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Early Wednesday morning

I am soooooooo happy. I have bought my grail watch!!!!! This is not my picture. It is taken by Zeke from HF. Bought and paid today I hope he wont mind me posting his picture here until I can make my own wristies I was planning on making my own 6154 but he offered me his at a price I could not refuse.......

Lost in Space

Here's an old favorite spruced up for 2012. Exactly three years ago, I received my first Panerai rep from Davidsen--an 082, or a PAM00082 if you like your reference numbers intact. I was still starting out with reps and figured that I ought to give these chunky Italian watches a try. I figured a basic model like a 111 would do, but got distracted somewhere between DSN's photobucket and nervously sending that first wire transfer to China. Make that twice distracted: First, I ended up getting one of DSN's lovely Blancpains, and then I was mesmerized by the 082's blue dial. Davidsen produced some of the best PAMs in 2009, but the development pace of Panerai reps since then has been relentless. Pieces that people once paid big bucks for would likely be rejected at the QC stage today. Now we expect crisp perfection straight out of the box. Modding, on the other hand, has moved well to the right on the curve of diminishing returns. Take a look at the comparison shot of DSN's old titanium case (with a non-DSN crown) and notice the soft, indistinct edges, the tall bezel, wrong crown position, and the CG. The old case just looked squat, and that's what bugged me in light of all the new releases from the H, N, or Whatever factories. But the 082 is special. It's one of the biggest compliment-getters in my rep collection, second only to the 288K. Note that when I say compliments, I mean from the general public. On the rep forums, the 082 gets a surprising number of "Is it gen?" comments during the wrist-checks. I think that says more about the rarity of this model, or how niche-y Davidsen has become these days. It's nowhere near super-rep levels of accuracy, but the look is right. While I wish Davidsen would finally put out a dial that didn't have "moats" around the markers, no one else has come close to matching the brushed finish and the just-right shade of metallic blue. The cartel attempted an 082 a couple of years ago, and the result was a little embarrassing. Go ahead and look at it now, if you want. I'll be here. Davidsen's updated the 082 a bunch of times (as recently as last month, in fact), so what you get from him today is noticeably better than what I bought in 2009. (It's a bit cheaper, too.) His now-engraved caseback and all-new CG are especially nice. The new dial features better spacing and positioning of the text, but it still has those darned moats. I didn't want to pay $280 for a few upgrades, so I went searching for a more recent Ti case. I found someone who sold me an old 177F caseset with much better dimensions, a great-looking CG, and a crystal without AR. That blue glare was a big tell on the DSN and, more importantly, it made it harder to appreciate the blue sheen of the dial. You can clearly see the bothersome moats here. Despite them, the blue dial is really something else when you see it up close and under a light: It was a quick and painless transplant. Movement, dial, and hands were untouched. The crown and caseback were carried over from the DSN. The Amerigo Vespucci is laser-etched rather than engraved (as on the current 082s), but it's still a nice caseback to look at: The strap is a cheapo "crocodile" leather from the world's online marketplace; stitching, padding, and texture are similar to the original, but that dark shade of blue isn't quite a match. Unfortunately, I'd lost out on a few auctions for OEM blue-green crocs. $200-300 ain't cheap! Did I mention that this watch is actually a franken? It's true! The two bars are OEM parts, therefore... SUPER-DUPER-FRANKEN-GENESTEIN!!! YEEEAAAHHH!!! Ahem. My DSN 082 came with a sharp-looking (and actually razor-sharp) titanium fishtail buckle, but I wanted to keep things as close to stock as possible. This titanium thumbnail buckle was a lucky find. Eddie Lee, don'tcha know? I'm still hoping that the factories take a crack at the 082 and get most things right at the first attempt. Alternatively, maybe Davidsen could figure out how to punch numerals and bars into a blue sausage dial without leaving outlines. Until then, this will do nicely. But do send me a PM if you find an OEM blue croc selling for less than $200! EDIT: Cleaned up all that cruddy <acronym> HTML...

Back in the 80's, when the silver prices went crazy, I was working for the firm that did the engraving on all the Zippo lighters. They had been selling sterling lighters for quite a while, and we had been working on them for years. One day, while rummaging around in the basement of our building looking for whatever, I stumbled upon three 55gal. drums with sealed tops, and the words "Zippo Scrap" written on them....I opened them, and discovered that they were chock full of STERLING SILVER Zippo lighter cases that were mis engraved, and considered unsellable.(the base metal ones were routinely scrapped) Since Zippo was one of our oldest and best customers, I immediately called the folks in Bradford Pa.and told them of my discovery. the NEXT MORNING, a Brinks armored car arrived at our Attleboro Ma. plant to recover the treasure trove...... And...I never even got a 'Thank You' from those scumbag Zippoheads!!

Out for a walk in the alpenglow.

https://www.watchmaterial.com/listCategoriesAndProducts.asp?idCategory=362

Ok J......here you go!

DSSD in action....

Wearing my 1680 white today with the puffy lume job of FxrAndy Have a nice day Cats

I never compared the watch in the listing with a rep Panerai. It was only given as an example to show that if a watch like that costs $3 then a rep Pan cannot cost more than $40. And the main point of this all is that if you removed the word Panerai from the rep Panerai and you changed it to "NiceWatch", i.e. no brand, while you kept everything else the same, it would be found on eBay for $42 including shipping. But this is where the problem is. It's a Panerai. Fake yes but still. It's a Panerai. OK, what is the bottom line of all this? Simple. The rep industry is WAY WAY more profitable (translates to rip-off) than the gen watch industry. Let's not get into a lot of details. Let's keep it simple. Panerai sells a watch at $5000. The true cost is I'm sure way more than $1000 incuding R&D, design, marketing, manufacturing etc. Less than 5X the cost. And how many do they sell? Of course a limited number (by the way this is another reason the watches are this expensive, very few sales while they have to cover some minimum expenses for the company to continue to exist). And plus they have to worry about keeping their doors open next year by innovating, hiring good people, monitoring the competition etc. Nothing is granted, A rep costs $30 and it sells for $300. 10X the cost. And they sell way way more as long as they keep themselves busy. Plenty of watches to copy and if one brand ceases to exist thank God there are another 1000 of them. In both cases we are overpaying. But from where I'm standing it looks obvious we are overpaying more for the reps than we are for the gens. But as said before, it's the market that ultimate decides what's a fair price and what's not. But don't start feeling good just yet. Be careful because noone said that the market is smart enough to be able to discover the true prices of anything. The markets are usually stupid. Take for example the stock markets. Everyone sells when prices are low out of panic and fear and they all buy like stupid morons when prices have already skyrocketed through the roof out of greed, complacency and mainly stupidity. They say the price of a stock is the 'fair' price because the markets 'know' but looking at it closer the market doesn't know [censored]. The markets are dead asleep and they can't tell their ass from their face. All that being said, we'll continue to buy both gens and reps unitl we drop dead and buy [the stock market] high and sell low. That's a plan. Let's commit to that.

As someone who has lived in China for 5 years, yes we are indeed overpaying for our reps. We need to quit being a bunch of suckers, but when someone who wanted to buy a $6,000 Rollie sees he can get 99% similar for $300, he's happy to jump on that. Me, I got into reps as a kid in high school so I never even started from that "genuine buyer POV". A cheap Chinese watch that cost $30 to make, you want me to pay $300 for it? It's a rep forum culture thing. I've been lurking a buncha forums since 2007/2008 and I'm appalled at how we as a community have no balls to stand up to dealers. I mean aside from blatant cases in which ppl use forum admins to help resolve situations, we practically justify them lying to us, "Swiss ETA" movements being a prime example. Or stuff like no QC and crooked cyclopses, etc.--Casio, Invicta, Seiko, blah blah can do better and printing 5 different letters on the dial doesn't double the cost of the watch. Or you can just say I'm a cheap bastard, another $100 don't mean nothing to you, it's just a "buck" right? Well especially in this economy, and as a college student now, I care about how I'm spending my money, and you should too.