sneed12

I just never understood these kinds of threads. If you like the watch, you buy it. If it's too big or looks stupid, you sell it. You know how big 40-odd mm is, right?

You need to ask someone else how big of a watch you can wear?

The Ingy bracelet will not work. The endlink is different. I think the GST bracelet might work, but you'd have to brush the polished parts.

"Quite clear"?

BigCrown says he can't ship until he gets ~10 more people to pay. He didn't tell me I was pre-ordering when I sent the money, he didn't tell me it would be 30 days before the cyclops was ready, and he didn't tell anyone until a couple of days ago that he doesn't have enough orders to release the pieces from the factory. Not real happy about it.

The crystal and the cyclops are both acrylic; how could the polish only affect one but not the other? That makes no sense. Having said that, the scuffs in the cyclops look pretty deep, so it will probably take a lot more polishing than the crystal itself. Even if you get them out the cyclops might end up out-of-round and the magnification may be changed or the date distorted.

Right. And now he's a performance artist that does pickpocketing. I didn't say or imply that he wasn't a criminal before.

Or if you get lucky and snag one for sale--I grabbed one that had been languishing in the for sale area for months

Not on a plexi crystal; that's a 1675. Polish the scratch out of the crystal Buy a clark's crystal and replace it (~$25) Buy a gen crystal and replace it

But this guy is a performance artist that does pickpocketing. Like a magician but his tricks are pickpocket tricks. It's a show If he wasn't putting on a show I'm sure he'd use different techniques.

A mass-produced watch is not a capital investment. Selecting one that will appreciate in value is like picking the winner of the lottery.

Yep

One is the modded low-beat, one is standard high-beat. Can you tell which is which?

"1570 hands" returns 80+ hits on eBay.

If you're not willing to do any work or invest any time, I suggest you buy a gen.

Date font looks much better than the last version.

Less than the parts. You always lose money on projects like this. Even if he got the parts cheap, he can sell the parts at a profit more easily than he can sell the completed watch. Even when the watch is worth it, it's hard to sell a $5-6k rep.

It's just a pic of a gen 16520 dial, Zenith El Primero chrono movement, gen hands/crown/tube and a Phong midcase for a Rolex Daytona build. I'd estimate the parts value around $4-5000. I have never bought anything from Nik and I don't know anything about the guy, but it seems odd to say you're scraping for money to refund people yet you are starting a $5k+ project.

Dude, this thread is 3.5 years old...

I had an all black and while I liked how cool it looked, it was basically impossible to read. Never had a problem with mine, and I've had more than a dozen sec@6 7750s (Daytonas and 3714s). They do have potential problems, but calling them "timebombs" is hugely overblown.

Concepta apparently has time and money to invest several thousand bucks in a 16520 project http://www.repgeek.com/showthread.php?t=194279

Old Noobfactory Explorer II case, old Noobfactory GMT Master II dial lumed by vac, WM9 sub bezel, Swiss CHS movement, built by me. I did a build thread a while ago.

Would rather answer questions here in the thread... these forums are for sharing information, and someone else might have the same questions as you someday. Having said that, I posted pretty much everything you need to know. You need to remove the escape wheel (which means removing the plate that holds the gear train), balance assembly, and pallet fork. Then install the same parts but from the 2846. There is literally nothing else to it.

Can be done I should take some more pics of this watch. It deserves some good ones.

I had a couple of days off of work and decided to play with my AP diver a bit. As most of you know, the gen AP diver has a 21,600bph movement. Our reps come with an ETA 2824 (or clone) movement which beats at 28,800bph. If it had a 2836 movement, it would be simple to swap in a 2846, which is the exact same movement except with a 21.6 beat rate. However, swapping a 2846 for a 2824 is more difficult. It's typically doable (although the stem height is sometimes an issue), but the date wheel will not swap and with these AP divers have a custom date font, so using the stock ETA wheel is no good. Vac posted a thread in his section that seems to indicate that he's modified some 2846s to work with the 2824 datewheel, so I tried that for a bit. I swapped every single part on the front of the 2824 to a 2846, and it still would not work correctly with the 2824 datewheel. The teeth are not in the right plane. Some people report success so there apparently is a way to do it, but I couldn't figure it out and no one will share with me how it's done. So I decided to do it from the other side of the movement. In a lot of ways this is actually more desirable, since it gives you a movement with the correct stem height, you don't have to modify the date mechanism, etc. It is more delicate, fussier work though, and some of the parts are very easy to break. What I ended up with was a movement with all of the 2824 parts except the balance wheel, pallet fork, and escape wheel. The gear train is the same on all of the 28xx movements so nothing else had to be swapped. Now the movement beats at 21,600bph and nothing on the front side of the movement had to be changed. I didn't even remove the stem or uncase the movement. These are the parts that were swapped: I've transplanted these parts to the clone A2824 (you can see that the balance **** arm doesn't have the same perlage finish as the rest of the movement--this pic is through the loupe, that's why it's so weird looking) Better pic: Watch is now running at 21,600 bph. I didn't even have to touch the dial and hands or uncase the movement! The watch itself actually makes a pretty good movement holder for this project. Excited by how this turned out. Watch has been running within about 3 sec/day for the last day and a half, we'll see what it settles in at--the lower beat movements usually aren't quite this accurate over the longer term. Waiting on a new strap, I bought a Donerix leather, we'll see how it looks all together.