Nanuq

Oh.My.GOD. You understand! No Cohibas for me, rather a fine akkevit (Linie, for the unwashed heathen among us) as I sail these uncharted seas. My God, these Klipsch sound good. It's Valhalla and the Valkyries now! (at least until my favorite wife comes down and *cough* suggests I turn it down a little....

I'm sitting here tonight wondering, what have I done??!! I have a collection of vintage audio gear ca. the 1960s, each piece selected for a reason. My daughter called me this week saying she spotted a pristine pair of vintage Klipsch speakers at a local donation store, and I was on them like white on rice. So tonight I have them home, installed and playing some very very tasty Mahler in the Mountain House as I write this. The heavens have opened and God Himself is smiling. But my heart is broken. Why? Because I disconnected my beloved vintage JBLs to hook up the Klipsch. Yes, they're that good. Vintage JBL are the gods in the pantheon of ancient audio gear, and these Klipsch speakers, the usurpers, unseated the JBLs. My world has been rocked. Nothing is as it was. Everything is up for grabs, spinning in the yawning Sixties chasm. What have I done?!

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say this dial has been to Kirk Rich. He will only print/reprint a dial for which you have provenance, and he has the original, genuine pads for most of the vintage dials. I'll bet this dial was stripped, redone in the original black textured background, and pad printed gilt for what the original would have been. Rolex SA has used him for this exact requirement. All the details are there for a genuine dial, but it's just not old enough. So then it could legitimately be called a "gen dial" though the "untouched" part is an exaggeration. Then the lume dots were (poorly) applied later, by someone else. Apparently using a straw full of lume, and spraying it in the general direction of the hour plots. There, I said it.

+1 what Ronin said. The nice thing about Colorado snow is it's airy light fluffy stuff, a joy to ski in, and drive in. That amazing light powder snow... you could probably drive a Toyota through 3' of it and laugh yourself silly. If it was heavy, wet saturated east coast snow, that's another story. We had a snow dump here a couple years back on my birthday in April, it was that light airy fluffy snow (very unusual for here) and I took the day off work because it was so much fun to drive in. I was out blasting around in the Rover pushing snow with my headlights, it was so deep, having the time of my life. The snow would come up over the hood bonnet like a submarine bow wave, breaking against my windshield! What a HOOT to drive in!! If you get some of that in Colorado you'll love it. Get thee some ground clearance and good tires, and Robert's your uncle.

The venerable Red 1680 with the mammoth Vampire Killer 12:00 dagger. Can you imagine what Palpatine could do now, with the stuff we have available? Heck, LOL, even RBJ could make one look good. LOL LOL !

Mine may be on a far distant end of the "normal wear" scale, but it's verifiably vintage. I'd expect the Rose Tudor to have at least some spiderwebs and cracking. Oh, and fewer "overspray" specks of lume on the gilt surrounds.

Here's something similar that's 54 years old.

That's the one. You'll notice Cap'n Kirk has 20 or 30. Rumor has it, Chuck Norris is the offspring of Kirk and one of his alien dalliances.

Gaahhhhh, I hate to say this, because I DETEST Subarus (spit spit spit, I said it and it left a terrible taste in my mouth) Go with the Subaru (spit spit spit). Not because of the US Ski Team, that's all marketing. Do it because they have: a modicum of ground clearance they're light they have AWD they have big windows. If you're using unplowed driveways you need ground clearance. Front-wheel drive should be okay. If they're unplowed uphill driveways, you need AWD or better, 4WD. Don't bother with the chains, you won't use them. Low range is not necessary for snow driving. That's for hard, technical offroading or pulling someone out of a ditch. At home we often get big snow dumps overnight and I'll go to work knowing I need to clear it when I get back home. So I often have to drive uphill through as much as 3 feet of new snow, and my Land Rover always makes it, because it has ground clearance, real 4WD and real snow tires..

Alright, dammit. Ephry I'm ready to sic Miss Understood on you... you're KILLING me here! Photos! Specs!

......of course there's always CC33's lovely 5510. I guess it will do in a pinch.

No kidding, Red. I spoke with my local AD watchmaker buddy, he's got a friend that used to buy these all day long for 50 bucks each. Usually the reversing wheels in the 390 movements had died, and he has a drawer full of them. I said I'd love to take a Big Crown off his hands and just use it manual-wind, and I'd be happy to pay him handsomely for a pretty one (trying really hard not to seem too enthusiastic!!!) so my buddy passed along my offer and the guy sniffed me out. He ran like a cat on carpet and the deal was off. Drat! Missed it by *that* much.

Miagi

Oh it gets better. Guys on the other dredge (there were two teams of us) got into an old set of tailings in the middle of the river down a ways where someone had a hydraulic "giant" set up 100 years ago and an inefficient riffle box. Those poor saps sent most of their gold out the end of their sluice into the river. Well Ben and Ben found it, and ate those tailings right up-river into the bank with their dredge. They found so much gold it was just sick. Our poker nights left empty jars of dry roasted peanuts, and Ben-squared would fill those jars with pennyweight nuggets. Then we'd go out and bury them because there was no safe to stuff them in and we were away from our camp all day every day. So we had a map with an "x" for each peanut jar. By the end of the summer they had over a dozen jars buried, but me and my partner only ("only") came out with about 13oz. apiece. At $1,000/oz that was a good summer's work. I had to hand-deliver one of those jars to a partner in Montana and it's astounding how much a dry roasted peanut jar full of gold weighs.

My favorite is CC33's 5510 above. He just doesn't know it's mine yet.

Hmmmm, now that you mention it, we were in the middle of bear country, 100 miles from the edge of nowhere, IN a salmon infested river all day every day, with our paper bag lunches sitting out on the ground. And it never occurred to us to watch for bears! At camp it was another story, I carried a Mossberg 12ga and a .44 Ruger everywhere I went. Fricken bears were everywhere.

Yeah we should have played for gold nuggets. Probably a good thing we didn't though, that takes all the fun out of it. We cut a pond into a hillside with a Cat so a natural spring filled it, then ran a 1" poly pipe down to the cabin for running water. We were feeling pretty clever, but late in the summer the water started tasting funny so we hiked up to check the pond, and a moose had died and fell in it, he was floating around looking pretty nasty. Oh, and we had LOTS of these guys around.

My 1680 has lived a hard life. Yes, you can throw a cat through the end link gaps and the crown is *cough* slightly worn. Crown guards? They used to be meaty, many many rock strikes ago.

Yeah rivers are where it's at... they're constantly reseeded with gold from eroding hillsides. But they're darn cold, glacier fed, and the salmon run up there too. So we'd be working in our orange Poseidon drysuits and a big salmon would run up and BAM!! hit you, trying to assert dominance over "his" river hole. Stinking salmon with attitude. We were waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the sticks and it was completely silent at night. We'd play poker for peanuts by the light of a kerosene lantern. One of the guys I mined with had a plastic heart valve, and it was so quiet you could hear his heart ticking. So when he got a really good poker hand we'd hear his heart going TICKTICKTICKTICKTICK really fast and we'd all fold. Hah!

Yes, it's the hardest work I've ever done. Excruciatingly hard work. It didn't help that we were breaking ice off the river so we could get to work in our drysuits! We had spent a couple weeks working our way down through 15' of overburden to get to bedrock, and lying on the bottom were boulders the size of chest freezers. Beneath them was the good stuff... wide cracks in the bedrock filled with blue/black clay. We'd roll the boulders over with a steel pike, then suck the clay out with the dredge. I was down working the bottom and my brother-in-law was topside, when he suddenly cut the engine, stopping my air. I popped my weights and came boiling up out of the river gasping for air and he stood there at the VERY END of the sluicebox, holding a big heavy black lump of clay. There was a golden glint showing from one end and he'd spotted it just before it went out the back, into the river. He polished it off and we had a jumping up and down party right there on the riverbank. Boy do I have stories to tell about gold mining!

Hmmmmmmmmmm. His ad says it's wearing a 2776. Otherwise it's a fine looking piece.

Ahhhhhhh, finally a topic I know something about! (cracking my knuckles and getting comfy) I'd recommend a light AWD with good ground clearance. Here's why: If you're driving uncleared roads then you need to NOT drag your undercarriage. AWD should be adequate, it would be nice if you could "lock" it into 4WD so there's no hesitation if you need the traction and the system is slow. I doubt you can get studded tires. Here in Alaska they don't rent cars with studs, instead it's good all-weather tires. Something about liability. But if you're in cold, dry, packed Colorado snow you won't need studs. Those are for ice. You want WINTER tires, not "all season". Studless Blizzaks are okay (if you can't get hard-core dedicated studded tires). You want a light vehicle so you can corner and stop with less mass fighting you. I know most people say you want something heavy, but then you slide off corners and down steep hills. I have a beast of a Land Rover, and a nice light one. The beast is used to pull people out of ditches, because it can plant itself on the snow and PULL. The light one is much weaker for that, but also much easier to handle on slick roads. My favorite wife drives a turbo New Beetle with gnarly studded tires and she can rocket around in winter almost like she's on pavement. Me? Not so much. It's all about dealing with your momentum. You want a tall greenhouse so you can see around you. Tiny windows cover with snow and ice faster and you're blind. DON'T let them wash the car just before you pick it up! The locks and doors will freeze. Make sure it has a good heater, and apply some Rain-X to the front glass, so the ice and snow come off easier. Here's my choice: ground clearance, light weight, locking 4WD. Notice I'd been pushing snow with my radiator before I took this, and those are 33" tires.

Is it just me, or is the movement in his photo a 2784?

@cc33, we're singing from the same music here. Spectacular 7922! Funny thing, I was a gold miner too, running an 8" Precision dredge in the icy waters of Alaska, waaaaaaaaYYYYY out in the bush. Paid for my college education too. Biggest nugget? 3.1 oz. about the size of my thumb. My meathead brother-in-law took a pic of me holding it, and lost the photo. Boy I'd like to have it back (the photo, not the B-I-L).

I hear ya, a Big Crown is next on my list to be checked off. There's just "something" about that big 8mm Brevet. The question remains, should it be a gilt 7924 or 6538? Sadly, it will have to be a franken, no way can I shell out what some gens have been going for! Something like this...