sneed12

Just curious if anyone knows if any of our dealers still have them... I've already emailed the twins, who else can I check with?

I have spare sapphire Noob crystals that should fit, PM me.

Since posting this I was fortunate to buy a BK/WM9 from a member. Absolutely stunning watch. It has a few scratches that I have buffed out, but I'm concerned about the winding. First off when I unscrew the crown, I don't feel any gearing when I try to wind it. When I pull the crown to the date position, the date wheel doesn't advance. When I move it to the last position I am able to set the time and forward the date by winding 24hrs. I hope this can easily be fixed. Any advice would be appreciated.

It sounds like it can easily be fixed... if you have spare parts lying around and are willing to pull the dial and hands.

If I had to guess I'd guess that the setting lever spring has broken off of the set bridge, which is fairly common if you pull on the crown too hard.

Swiss ETA movements are smooth as hot butter when you wind them. That's why you don't feel any gears. Precision machinery.

You should still hear a winding noise and feels ome resistance. I'm wearing a Sub with an ETA in it right now (I know it's gen, because I pulled the movement out of another Swiss watch personally) and it is smoother than my watches with ETA clones but still definitely makes a noise when winding.

Just got one of these:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Swiss-Sapphire-Crystal-Gasket-fit-Rolex-Watch-NEW-/200507384326?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item746ab086b1

last night. Allegedly, it's supposed to have a cyclops with AR. Look at the photos on the listing:

I installed it in my GMT IIc last night. It was a direct replacement for the Noobfactory crystal, although the gaskets that came with the aftermarket crystal did not fit and I had to re-use the gasket that was already in the watch.

In short, don't bother. There definitely IS AR on the crystal, you can tell if you look closely witha loupe. But it doesn't have anything like the effect that the gen does. In fact in regular use you can barely tell. I don't have pics yet because when I was trying to take pics last night, I wasn't able to get a single one that showed the effect of the AR. I'll try again tonight.

I don't feel like I was ripped off; it's still a pretty nice sapphire crystal for $20 shipped. That's not a bad deal if you think about it. But it does not have the AR effect I was after. Oh well.

Yeah. It costs about 500$.

If you're in... just about any country other than Switzerland... you should be able to find a nice GMT IIc rep NEW for less than half that.

What's the difference? Just thickness right? I think either crystal should fit either case, the Sub crystal is just slightly thicker due to the increased depth rating.

Thanks for the heads up. For thirty-some-odd bucks can't hurt to try...

EDIT: Less than 20 bucks in CONUS. I guess by early next week I might have some new pics to put up.

Cool, that's what I thought. Thanks.

When you polished off the engraving on the rehaut, did it take enough material off to cause problems with fitting the dial??

No, it wasn't a problem, and the engraving on this case was actually fairly deep.

Are there seconds at 6 Daytonas without rehaut engraving? If I remember right they switched to seconds at 6 10+ years ago, but the rehaut engraving hasn't been around that long...

I was under the impression that the gen crystal won't fit a Noob case...?

I've been building this watch on and off since February or so, never seem to get it quite right. I've always thought that Rolex should have built a 16610 Sub with a blue sunburst dial, but they never did. I learned to love my Smurf ceramic blue Submariner, and I normally am not a fan of fantasy pieces, but for some reason I couldn't get this watch out of my head.

The LV is the "Lunette Verte" or "green moon" so I'm calling this one the "Blue sun"

I've been accumulating parts for this watch for months. The dial came from a fantasy piece that Stan was selling. The movement is a Swiss ETA 2836 that I pulled from an old watch. I had an open 6/9 datewheel in the parts box that I was itching to use; it had been in my GMT Master II for a while but it just didn't feel right in that watch. The case is one of those $30 Sillix budget Subs, and the bezel insert came from that eBay seller that does $8 inserts.

The Sillix sub had really, really terrible rehaut engraving on it. I polished it off and then, just for grins, I mirror polished the rehaut. It was totally on a whim but I think it's a cool effect. At some angles it makes the dial look bigger. The reflection really lengthens the minute markers as well.

Finished it off with a GMT IIc clasp and bracelet. I really think the tuna can clasp on the old Subs was a piece of junk, that hung around far longer than it should have. The polished center links are a nice dressy touch for a dressed-up tool watch.

Anyway, onto the pics:

and next to its big brother:

The watches that really got me started in this hobby were the Rolex GMT Masters. I think a large part of what's kept me interested is the fact that, in so many ways, the reps of these watches are pretty bad.

Group shot:

I've been through 4 or 5 GMT IIc's worth of parts watches. Bracelet, case, movement, bezel insert--I matched the best of what's out there into this watch.

I found an earlier example of the ceramic bezel insert with the slightly wider numbers in another watch. The flaw that these had was the paint was too dark, so today I sprayed it with Duplicolor platinum. It came out reasonably well, but I'm thinking of stripping all of the paint and starting from scratch.

The case is from an a21j GMT IIc that Stan sells. I don't know why but his a21j new-style Sub and GMT cases all seem to have much better aligned rehaut engraving than the ETA offerings out there. It's a hair too dark, but look how well the rehaut engraving lines up at 9.

Bracelet has a clasp with reasonably deep engraving, not the really light laser etching you usually see on rep GMT IIc clasps. I'm debating whether or not to do the black paint thing to it.

The single really big tell is still the AR'ed cyclops on the gen. Lots of people have tried lots of things to duplicate this effect, I'm still not sure what I'm going to end up doing. It's the last thing that really bugs me on this watch. The movement is a jumping-GMT-hand 2836; I pulled the GMT bits off of a clone 2836 and transplanted them to a Swiss 2836 I pulled out of an old watch. Works like a charm.

My recently acquired Noob/BK Explorer II is perfect, as you'd expect a BK watch to be--except for the misaligned rehaut engraving. I'm debating whether to polish it off myself or send it back to BK and let him do it--strongly leaning towards letting BK do it though .

I just finished putting together my 1665 McQueen Explorer, as well. Finally got a proper acrylic crystal and bracelet with hollow links. It has two problems, the datewheel font sucks and the bracelet isn't worn or softened the way the case is. We'll see how long I can live with the datewheel thing. It still has an independently adjustable GMT hand too (which it shouldn't) so sometime soon I might open her up, remove the GMT hand adjustment wheel and install a datewheel overlay. This one's running some flavor of a21j, though (looks like a Shanghai B from the back) and they can be dodgy to work on, so maybe I'll just live with the flaws.

Finally, the watch that got me started on all of this, my 16710. Funny how just a few months ago I thought this watch was complete. As I get more familiar with these watches, I find that the very slight wokkiness of the case bugs the heck out of me. I need to find a case with a better rehaut, or I've been thinking of trying to turn the rehaut down a bit on this case--but I'd be doing it by hand, I don't have a lathe or milling machine or anything like that. Might be too ambitious of a project to tackle. Also, now that I know jumping GMT hand 2836s exist I need to find another one to gut for parts to put here.

Just thinking out loud, I guess. Reps are never complete, I guess that's why I like this hobby.

Subdial spacing looks off.

That's a really nice looking watch

Yes there is (Sea-gull ST18).

Really? Crap, where can I buy some?!? Thanks for the info, I was misinformed

I'm guessing you've never worn a 1655...

I'm wearing a rep of one right now, actually

Dials with no markers are fine, but the 1655 dial is a nightmare to read, because the eye picks up on the additional 24hour markings instead of the main ones.

I never seem to have that problem. To each his own I guess

Lets put it another way... If the dial format for the 1655 is perfectly acceptable, why do you think Rolex discontinued to use the dial, and proceded to built the next generation of Explorer II's with GMT/Submariner-style dials and continue that style to this day?

So that us vintage watch nuts would start paying 10k+ for these things (or build or own)!

I don't understand the comments about the dial being illegible, honestly... Who looks at the dial when telling time? There are watches out there with no dial markers at all, as long as the hands are visible telling the time is fairly simple.

I just put together an a21j version yesterday... the gen of this watch (the McQueen I mean) has a non-independent GMT hand and a low-beat movement, if I remember correctly.

Going 21j for low-beat and ETA or clone for high-beat is the one thing that I'm fairly anal about with Rolex reps...

If there's enough clearance between the edge and the numbers, a bit of sandpaper and a bit of time should do you just fine.

Hmm... I'm not very good at this game, all I see are the tells. Crown position looks low to me.

On the other hand, the rehaut looks nice and deep...

A bezel will show noticeable aging after only a few SCUBA dives, so a week in salt water ought to do something...

Based on the finishing and the fact that as far as I know, there is no clone of the 2892, I'd say you're golden.

No the cases are different.

The rep cases? I doubt it.

The movements are the same, but the tricompax has extra transfer gears on top of the datewheel. The amount that the datewheel is recessed is equal to the amount that the crown tube has been moved toward the back of the case. Just imagine the transfer gears as a spacer of sorts, it pushes the entire movement back about one millimeter. So the case is modified to accept the movements new position.

Yes, I understand.

Here's my 6-9-12 Navi with sunken DW:

I bought it hoping that without a transfer plate, I wouldn't have to worry about a sunken datewheel, but that's not the case. If you think about it, what are the chances that the rep manufacturers were going to design and build a second Navi rep case with a slightly different stem height? Why would they do that if they could just do what I think they did, throw a regular a7750 into a a7750+tricompax rep case. Even with the sunken DW they sell just fine.

Question for you Andrew. What is the difference in the case? Isn't it the same 7750 movement? Or is it because the tri-compax rep case needs to be thicker to accommodate the modded 7750?

I think that the cases ARE the same, and that is why the 6-9-12 cases still have sunken DW... even though there's no transfer plate there is room to put one.