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Wow what a dial!!! Nice work! I just looked and Maranez are sold out in the Samui line, bummer. What is the diameter of that dial?&

Perhaps part of the reason we have so few female members here?

Wow. What’s the old saying, a fool and his money are soon parted? If I was buying a 5 figures Daytona I’d have it inspected by every watch expert from God down before I threw my cash out there. Even I can see the unfinished movement components. Rolex would never release something as coarse as that.

People seem to have different opinions about "working fine". Half the watches I've bought person-to-person have been like this, advertised as "working fine" and you have to monkey with the crown to get it to "grab" before it winds. I can get them to work eventually, or I'll just set the time and screw down the crown and whiz them up a bit by hand and wear them, and they wind themselves. It works but it's a pain. It will be a simple repair, maybe a new stem or touching up the keyless, like Ado said.

Thanks AGoat, that’s the whole idea. To have vintage pieces I can use and not worry about the movements.

That's great advice. Looking over vintage dive watches on eBay it's like a kid in a candy store. Genuine robust well made dive watches as far as the eye can see. No need to worry about wonky Asian clone movements. My problem is, how many round face, black, domed crystal dive watches can a guy justify having? So I'm learning to look and admire, and remember I don't HAVE TO own it, to admire it. So I just went and looked... FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!! A Jenny/Philip Caribbean 1000m diver with complete bakelite bezel for $337. ARGGHHHH!!! You did this to me! YOU!!! Must have... must have... my precious...

Somehow the stars aligned and I found this beauty. I've heard plenty of Ray Charles blues, but this is a whole 'nother level. Dang, I could listen to this all day long.

No kidding. That’s spectacular.

That’s a great photo Joey. My original hours hand looked like that but fell completely apart, like it was bits of card stock glued together.

Mmmmmm a 702 crown, as God intended. That’s next for the Kursk.

Ah Jim, you dirty dog! Now when I look at my baby all I see is that poor underfed skinny hours hand accusing me of withholding nutrition! To be honest I never noticed the width of the lume plot in the hours hand vs the minutes hand. I figured they were the same. Now on your very kind offer, I went googling and sure enough, you're right, the hours hand lume is noticeably wider. Isn't that just a "Rolex thing" for you, them being different. I suppose it's to be expected, consider the Milgauss 6541 hands or the 6204 vs 6200 hands. I suppose earlier days and smaller facilities meant more unique bits. Anyway, the Mercedes hand first appeared about 1/3 of the way through the 6205, so the pencil hands qualify as original on a 6204. As to my comment about them "not being quite right" I meant mine are crude in their dimensions, not finished like Rolex would finish them. Mine need to have flatter sides, eased top edges, all that. These bloody things are so gratifying, and so annoying! In the end I think if it looks good enough under wrist distance scrutiny, that's as much as I'll go for, loupes de damned. Yes I would love to have you open up the lume plot on an hours hand and send it, that would be very kind and generous. I'm using ETA postsizes. At some point I'm sure I won't be able to tolerate these detail flaws any more and it will be off for more fine tuning. Then your kindly offered hours hand would love to find a home on my build. Thank you!

I had to take the back off for a minor adjustment. Look at that caseback stamping. Whoever built this case had a serious eye for detail.

Tonight I tried it on a Yuki band. Hooooooly smokes, I thought it looked good on a leather strap!

I know, they’re just so pretty!

Dang, I wonder if I could get away with these on a 1680 Red Sub? .....except for the seconds that is.

No competing for me, my roommates in college played football so we were in the gym all the time. One of them went on to star in a Hollywood movie, check out "Vision Quest", he plays the role of Shute, the antagonist wrestler from across town. Frank Jasper is his name, he's BIG in that movie, but had to drop over 25 lbs of muscle before they filmed it so he'd look like a high school kid. Yeah right, "high school kid". These are the guys I worked out with. We'd run the stairs clear around that stadium when we had extra energy to burn.

You guys are too friggin kind ... nobody called me out on the insert being way too glossy? So I fixed it.

I tried a small change on the Kursk (Red Sub). I took the shiny finish off the insert, I like it!

!+&:!@%* I just HAD to say that. Watch fogged up, now I have the back off and it’s lying on the boiler drying out.

Uh oh I went for more than 50 yards in the rain today...

Welcome back! Funny how this place works, it's like that TV show Cheers. It's always here, will always be here, and who knows who's hanging around the bar? Woody! Bring up another case of single malt! Dylan is back! Woody: "oh hi, Mister Dylan, want a beer?" Woody dammit I said single malt! And so it goes...................

Thanks Auto, that's high praise coming from you. I know what you mean about that sour taste in your mouth, but in my experience it's about other collectibles. Every morning I kick myself for some of them. Some are worth a kick in the evening too. Ask me about Eric Clapton's guitar some time. My gens are getting pretty long in the tooth, I still want to wear them, but can't justify daily use. So the vintage builds take their place. The 6204 will fill in for days when I want a Small Crown, the Red Sub will fill in for the Nastymariner (still alive and gasping for breath) and the Big Gonzo 6538 is for when I want a vintage Rolex for a swim in the ocean. Just to stick my thumb in the eye of collectors. After all, these are TOOL watches, all of them. If I flood an ETA movement? No biggie... wash out the salt, clean the dial, stick in a new movement and go again. PS: those Lawn boys are the BOSS if you can make them rev high enough. I had one with a magnesium alloy deck, puke green, I painted the wheels purple and put shark teeth across the front. We lived on an island where it rained all the time, I called it the Lawn Shark. I cut an opening in the top for grass to blow out, and used half a garbage can lid for the "flapper". Holy crap.

Sorry JSebWC ... I've been hacking up hairballs since DP had my Dobermans in the champagne fountain. That's not pleasant at all. I can finally say that this one is complete. Sorry for leaving this topic hanging! I had to make some tough decisions and each one was no going back. Do I use an A260 movement? Are parts available? Do I intend to USE this watch, or sit it on a shelf? I never wear my 6536 anymore because the autowind train is about shot, and there's no more parts out there. I want to wear this one instead for the Small Crown itch, so that meant an ETA movement. So we machined the case to make it fit. No going back. Do I want it to look pristine? Sharp chamfers and untouched dial? Well the case is not bright 904 stainless, it's another alloy and darker than most. So it looks well loved and well worn with engrained old grime. That means every other part needs to give the same aged impression. My 6536 has never flooded but the dial is OLD and chipped and gnarly looking. How that happens is probably UV ageing and tritium. I had my choice of the Tonny perfect glossy gilt dial, or the original ancient chipped dished dial. I went with the old chipped dial because it looks right in the case. Then the hands. They are nearly perfect in dimension, but way WAY too shiny and gold and perfect. So they took a lot of ageing. I wish we'd done a little more to ease over the edges of the hands so they look hand stamped instead of machine made. It's a subtle detail I'll have to address at some point. The bezel flat ROCKS, the rehaut is two pieces carefully put together by unknown hands decades ago, to give a neck for the crystal and a sloped inner edge for the dial. It's spectacularly well done, and almost impossible to see. The case is also slightly curved on the sides. Did those come from decades of polishing? Or should they be flatter? When I did my Snowflake I had the case polished to DEATH to make it all curved and sexy. There's no reason a 6204 can't have suffered the same treatment over its 65 year life. So old case, old chipped dial, old aged hands, old worn filthy bezel, what's left? The original insert is the vintage funky pointy-four piece with weird fonts, and looks EXACTLY like gen. It might be, for all I know. Someone sanded its outer perimeter to make it fit the bezel and took it slightly too far here and there. There's no going back from that. Maybe I can paint the sanded edge black to make it less noticeable? A little 3M goo holds it in place. The crystal feels like a tropic-18 very thin and delicate. It's no beastly thing like a T17 or T19. Do I like that? I have no frame of reference to decide. So it stays. In the end the case, engravings, bezel, insert, dial, hands, crystal and beat up Brevet+ crown all agree they are ancient and tired. That's exactly what I was going for. They're 95% correct, I just need to fine tune the finished piece to get everything perfect. But it came out far, far better than I'd hoped for. It will live on a leather strap because all the folded rivet bracelets are too bright and their steel doesn't match the case. That's fine with me, a gentleman 65 years ago would likely have worn this on leather anyway. And now to the pictures!

Yeah that one took a couple years off my life. But the result... wow. All the little details are there, from the ever so slightly rounded tops of the bezel teeth to the subtle inset of the insert, tapered seconds hand, understated droop to the crown guards ... it all adds up. Now I'm biting my lip until I get the silver flat-three overlay put on, it will be exactly centered in the date aperture and exactly centered beneath the cyclops. It's all planned out. I also have a gen 702 crown sitting here smiling at me. I'm holding onto it for the 1665 SD if that one ever fails, but it's sure tempting. Maybe I can find a 700 crown and tube somewhere?