crystalcranium

Nice effort but Quote: Babbage failed to build a complete machine. The most widely accepted reason for this failure is that Victorian mechanical engineering were not sufficiently developed to produce parts with sufficient precision.

Sad but maybe all too true. Maybe the B&R is a special case. The watch itself is such a curiosity piece, ie. the only people who would buy it would be people enchanted with it, that perhaps this is a calculated scam.

I wasn't bringing it up as a new issue. I went to a few websites, in particular, those that were touting this watch and those which usually have excellent photo documentation of their products, to see if there was any prior indication of a problem. I was surprised to find no pictures of the inside of this watch, in particular, on websites where photographs of the "works" are the norm in the advertisements. I find it hard to believe this was an oversight, and I find it equally hard to believe the better and more respected dealers here could ever hope to put this over on us, or risk the embarrasment of a public flogging such as this. They very openly worked with this particular community on this very watch. Someone was bound to open up this new and irresistable toy....and then howl bloody murder finding a worm in the apple. I don't know how they could have been ignorant of it...and yet I can't imagine tham risking this by covering it up. Very strange.

Closely. Did I miss something that made my comment off the mark? Perhaps repetitive???

Yes, this is the kind of stuff that blows me away! As for the bicycle and other amazing technologies that improved our lives by leaps and bounds,... all due respect. But the watch is such an amazing machine on such a small scale with very difficult to fathom tolerances and machining....I just dont think man created anything more advanced that was purely mechanical. Yes, the liquid powered rocket enabled us to achieve remarkable things and Goddard and Von Braun overcame high technological hurdles but they were essentially harnassing explosions. The fact that a few differences measured in the thousandths of an inch add up to the difference between a chronometer and a watch that gains a minute a day is testimony to the engineering that allowed companies like Hamilton to mass produce chronometer grade time pieces 100 years ago. I know in a computer driven world, a desktop PC that made 5 mistakes out of 84,000 tasks a day would be considered junk...but in the realm of pure mechanical machines, a chronometer is still a remarkable piece of engineering.

I've just read some of the dealer website descriptions for the new B&R. ETA 2892 21J automatic movement is the prevailing description. No photos of open casebacks. Given what the photos of the actual movement in this new version of the watch look like these are not accurate claims. I don't know if our dealer community has been scammed into believing they were getting something they were not, or if it's out and out deception, but these claims go way beyond selling something that looks VERY much like a 2892 that actually has no ETA lineage. These advertising claims need to be withdrawn. They are simply not true. I would grant a point of argument to a dealer who wants to claim an ETA baseplate with Asian parts stacked onto it gives him enough "ETA" in his movement to call it an ETA,.....but not this. This was such an eagerly anticipated watch. What a shame.

Can you think of any other purely mechanical piece of technology that surpasses it? Certainly, the world of electricity and electronics took us into an entire new realm of technological achievement in the last 100 years and the intergrated circuit will continue to drive technology onward and upward, but can you think of another piece of PURELY mechanical engineering that surpasses the mechanical watch as the pinicle of technology? The internal combustion engine??? Pretty "macro engineered" stuff with tolerances many times fold higher in size than those in an early 20th century pocket watch. The fact that railroad engineers were able to carry mechanical pocket chronometers accurate to within a few seconds per week 100 years ago still blows me away. I think this is the facination with timepieces for me. I think they are the high water mark of "lever/wedge/screw" based engineering in the history of man.

Sorry to hear. An unfortunate price of doing business in this genre.

I feel a grand mal coming on!

I'm not hearing any language from the dealer side (TTK exception) good or bad in this thread. The silence is deafning....and a bit incriminating. If these were honest mistakes in language barrier based miscommunications...that would be very easy to clear up. I'm not hearing a thing.

The Don Just one of them

The dealers who are having their names thrown around in this discussion do exactly that. This is more about advertising language than blatant scamming. Let me just state again for the record that I think Josh and Andrew are part of a VERY short list of individuals that I would trust sending money to on the other side of the world and have a reasonable expectation of getting something close to value in a purchase and have it actually delivered to my door. There is more to being a good businessman than accuracy in the language of advertising. Josh has done replacements and exchanges for defective watches, even for watches that looked different in person than they appeared in photographs without question. ....but as I said before, a movement is the heart and guts of a watch and if they are being misrepresented,....it's serious stuff.

...and misrepresenting movements is serious business. And they have, as a whole, been pushing the envelope on this recently. And as ETA's come off the market in the next few yeras, .....maybe we're just see ing the beginning of the new marketing. Calling a stepped up 28,000 asian movement an "Asian ETA" is over the line. Now if the dealer used advertising language like "ETA Asian Copy" or "ETAlike movement" or "Movement based on an ETA design" I would have absolutely no problem with that.

I agree that we have it as good as it gets. I don't think this discussion negates any previous threads about being in the golden age of replicas. I do think it's useful to keep the community of dealers aware that there are certain limits to what we'll be willing to swallow as fact. These guys operate primarily in the black, without any reasonable regulation except our word of mouth. Let's face it, if the wolf showed up at the door of one of our most trusted dealers today and he had to punt and get out of town with thousands of dollars of orders paid for and pending, I doubt we would see any resolution or have any recourse. What's wrong with a little discussion saying "that claim goes over the line of what I think is fair"? I have heard Pugwash repeat several times he didn't want to organize a boycott or be a jerk in this and I think he has brought up an uncomfortable, difficult and necessary point.

I think Pugwash's thread pointed out a disturbing trend. It was a necessary red flag. That doesn't dismiss the fact that most collectors here, noobs and vets alike, are enthusiastic about this hobby. We were just rolling in the joys of "the golden age of replicas" a few weeks ago extolling the virtues of the newest generation of very accurate reps. This is a discussion board and all ongoing discussions move along a wave. Just because we dipped into talking about the seedier side of the buying and selling of illegal contraband, it doesnt mean I'm any less passionate about being a collector. Just a little wiser than I was yesterday.

So the Seagul crap is the movement found in the Aqua terra clones????? Not to pick on Josh here with pics but he's the dealer with whom I have the most image familliarity. (But shame on you Josh. You call this an ETA 2892. You also call the new movements in the PO beginner line "Asian ETA". What the hell is that???)

"So you heard I found the money eh????" "The money...what money? "You know what money...the money I found on the bus!" "Oh yes, I do remember hearing something about that..." Oh my.....too many hours wasted in front of the tube. Med school was quite a hurdle looking back!

...and just let me vent a bit about this particular movement and some who were touting it's reliability and virtues. In an old thread about ETA vs Asian, I got my ass reamed by several here who said the Seagul movement copy of this movement was a reliable, excellent reproduction of a proven design and should not be criticized for being inherently inferior to it's ETA counterpart just because it was Asian. Thus my statement earlier in this thread that this was a reliable movement. I think this myth has been blown to bits. It looks like this movement is junk.

Totally agree. I sure as hell would have looked at this movement an hour ago and said "Yep, its a genuine ETA" based on the hallmark. I don't think everyone is intent on misrepresentation. This movement "grey zone" is pretty confusing stuff!

Well, not to go off topic.....but I would suggest that an ETA mainplate with everything else that works and moves being Asian is not an ETA. If I have a car frame built by Porsche and everything else stacked on to it is Ford,...... I don't know what you have but it's not a Porsche. i don't know if everything stacked onto this ETA building block is Asian, but the lack of genuine ETA screws suggests what's screwed to it is not original. If that's the case, this is far from an ETA movement IMHO. And in the spirit of the original thread topic....its not an ETA 2892 same spec as genuine etc....

Amazing information from Ziggy. Who else would recognize this as a "Frankenmovement" I would have thought for sure that the ETA stamp alone meant it was genuine, not just part ETA.

So....the plot thickens???? This is an "in between" movement, part ETA, part asian??? OK, now I'm completely confused...and a bit disheartened. That vintage Hamilton Pocket Watch collection I'm working on is looking better and better. At least when I buy a Railroad Special 992B from 1925,.....I know what the hell I'm buying. From what Rob just said....I dont even trust my genuines anymore!

OK, here's the mentioned "hallmarked" movement, closer than a mile. What do you think?

Bet the house on it. This is the worst of this kind of advertising