sneed12

That Sub case looks nice... but if it fits a gen movement, it probably won't fit a 2836. Stem heights are too different I think.

Honestly, if I were you, what I would do is learn to do some simple work on your own watches. You could have saved yourself several hundred bucks. That's what got me into this hobby in the first place, I showed up here looking for "the best sub" just like every other noob but there is so much information out there... if you have two hands and $50 for tools you're better off doing simple things on your own. PS: I don't buy a "bent cannon pinion" if the minute and hour hands were catching. They probably just weren't on quite straight.

There was a guy at RepGeek who had some printed last year. It's not as good as the one in my SOHC but it's a lot better than the stock A7750 datewheel.

Crown position looks good and the case is the right shape/thickness. If it's a rep it can't be 7750 based

Gotta watch out for those eye swarms. They get angry if you disturb the hive.

I got started on Seiko 7S26 movements. They're great, so forgiving. Stem removal is really easy, there's a tab you press down, that's it. One thing to try though (since your movement is borked anyway) let your watch wind all the way down, then whack it nice and hard on a table or something (you want to hit somewhere around 8 o'clock, but this isn't a precision repair). Sometimes one of the coils of the hairspring can get jarred and end up overlapping with another one and you'll have this happen. I've fixed SKX'es that had this problem in this way before, my success rate is about 50%.

For some reason, a lot of otherwise awful 21j reps have had that right for years. From a thread I put up on RG in January. This has excellent rehaut engraving but poor pretty much everything else. I was hoping to use the case and swap ETA guts into it, but I didn't have a crystal that would fit and the date mag on the crystal it came with was awful.

You can either have it serviced or drop in a new movement. Either can be done for $100 or less.

That's a Rolex promotional picture of a gen.

The older Navi SS did not have sunken date, all of the newer ones do. I thought the older ones only came in low-beat movements but this one had a high-beat movement in it.

I bought a blue dial Serie Speciale from Josh last year. My hope had been that due to the unchanged subdial layout, the datewheel wouldn't be too sunken, but no luck. I sent it to Vac to have the datewheel changed to a Breitling font datewheel last summer and I'd been wearing it like this ever since. You can see how sunken the datewheel is in the second pic. Last week an interesting watch popped up in the FS section of RWG: It has a brushed case (which the gen SS does) and the datewheel looked less sunken. I took a chance on it and this is what I ended up with: I'm really, really happy with how this turned out. The only real annoyance was that the tube pulled off of the main seconds hand and I had to spend a couple of hours gluing/reassembling it. I found something interesting when I pulled apart the first watch: There is a plate between the dial and movement! This one has a very interesting complication on it; that's clearly a GMT complication intended to show inside the minute totalizer subdial. In fact I think it's this one: It has that little arrow thing painted on it too. So this must be a leftover plate from making a rep of this watch. A regular Navi would have a plate moving the minutes to 3 instead. If you think about it, it makes sense--the factory would have to make different cases with different stem heights for the 6-9-12 and 3-6-9 cases. This is a cheaper, easier solution.

Yeah, it came yesterday, and I built me an ultimate Serie Speciale Look for a thread on it in a few minutes.

I just took one of these apart. A Swiss 7750 will fit no problem, as will the dial, but you're still going to have a sunken datewheel--there's an extra plate between the dial and the movement. Then you're going to have the problem that the rep 7750 hands (you have a high-beat 7750, trust me, and the high-beat 7750s use different tube sizes for the subdial hands and the main chrono hand) won't work with the Swiss movement, but the gen Breitling hands will be too short (again due to the extra plate under the dial). Interested to hear how you fixed this with your watch.

PS: Just pulled the dial off of my Serie Speciale, and I can confirm that the datewheel is sunken because there is an extra plate between the dial and the movement (even though it's not used for anything in this watch). I will post a pic later. The plate, oddly enough, has a GMT complication on it (putting a 24 hr hand into the 12 o clock subdial) that's not attached to anything.

PS: Just pulled the dial off of my Serie Speciale, and I can confirm that the datewheel is sunken because there is an extra plate between the dial and the movement (even though it's not used for anything in this watch). I will post a pic later. The plate, oddly enough, has a GMT complication on it (putting a 24 hr hand into the 12 o clock subdial) that's not attached to anything.

I've used the E6B on watches many, many times... but it was before I discovered reps. I used Citizens of various flavors all throughout my primary flight training, and I still use the slide rule on my Nighthawk. The slide rule on my rep Navi is used only for currency conversions, since it doesn't quite line up all the way around the dial. (Also, note that even if every mark lines up that doesn't mean that the slide rule will be accurate; it has to be correctly printed in log scale as well.)

Varies from piece to piece. Some are quite good, some are way yellow.

Utterly forgettable, IMO.

I have nothing against this or any other Rolex modder. However, I think those watches suck. Not because they're modded Rolexes, but because they're not even ORIGINAL modded Rolexes. Those look exactly like Pro-Hunters, DLC'ed with added red text. The only original idea I see there is the skeletonized dial on that Daytona.

No, using a 116710 case for a 16710 build is not going to be feasible. Everything is totally different--crown guards, bezel, case size itself, etc.

I'm gonna find out in a bit

In fact it's still there. Buy this watch http://repgeek.com/showthread.php?t=136374 it's the absolute best YM in the sub-$300 price range that there is. Only way to get a better one is to go WM9 and that's 2.5x the cost.

Sadly, the "second best" Noob YM is also out of production (although I saw one for sale yesterday on one of the forums). The "third" and "fourth" best aren't very good, IMO.

Sub bezel inserts are anodized aluminum, so they should look like bare aluminum. Every insert, gen and rep and aftermarket, I've ever seen has looked fine in this regard. Sub C bezel inserts are ceramic, with inlaid platinum numbers. They should NOT look like bare aluminum. Rolex PVD's platinum onto the ceramic then polishes it off of the raised surfaces. Totally different.

Unfortunately, you sort of don't. Especially if you buy directly from a dealer website. The best way to source a specific watch is to email a dealer and ask. I use Sead a lot when I want to do it that way; he's slower than ordering from Josh but he always gets me exactly what I ask for. The other way to do it, and honestly I get most of my reps this way, is to keep an eye on the for-sale section. That way you get pics of the exact watch, and you usually get it faster, and often can find watches without having to deal with customs hassles.