panerai153

As i said before, I'm no IPAd expert, but after reading on the IPAd forum, I'm under the impression that the IPad comes unlocked. This was reiterated by Steve Jobs at the IPad introduction several months ago. According to the guys on the forum, several of which have IPads that were bought in the USA, are using them in the UK as well as other countries in Europe. What they said was you pay the regular rates for data that you normally do from your carrier in Europe. One fellow did say that he had to buy a micro SIM and set up and account in several countries to avoid roaming charges. From what he is saying, roaming charges are stiill a big problem in the EU. Here in the USA, they are just about a thing of the past, as most carriers are national or have national contracts with other carriers.It sounds like in the EU, you almost have to change SIM cards every time you cross a border!

We send our thoughts and prayers to you and your family. Your grandfather sounds like a remarkable man who has been blessed with a full rich life. I wish you Godspeed on your journey to see him, and hopefully you can be there for him.

Sorry, I must have been half asleep whenI read your post. i don't know about Ipads. I would imagine the wireless function would work anywhere you have wireless, but who knows about the 3G network?

I just did some "Googling" and this is what I found. You nmay want to do some further research, I Googled "Will the USA IPad work in other countries" This is one answer from the Ipad Forum.net IPad Info

Looks like it will work ok in other countries, you just need a microsim card from your carrier in Europe.

You did out kick your coverage!! You did mighty good for and old country boy from Abita Springs or then maybe you were a city boy from Downtown Mandeville!! Congrats Two beautiful girls

The answer is no. I know I tried. AT&T are the only seller of the Iphone in the USA. You can buy a phone with no contract, but they will not unlock it. I have been a Bellsouth and then AT&T customer for at least 45 years. I have been an AT&T wireless customer since they opened their first store here. I tried to get my wife's 3GS unlocked for her last summer before she went on her annual trip to Ukraine. In the past I have never had a problem with getting her phones unlocked so that she could use an incountry SIM card. No luck this time. I was told that AT&T couldn't unlock the phones,as that was controlled by Apple.It is all controlled by Apple thru their computer system, probably the ITunes store.

You can buy supposedly unlocked 3G's as well as 3GS's, but in essence they are just phones that have been "jailbroken". I'm like you, I have her 3GS, but I wouldn't want to take a chance because if you do something wrong, you could end up with a nice black paperweight!

I have heard that tyhere are some countries in your part of the world, possibly Sweden, Denmark, you would need to research, but by law wireless phones must be sold unlocked. From what i understand the Apple IPhones sold there are sold unlocked. If you get on some of the IPone forums, those guys can answer all your questions, and tell you where you may be able to buy one.

Good Luck

I'm with most everyone else here. the genuine crown would be the best start for this project. No matter how skilled you are with a lathe, it's not just about taking off metal to make the crown shorter. There are genuine crowns all over the place. I've bought two of them in the past year on this forum for around 50.00 USD each. You can use a genuine tube, the PT tube will work as well as a Clark's tube. Once you get past the genuine crown, the other parts start getting pretty pricey. If you want a genuine insert w/ Tritium pearl, expect to pay somewhere north of 200.00 USD for insert/pearl. i just bought an insert for my 1665 project and it cost me 165.00 USD the pearl was 110.00 USD or 275.00 USD for both.

I think one of the questions that one of the posters asked was why not start out with a MBW 1680 as a base. Probably the easy answer to that is the MBW will take genuine parts much more readily than the PT. Genuine bezels will snap on, genuine inserts snap in to the MBW bezels. This is my take on the question, if you are going to mod a watch as far as you can feasibly go, the MBW is hands down a better choice, If you are going to do a minimum of modding, and really don't care about bezels, inserts, crystal, the PT would be a logical route to go. the big plus of the PT is the 2846-2 "Slow beat" movement and the silver, flat top 3's datewheel.

No matter which way you go, good luck with your project, and post photos of your progress

totally off the subject, but what do you think the PN Daytona that is the "REAL" Paul Newman Daytona would bring at auction when he or his heirs decides to sell it?

I believe what ronin mentioned in his post sort of cuts to the core of reps vs fakes. How you carry yourself, your clothes ,etc are going to go a long way toward your credibility. If you look like you can afford and wear a 40+k watch, then you can pull it off with no trouble. If your primary occupation is part time student and full time pizza delivery boy, then you may suffer some credibility issues.

Yesterday, my wife and I drove down to Baton Rouge for some shopping. Our Anniversary is a couple of weeks away, so we went into a jewelry store that happens to be one of the authorized Rolex dealers in BR. I had on my WM9/BK Sub. i wasn't a bit worried about anyone saying anything, as we were looking at diamond jewelry for her. I didn't flash my watch, or ask the watch salesman to look at it, but I had on a short sleeve shirt, and I made no attempt to hide it. I would bet that no one in the store could tell from a glance that it's a rep, even though it has a genuine crown/tube and insert.

All this aside, that is a very nice Daytona. I saw it soon after it came up on the sales forum, would love to have had a go at it, but i have an MBW 1665 project that is growing by leaps and bounds almost daily!!

Wear it well, and welcome to the Rolex forum and "plexi mania"

Yeah same watch on first 2 pics.

The one on the tester aint!

My old eyes certainly aren't as sharp as you young guys. I can't see any difference between 1,2 or 3. At any rate this looks like a pretty nice DSSD. None of them are perfect, but then a 400.00 USD rep isn't a 7-8 thousand general. The engravings on the bezel insert are shallowed and not as distinct as the genuine. The pearl looks really nice.and they are finally getting the OGEV ring is closer to correct at least the top of the ring lines up as it does on the general. Unfortunately they just can't seem to get the letter spacing correct so that everything lines up properly top and bottom. From the photos, you cabn't see the rehault engraving, but with the distortion of the DSSD crystal and the tiny letters, it's hard to see them without ideal lighting conditions.

My vote is

Uh Oh!!

Sorry fender, just generalizing. I do hope that some of our members from the area will chime in and give you some hard information. Good luck and hopefully your friend will find a really good watchmaker close by.

Nice run down. I lived about 400 yds from the Abita Brewery way back when nobody knew what an Abita beer was LOL!

I grew up on my dad's warm Dixie, Jax and Falstaff..at parades, he would give his spittle to the kid that fetched him a nice cold fresh one.....I was always pretty fast and probably an enabler to my dad's drinking. He swears he is not an alcoholic though....he says they go to meetings. He is a professional drunk LOL!!!

Man!! I can tell you those are some rough beers,Dixie, Jax and Falstaff. I bought a 6 pack of Dixie "Voodoo" years ago to take to the hunting camp. At the end of the season, we still had about 4 or 5 cans left!! And we had some serious beer drinkers in our ranks.

Abita Amber draft is probably one of my favorite summer time beers.

Please excuse me for getting a thousand miles off on a South LA tangent.

The Monte Carlo is really nice, and the genuine crystal makes it even nicer. i agree with what has been said, you just can't beat genuine Rolex glass (Plexi) for clarity. They are just better. Sort of like comparing Zeiss binoculars to Bushnell, no contest.

I googled Chronotac, and came up with quite a few reviews on WUS and a couple of other forums. most of the reviews were positive. Pretty nice little 70-80 buck watch. Biggest gripes were lume is crappy (haven't we heard this one before?) and the bracelet is flimsy. Probably because it's a copy of a Rolex Oyster bracelet Some of the folks commented that there were inconsistencies between watches of the same model, which would fall in line with production coming from various rep factories.

this is the type watch you can wear while doing yard work, changing the oil in your car. etc. If it gets beat to pieces, it's not the end of the world.

I don't know if this sounds paranoid but could 'I' get in trouble? Here's what I'm thinking in my mind: the customs ask this customer for the seller's info which is me and she has my paypal ID. Then customs gives it to Cartier and Cartier pursues legal action against me becuase they will see from my paypal I have sold about 15 of these.

If they pursue this at all, which for one bracelet, I would find highly unlikely, you might get a "cease and desist" letter from Cartier. Basically stop right now, and If we ever hear about you again we will unleash the fury of our lawyers on you. I would be more concerned about your Paypal. If they (customs or Cartier) notify PayPal that you are dealing in counterfeit items, more than likely PayPal is going to suspend your Paypal account. If it were me, I would get all the money out of my Paypal account, as it may save you a lot of hassle later on if they suspend your account and freeze your funds.

Another thing, If the French customs are like US Customs, your customer's address and name are now in the computer, so I would advise him to never try to receive any replicas or counterfeit items at that address or under his name. May not ever be a problem, but they coulld check everything coming through customs to that name and/or address for a while.

Yes, that is what I thought to but in the tracking in France it stated it differently: arrival in delivery office: CUSTOMS. It was in french so I used an on-line translation to figure it out. My customer in france called Customs and gave them the tracking number given to me by the China seller and customs told her they were seizing it because it's counterfeit. This is my second transaction with this customer in france, the first had no problems.

Can this customer get into trouble?

I don't have any idea as to how vigerously the French Customs people will pursue someone for importing one bracelet. Hopefully some of our EU members will weigh in on this. The biggest problem is the customer called customs and specifically asked about that package. Had he not called, he could always deny the package and claim that it wasn't his. possibly wrong address, etc. "plausible deniability". Unfortunately, he has now established a connection between himself and the package, so no deniability is possible now.

I don't quite understand. According to what you posted, it was released from customs,(2010-11-08 03:00:00 FRENCH REPUBLIC ROISSY CHRON Released from Customs ) and the next was "arrival at delivery office". Sounds to me like customs released it and sent it on to the Post Office for delivery. I would think that if it was seized by customs the post would read "Seized by Customs or held by customs", not released by customs?

Certainly not and expert on this,but I would be very careful about handing a replica watch over to a watchmaker in Switzerland. I believe they have some pretty punative anti counterfeit laws ,don't they? I would have to be convinced that he actually worked on reps, this would have to come from other members who recommended him. Maybe better in France or get in touch with francisco.

I may sell it if you might be interested

GW ot triple 6? Either would be great additions to anyones collection of genuine Rolex

Isn't this supposed to be a 1655? 1665 is a SeaDweller

First off, you need to read and do some research so that you will be familiar with all the "tells" that seperate the genuine from the rep and the good accurate reps from the cheap junk. Start with this review GMT ceramic review

As far as this watch, it is an example of what is referred to as the "correct hand stack" (CHS) version. This means that the hands top to bottom are the same as the genuine. Unfortunately, this movement is notoriously unreliable. The more popular version is the"wrong hand stack " (WHS) version, which uses the much more reliable ETA 2836-2 movement with and added GMT module.Here again, you have toi be able to look at the watch close up and know what the correct hand stack looks like to tell a really good accurate rep from a genuine.

As far as telling if it is a "Fake", you have to remember that 99.99% of the population can't tell the difference between a Rolex and a Timex unless they can read the writing on the dial. When you are dealing with folks like the ones here on the Rolex forum, they can tell at a glance that this watch is not accurate. For you to get to that stage, you will need to read a lot, and look at lots of photos of genuine watches and accurate replicas so that you are able to tell for yourself the difference between something that is good and something that is trash.

Great watch :thumbsupsmileyanim: And as you said, they might not be rare, but they are certainly iconic. It is the one watch that every serious (and wealthy!) Rolex collector has to have in his collection. Good luck with your quest.

First it's not genuine if that's what you are asking, GMT hand paint is off color, doesn't have the quality bezel engraving of the genuine, the white gold surrounds look suspicious and lastly, genuines are never sold new with that dead givaway blue protective film. What I suspect is this is a replica with the notorious correct hand stack movement. Notorious because it's has a life expectancy of weeks possibly months, but it is very prone to failure. There are much better reps available on the forum here from trusted dealers, as well as gently used examples that come up for sale here on the forum from time to time.

Long story short, DO NOT BUY!

What a load of Crap! Either the seller is an outright liar, or whomever Rolex on 5th Avenue is should change the sign outside from Rolex to Timex. Obviously he asked the stock boy to "authenticate" the watch. Unfortunately, this is another example of Ebay fraud, or a gullible seller who was led astray by so called Rolex experts.Pretty nice watch, but I would expect the asking price is off by one zero (-)

I sort of put my watches into two catagories,the "keepers" and the "disposables". Most of the time a watch falls into the disposable catagory because it was one I bought on a whim because i liked it at the tiime, but find that it just isn't what I like. Then there are those that I sort of buy to try. A good case in point was a cheap but nice SeaDweller rep that I bought as an interim until my WM9 SD was delivered LOL !! Well considering that project is either DOA or so far in the future, I may be in a nursing home when it arrives, I decided to shift my focus to modding a MBW 1665.I figured to sell a couple of the disposables to raise a few bucks for genuine parts, so the SD was one that went.I really try, usualy without much success to keep my watch hobby as funds neutral as possible. I need to buy, so i need to sell something to fund it. (Sounds good in theory, usually doesn't work!)

The keepers including my genuine Rolexes and Tudors are here to stay as well as my MBW's and my PAM 063. Other than those, most of the rest could be sold with little or no remorse. One thing that I do think about before selling today is "How difficult was it to find this watch, such as my old skool Eddie Lee PAM 063 and my WM9/BK v3 Sub, and if I sold it and wanted another how hard and how expensive would it be to replace"?

Another factor in my case, I'm getting to the age where I am seriously considering what I want to pass on to my children, and what needs to be sold before that time takes place.

Replacing that crown will make a world of difference, and would be my starting point in the modding. There are genuine crowns all over the place. I would post a Want to buy in the Tools and Parts forum.There is a tall Coronet NOS Crown/tube for sale over there right now, but It's pretty pricy. i bought a nice used one with a Clark's tube for my PT 1680 a couple of months ago, and I payed around 50.00 dollars for both.You can also check the Vintage Rolex Forum's Vintage marketplace as well. they have lots odf genuine used parts for sale all the time.

It's been a long time ago, but I remember my first Sub was purchased from Hausmann's Jewelers in New Orleans. Around 68-70. I paid less than 400.00 USD for it back then. One thing about those folks, they wouldn't cut a deal at all on a straight sale, but the salesman told me that if Ii had something to trade in, they could really "Work with me" on a trade.Ii suspect even back then, Rolex was watching the dealers like a Hawk, strickly enforcing the MSRP. With a trade, they could work in a discount by upping the value of the trade. Another one that I distinctly remember was a 18k Day Date that I bought from a local Rolex dealer in 1982. I paid 4000.00 including all taxes. I believe the comperable model today is aroud 24-26000.00, around a six fold increase. I bought and sold several Subs and SD's in the 1980's and honestly I can't rememember ever paying over 500.00 Dollars for any of them. As I said, it's been a long time back and my memory may be a little foggy, but the prices really didn't start to shoot up til later. I do know that I felt the prices had gotten a little silly by the late 90's an I didn't buy another genuine til about 7 years ago when I bought a used 16750. looking at the prices lately, for the later watches of which thousands have been produced,prices have actually come down some. If you look long enough, you can pick up a fairly nice 16610 for around 3,000, maybe a little less if you are lucky and drive a hard bargain. Rare models, especially those in pristine condition, don't seem to be as vulnerable to price drops.

When you look at Rolex prices, compared to everything else, I don't think their price increases have been that much out of line with other items. i bought a brand new Ford galaxy 500 (It was a full size Ford) in 1968. the sticker price was 6500.00 and this was "loaded", Air conditioning, power steering, Power brakes ,Windows, etc. I would gues that a comperable car today would be something north of 40k. I also bought a Ford F-150 around the same time, it was pretty bare except for A/C and power steering. It was about 3500.00 dollars.I priced an F-250

Diesel ,King Ranch edition a week ago. Sticker was 75,000 dollars!! Of course comparing 60's era cars/trucks to 2010 models is a little Apples vs Oranges, but as you can see everything is way,way more expensive today.