Leaderboard

"...Switzerland once copied British and American watches as swiss were considered inferior." Their biggest hits were copies of USA made RR grade pocket watches and copies of fancy dress pocket watches from the late 1800s through the 1920s/1930s. I have seen a lot of them for sale at watch shows, commonly known as 'Swiss Fakes' and there are people who still collect them. The brand names are often misspelled to 'fool the fools' back then. The Swiss also made millions of low grade pin lever wristwatches in the 1940s/1950s/1960s as well as some higher grade pin lever models featuring 17 or more jewels. Bettlach and Ebosa brand movements were used in many of the better brands and most usually had '17 Jewels' or '21 jewels' on the dial. The common models had cheapo 1 jewel movements with no jewel claims on the dials sporting brand names no one had heard of that retailed for $10 or so. Some went so far as to have 'Bolivia' (knockoff Bulova) etc on the dial and came with boxes and papers...they were around $15 or so. The most famous pin lever brand of them all was Timex with movements from all over the world including the USA and England. Bettlach 17 jewel movement: 17 Jewel Ebauches Bettlach 8800 Walk Through. - Your Walkthroughs and Techniques - Watch Repair Talk Swiss Fake PW movement:

I picked up this Maranez a couple years ago, but no steel bracelets existed at the time. So I found a 20mm Beads of Rice with straight ends, and a guy in the UK selling curved BOR endlinks. It has a massively thick case and an 11mm crown (!!!!!) but it looked like I could marry all the parts together. So a lot of file work and reshaping later, here she is.

Here's mine saying Hi