harryarme

It's unfortunate that you've experienced a problem the first time out of the gate. My condolences... Hopefully your research included reading the postings from The Zigmeister regarding the care and feeding of the 7750 here: http://www.rwg.cc/members/Technical-helpful-inform-f209.html including the cautions against setting the date when the indicated time is between 7PM and 2AM. Trying to set the date between those times will result in behavior like you describe and may damage the movement. If you've read those postings you've also seen the caution against handwinding a 7750 more than necessary to get it started. In cases where the date setting mechanism is acting up, I've found it useful to carefully turn the hands forward past midnight to 4AM or so, which should cause the date to advance one day, and then try setting the date. Doing that generally seems to put the date setting mechanism into a proper working state. I also believe it works best if you pull the crown out to the first position and set the date and then pull it out to the second position and set the time, rather than the other way around. I'm fairly new here as well, but I believe that it's assumed the buyer is responsible for the shipping charges back to the dealer, who will repair or replace the watch at his option and ship it back to the buyer at his (the dealer's) expense. If you know of a rep-friendly watchsmith who is experienced with the 7750, you might consider having it serviced rather than sending it back. Any additional costs for the repair, if needed, would likely be less than cost of shipping it back to the dealer, and you would have a watch that should give a long period of reliable service. In addition, that would eliminate the risk of customs seizure. H

Thanks very much for your reply, Carl. I guess I forgot that first class = air mail these days. I sent the watch back to WatchEden by registered USPS First Class Mail International Package, which cost $10 for mailing and $10.54 for registration. I declared it as a "broken used watch for repair", value $20. Insurance makes no sense and you can't insure a registered package anyway. Note to someone who reads this thread in the future: The USPS will only let you register a package if it is sealed with brown paper tape, the kind you have to wet. There might be some other kinds of tamper-evident tape, but standard plastic packing tape is NOT OK. I also printed out a shipping label with space between the address lines and a Chinese friend kindly wrote the Chinese version of the address in between the English lines. Probably overkill, but can't hurt.

Well, it happened. I bought a swan-neck PAM 177 from WatchEden. The watch was drop-shipped from HK and got here in 4 days. But, it was the wrong watch (PAM 177 but no swan neck). I considered keeping it and asking for a partial refund, so I wound it well and left it on the desk. It quit running after 6 hours and now won't run at all. OK, them's the breaks and WatchEden is a trusted dealer. Today Sarah sent a return # and a good address in Guangzhou (after I confirmed that yes, I knew it was a manual wind watch and yes, I had wound it). She said to value it at $20 and use registered air mail. So here are my questions: 1 - From the US, airmail means Priority Mail International, which can't be registered. Have people used that successfully? Tracking is nil. 2 - What about Express Mail (EMS)? Does that flag it to Chinese customs? It doesn't cost too much more and can be tracked. Sarah seemed to say not to use it but that was in the same sentence with FedEx, etc., which is known not to be a good idea. 3 - What should I declare it as? "Broken fake watch" may be accurate but is probably not a good idea. How about "broken watch for repair", or "watch parts"? Hopefully someone who has done this will take pity on a relative noob and comment. Thanks in advance, H

What a crappy thing to do to a nice watch...

A little off the point, but why does it take so frickin' long for mail to go between the US and Canada.? I just bought a Marathon bracelet from someone in Vancouver, and it took 13 days from there to Texas. I believe it was sent "expedited post" or something like that. Granted, the problem was largely on the US side. EMS from Guangzhou only takes about 6 days, including a couple of days in customs. Yeah, it's a pain to fill out a customs form, but I have to go to the post office anyway to ship to Canada, so it's no big deal, just $5 or so extra for postage. I'm willing to let the buyer take the risk with a $100 rep, but when it comes to a $400 super-rep I'd rather not ship outside the US because I don't want to be the seller in a deal where the buyer stands to lose that much. Besides the customs risk, there's the risk of loss or damage. If you ship a $400 super-rep and declare the real value, the buyer in the EU (and Canada as well, I believe) gets stuck with a big VAT bill and customs is more likely to check the package. So you declare the value as $25 or so and you can't insure it for its real value. I just looked back and saw that previous posters had made these same points, but I'll post this anyway. We really don't dislike you folks, it's just that you live in Canada...

Thanks, FGD, the photos are definitive, much appreciated. I can live with that and if I decide I want perfect AR the crystal can go to Chief. Is that one of your dials on the Franken, or a DSN dial? Chief can answer better than I can, but the AR properties are a function of the thickness of the individual layers in the coating. My guess is that the limits on thickness of cheaper coatings result in some remaining reflections at short (green and blue) wavelengths. Blue is definitely better than colors at the other end of the spectrum (red). Chief hinted that his coatings might use the nano crystal technology that Nikon uses in their N series lenses. There is an excellent article on Nikon's nano crystal technology at http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/...ne/20/index.htm H

LOL! Water-based AR, maybe? All I want is something I can live with for a while while I admire the new watch, then it will go to Vac to service and send the crystal to you, like my 111H that hopefully got to Vac in time to get the crystal into your run. No AR at all is preferable to the blue flash, so easy removal is a major plus. Thanks for the comments, gents. H

Cases showed up here in Texas soon after they started in Mexico. When a few school-age kids got it several major school districts shut down for a week. There were a few deaths, but they were mostly people with other problems as well. The scare seems to have died down and there hasn't been much about it in the news lately. The medical community seems to have over-reacted but I don't know if they deserve a lot of blame. If you read newspapers from 1918 you will be blown away by how severe that epidemic was. They were crammed full of obits of healthy people who got the flu and died. There was at least one death in almost every family, that's how bad it was. I think a lot of concern came from the fact that in Mexico a disproportionate number of the deaths were young people, and that scared the crap out of the health authorities. There is a theory now that H1N1 is similar to cases of the flu from the Fifties and before, when swine-type viruses were prevalent. Apparently there was a change around 1957 and bird-type viruses have been predominant since then. The theory says that people who had the flu or were exposed to it before the late Fifties may have some immunity to H1N1. There are some advantages to being old. It has also been pointed out that it took a while to realize that a lot of people may have gotten this new virus and recovered with no problems, and the percentage of deaths is probably not much different from the usual winter flus. The authorities in Oz may not have figured that out yet. A colleague from work recently took a business trip to Japan and when he went to meet with the customer's people at their site he found that everyone was wearing a full mask. They handed him one and required him to wear it. That same company also requires people who travel on business to work at home for 3 days when they return before they can come back to the office. Now THAT'S an over-reaction. So, yeah, there has probably been an over-reaction, and the drug companies and medical people see profit in it, but there's a legitimate fear that the virus could mutate into something really bad. This is probably worse in Oz because the winter flu season is starting and if the virus mixes with one of the other types the mutations could be very nasty.

I'm looking seriously at DSN's upgraded 177H. Can someone with a recent DSN PAM tell me how his AR compares with the standard "blue light special" rep AR? I've searched the forums and can't come up with a definitive answer. No doubt it isn't in the same class as Chief's AR, that's a given. If it still has a significant blue color, does anyone know if DSN can supply one with no AR at all? Thanks, H

Note that the M series due out in the fall will have an 80-hour twin barrel movement, using a reworked vintage Soviet Army movement. It has a nice Panerai look to it and will come with a bracelet and two straps, and will be available in S/S and PVD. I'm thinking seriously about one of those.

It was hard to tell what case that one had. According to the chart from Paneristi, an 009 is a PVD Luminor base without the logo, an 004 is a PVD Luminor Marina without the logo, and a 195 is a special edition PVD Luminor Marina with the logo. One of the real experts may know for sure, but it looks like there was no PVD Luminor base with the logo. That doesn't mean there isn't a rep like that, of course.

Assuming that's a stainless steel case, it's a PAM 112. The same watch with an OP logo is a PAM 000 logo base. DSN has both, and it's likely that other reputable dealers have them as well.

This popped up while I was looking around DSN's photo pages. Maybe this is how Ford intends to meet future fuel economy standards...

Haven't dealt with them, but their web site has a very strong resemblance to Watcheden's.

This is my second PAM rep. My first is a 111h: 44mm, black dial, hand-wind, strap, (alleged) Swiss movement, polished case, brushed CG, lousy blue light special rep AR. This one: 40mm, white dial, automatic, bracelet, Asian 21j, brushed case, polished CG, and NO LOUSY BLUE REP AR! Could I have done anything else that was different? This one came from Hont. I ordered it a week ago and it spent two days in SFO customs and the PO took two days to get it to TX from there. Timekeeping is excellent, though it's too early to tell for sure. The rotor is a bit noisy, but the noise is smooth-sounding, unlike the 7750 in my TG ceramic. I kinda like a bit of rotor noise, anyway. It's not a super-rep, but it isn't one that says "mod me". I'm really impressed by the bracelet. After a short brain freeze I resized it in about 5 minutes, unlike the hour or so I recently spent on a PO bracelet. My apologies for the mediocre photos. I was too lazy to get out the D300, 28-70mm, and tripod, so these were shot handheld with my Canon G9.