price, at a watch fair. The seller wanted shot of it. It worked. I decided I wanted to get it serviced because I dropped it in a nightclub and I thought I’d done it a mischief (lots of alcohol involved). Sent it to a specialist… and that’s when the list of issues was revealed. Seals, gaskets, rings, capacitors… I spent a lot of money getting it back to functional, and this was, 00s prices. I don’t want to know what it would cost now.

1973 Oris Star ChronOris – cal.725 monopusher. I knew what I was doing, until I got tipsy on a Sunday afternoon and paid £180 for this to arrive from Italy. Worked well for a number of years, until it didn’t. Donors are overpriced. Watchmakers refuse to touch it. Sure, I’m a Big Boy with Big Boy hobbies, but having an ultra-cool looking chronograph sitting in the box you can’t wear stings the soul in ways you cannot comprehend.

Don’t do vintage electric or pin-pallets – it’s not worth the pain.

Todd: Paul, I admire your ability to seemingly be sitting at 5 watches and not itching for more. Kudos.  I’m still a bit like a kid in a candy store with a found C-note. 

Trying to choose between new & vintage is an impossible task if I was required to for some odd reason. The designs on vintage watches are just so refined, elegant, and clean. Some might say simple, but just like classic rock, sometimes simple is best and all the faff to be ‘different’ just turns the thing into chaff. 

But as we’re all aware, for all its charms, vintage threatens to be a snake pit. Fakes, frankens, money pits, and high prices for specimens in good condition have driven many away from attempting to even try the kiddie pool. So they stay in the new release area and miss out on the rewards of vintage. I’ll admit I’m mostly in this camp, but have tried a couple well priced pieces. I need to get my Hamilton into the watchmaker at some point soon, but as of right now, I’m slightly obsessed with pulling together my bronze Flieger with a green dial. 

Maybe I can ask for my next raise to be deposited directly to my watch account? LOL.

Ryan: Vintage watches are one of three main reasons I get up each morning. My love of old watches came at the end of 2022 when I bought my Camy Club-Star. I cherish that watch dearly. It’s still pristine, minus some unavoidable fine scratches due to the polished finish. From there, I started speaking to my watchmaker and learnt how to repair vintage watches. I then proceeded to buy up almost any decently priced mechanical watches in my hometown. The most prominent of those was my Nivada Antarctic Spider. I started wearing it again recently and boy am I mighty proud to be its custodian. That’s a vintage watch I don’t regret buying one bit.

I did have a vintage desire for quite some time in 2024, which was a Universal Genève Altesse. I have since bought one, (it’s touching down in mid-March) so I can’t really class it as a desire anymore. I do fancy the Universal Genève White Shadow, which is basically a larger, automatic version of the Altesse. They’re a bit too expensive for me to consider for a while. I may in all likelihood get over it once my Altesse comes, because they are so similar. Another watch I would love to own is a solid gold Zenith Stellina (or other dress watch.) My watchmaker wears one, so it’ll be like a coming-of-age thing to buy one and wear it. I won’t be able to afford one of those until I finish my studies, so for the next four to six years I can only dream. I also have quite a few gold dress watches, so when the time comes to take the plunge on a Zenith, my Eterna Matic is probably going to get passed on. I would love to own a tuning fork and an LED watch, but, like with many things in life, I am attracted to things that hurt me. There’s a Pulsar P2 for sale for a not too bad price, but it has a chip in the glass. Replacing the glass on those old Pulsars is more effort than reading War and Peace in Arabic while on fire. In short, the process involves putting the case in the oven, inserting the glass somehow, and then hoping it doesn’t shatter when the case cools and contracts. Not to mention that replacement glasses are scarce and expensive. Chris has already said why tuning fork watches are troublesome, but damn it, I want one. Tissot had no reason to call their tuning fork watches “Tissonic” and Rado had no right to brand theirs “Electrosonic.” Those are among the coolest names for watches and it’s bloody hard to resist sometimes. If someone wanted to kill me, they would put a nice tuning fork watch under a cage and I would willingly walk into that trap cartoon-style. Thankfully they’re still a bit more expensive than what I can afford on impulse, so I’m safe for now. I also think of old TAG Heuer F1s every now and again. They’re colourful and plasticky in the best possible way. They are just expensive for what you get on account of the branding. A pink one or a green and red one would be nice, but I’ll only ever get one if I’m bored and/or drunk once I have a steady income.

I don’t know if I have vintage regrets. Sure, my pin-pallet Lucerne is currently showing the correct time twice a day, but it just needs a soak in benzene and an application of oil thinner than Moebius 8000. I seldom wore it anyway, so it’s no skin off my nose. My old Oris doesn’t get too much wrist time, because I’m starting to feel its shelf-life. It runs okay for a seventy-year old pin-pallet. It’ll hopefully make it to a hundred years old. It is well-made for what it is, but that isn’t saying much. I didn’t pay much for it, so I don’t really regret it.