fraggle42

My "grail", Breitling Aerospace I bought from a UK chap who is in the RAF and flies Hercules planes in and out of combat zones - it's quartz and has one big dent on it from when he came under fire, went to grab his weapon and heard and felt the hard "clunk" as metal made contact with metal. Total respect for him and you and all comrades and I don't ever intend to get that dent removed.

I've been given very kind permission to run three auctions for three gen watches on the rep FS forums with all funds made going to Hambone. The watches are an Alpha Sub with green bezel, black dial on a nice bracelet, an Alpha with salmon dial, black bezel on a black leather with red stitching, and an as new gen Jorg Grey 4500 chrono + date on a very nice quality brown leather strap. The auctions are to run over 5 days and I'll bump the threads once a day (or maybe twice for the first couple of days) (I don't want to swamp the FS forum and annoy other sellers, so better to have it over a longer period so everyone gets a chance to see it) So get over there, have a look and chuck a bid in! Thanks!

Happy Birthday Andy! Here's to many more. A Sunday of hearing some bad news from friends, spending hours clearing out the garage trying to find one thing (and failing), and trying to resuscitate the battery on my weekend car, topped off with some spicy pasta, cider and a slice of choclate cake!

Sorry pbdubis, I didn't mean to imply you were a noob! Just covering all bases. I agree that the email from PayPal just looks like a routine query to follow up a transaction from a (probably) "high risk" country with a large amount in the transaction. If it were me I would reply to PP saying you're happy and all is well, send a copy of the email to the dealer showing the dealer you're trying to protect their PP account which I would think would make them happy enough to send out new watches to you. I would think the profit they'd loose if their PP account was closed permanently would be a hell of a lot more than these three watches cost. So that's what I'd, but I give people the benefit of the doubt more than most do, and probably get suckered in a few times as a result. Karma dude! Hope it all works out for you.

+1 If you nag them, they stop replying to you.

The fact that every single picture is of the gen watch means the rep (as in working rep) doesn't exist. If you ordered from there you may get lucky and get a pile of crap where the subdials are actually painted on and obviously non functional, or nothing at all.

Well I've machined the bracelet links that connect to the clasp and the gen clasp now fits in nice and snugly! Unfortunately the half link I have in the bracelet decided to completely fall to pieces when I was putting it together. It was just too worn to push back together and stay together so I tried some blue threadlock and that has worked brilliantly! All back together and the clasp now closes perfectly and doesn't fall to bits like the old one did. I'm still tempted to try to pick up a gen bracelet complete, if one comes along cheap enough I will, but for now I can move onto making the adapter that the gen bezel needs to fit properly. And in the meantime, wear it and enjoy it

Why on earth would PayPal be investigating the transaction if the payment has been made and it's all finished as far as they are concerned? Did you put any comments in with the Pp payment? I'd do some investigation, search on the forums for anyone with that name and of the correct location and ask them direct. I'm sure once they find out its a member who will lose out and not the dealer, they won't have any problem forwarding the watches to you.

Not had any problems with it either. Are you using the latest version?

Sorry mate, I'm in the EU so not up on the CONUS guys. Someone should be able to chip in with a name or two. I do believe a similar question was asked on another thread and the answer was given and also the fact that that particular modded was active on RWI and not here, so you may have better luck asking over there.

I think if any watch was a complete 1:1 rep, it would cost about 50% of the price of the gen and no one would buy it. And does anyone actually believe the 1:1 hype? I think you've got to be a bit naive if you believe it, same for waterproofing claims, and accuracy of the watches. I will admit to seeing these claims and wanting to believe them when I bought my very first two reps, but I then thought "they're selling them for 1 / 100th the price of the real item, so they will have taken a million and one shortcuts and used the cheapest of materials they can whilst still making it last a year or two, 1:1 my [censored]!" They're reps, they're illegal, so of course the websites selling them don't have to be up to some standard or law, and they all inflate their claims somewhat. As Panerai said, it's all part of the rep game.

I consider myself to be lucky in that even if I spot a flaw, I can very happily live with the watch as it is. I know someday it'll be serviced or fixed or modded, and I'll attack the problem then, no big deal. One thing for me is that in good pictures the watches are something like 4 times life size, and we can see all these gorgeous details about the hands, and the dial. And when you get it, and it's watch sized, you have to look closely to see all those details, and you realise that looking at it normally, once you can't see all those details, left with the rest, it's actually a pretty boring watch. And so gets flipped.

Yeah, right. Just like my $75 Alpha sub (without the Rolex name) is just the same as a $350 Rolex rep? The fact that the bracelet feels like a feather, that the crystal isn't sapphire, that there's no AR at all, that the movement is cheap Chinese rather than Asian built using genuine ETA machinery (IIRC)? It is a WORLD away from a $350 rep. Don't get me wrong, for $75 it's astounding and reliable and a great beater and I like the looks of it, but, just like this $120 Tudor rep, it is not going to approach anywhere near the quality of these reps.

I love mine, and even though I don't expect perfection it's that damn close I'm more than happy with it Anyone who C&Rs it either just got unlucky and got one with a problem and can't be bothered to send it back to be sorted, they'd rather say its perfect and shift the problem onto someone else, or maybe should stick to gens.

I recall a few schemes that had cars tried to get off the ground. None did. There are too many companies out there who own a dozen exotic cars and rent them out (although I know some owners do hire their cars out to these places but that is not common IIRC) and very few people want to put their valuable property in the trust of complete strangers. Insurance schemes always offer you below market value, which is bound to be way less than the value individuals put on their watches, how will you deal with that? How will you persuade people to send you thousands of pounds worth of property to a new startup company? How will you assure people their watch is still indeed their watch when it comes back? The only thing I would trust would be a written report on the watch by the manufacturer when it went in, and another report by the manufacturer when it came back out again, and I would expect it to be serviced at that time as well, at the companies cost. And the only insurance I would trust is a bond for the agreed value held in a bank account. Basically, it isn't going to work. If I wanted to swap watches with a friend, that's exactly what I'd do. I trust my friends. I couldn't trust strangers.

Put the big crown on lathe, turn it down, refinish, rechrome or repolish. You will need the gen crown to get the dimensions from. And doings that will not be cheap. Or you could measure the diameter of the tube and the thread pitch (is it a screw down crown?) and then look on Ofrei or Cousins for a suitable crown that will fit.

The best rep OOTB have got to be some of the Panerai models haven't they?

Why do car manufacturers advertise that a car can do 67mpg but in real life it only does 35 to 40mpg? Lies, damn lies, and statistics. But the parts interchangeable with gen description is mostly true, I haven't heard of any watch being described so as being totally non compatible.

Look in the trusted dealer section, the dealers all buy from only a couple of factories so they all offer mostly the same things. Though Some dealers will only stock one factories products, etc. Look around. Toro, Joshua, Angus are good.

Well I used Polywatch on my teeth tonight and they have come up brilliant! Tastes bleedin awful though.

Love the photos, it looks so peaceful in them. I've escaped the flooding and the worst of the winds in the storms we've been having in the UK. The weather tonight said that the snow storms you're having over there may extend right across the Atlantic and reach us here! Boggle! A storm front that is like 800 miles long and that will be snowing in the states and Canada and the UK at the same time? Can't get my head round it.

Oh man not another [censored]. Sorry to hear this Ken. I know I haven't used you yet but certainly intend to when things pick up on my side. I agree with your policy, only offer repeat customers PayPal but I would also add "and they have spent more than $50" to stop any scammer buying a $5 ring the first time and then trying to scam via PP.

Sigfreids, stick to gens if you need any rep to be that accurate. This is a lot closer to gen than many, many reps. Angus took over a year working together with the guys at RWI to iron out lots of problems. And as to the price being high? You make it sound like it's the most expensive rep out there! What about the Fifty Fathoms? $500 or so it's going to be IIRC? AP divers? Etc, etc. we've all moaned about the quality of reps, they've gotten better, we now have QC pics and the opportunity to check for obvious problems (abused by many) and the TDs are mostly happy to sort us out if it arrives DOA or goes MIA on the way to us. I wasn't around 5 or 10 years ago but from what I've heard you ordered something from a couple of grainy photos, and once it was posted that was it. Dead or alive, smashed or working, accurate or absolute rubbish, it was yours no matter what. And no one had heard of QC pics.

When you say it stops after you take it off, how long after? A day? An hour? 10 minutes? And what do you do during the day? Is it a desk job where your hands are not moving much? As to your point about the movement, if the manufacturer believed everyone who claimed something was wrong, most will be genuine, some would be people trying to scam them out of movements, dials, cases, bracelets, etc. sadly postage will break some things, you were unlucky but Angus will sort it out.

What did you order? And don't forget to let us know how the order goes and pics when they come.