archibald

So your hobby is being an unclever d ick?

I'm obsessed w/ flaws but only for my own enjoyment . Sane people should realize that it is fairly easy, if even necessary, to bring good reps to a level that will fool all but the people who will never be fooled by ANY rep, however much you spend modding. It all boils down to the unavoidable fact that any rep's believability is 99% non-watch related. If you walk the walk, almost any decent rep, Rolex or not, will be assumed gen. If you don't walk the walk you could sport a gen rolex and everyone will say, "nice fake rolex."

No you weren't. You were trying to point out some sort of hypocrisy, as if removing how-to's violates "the spirit of sharing" 1/10th as much as trying to sell a damaged, asian-movement-descrobed-as-swiss watch for $40 more than the cost of a new one. The currently operating modders on other boards undoubtedly share your deep concern for the free exchange of knowledge and I bet will happily provide you free of charge with a step by step how-to so you can DIY any service they offer.

Something along the lines of a drug dealer flashing a of a zip lock full of smack to a room full of jonesing junkies... I wonder if it takes the rep factory forty hours to make each bezel like it does rolex. Anything less and it can't be 1:1. Seriously though, if the numbers are printed, or more likely, overlayed, on top of the ceramic it will defeat the whole purpose of the ceramic bezel look and will be an instant tell to anyone who's read Rolex's ad. Hopefully, they found some way to make the numbers fluch w/ the bezel itself.

Hi and welcome to RWG. Let me save you a lot of time, money and headaches: Head down to Sam's club or it's equivalent near you. Whip out the debit card and buy a Seiko Orange Monster, which is a fine orange dive watch you can buy for a little more than you paid for the PO rep. Wear it to the beach instead of your planet ocean. Why? #1 Nobody who knows what a planet ocean is is going to believe your quartz planet ocean is real. #2 Even people who don't know much about omegas will know your planet ocean is a rep since the general population thinks a fake watch "ticks instead of sweeps." #3 Moreover, everyone will wonder why you're taking off your dive watch before swimming, which you should do because there is no way to waterproof your rep or very many other $50 watches. One of the first things you'll learn if you hang around here (a lesson I and many of our RWG pals have learned the hard way) is that most reps, especially low cost reps, are made to fool people and in no way are designed or built to be function like their gen counterparts. These second thing is, sadly, that the cheapest version of reps rarely are worth even their low cost because they rarely serve either purpose--fooling people or functioning something like the gen.

I guess I have 2 comments: This thread got me all worked up, and I made 3 calls to local CNC shops: Two claimed to be able to have the ability to reverse engineer parts. One guy was clearly excited about his machines ans spent 20 minutes telling me about all the stuff he's done w/ this new thingamabob he put on one of his 6 axis CNC machines that more or less scans a 3d object to a high level of accuracy and even tells the cnc machine which tools to use. Apparently, the last thing they reverse engineered was some kind of piston assembly for $800, then forged and milled in a 25 piece run, both of which are good news. If this guy is not full of hooey, it means that in a 50 case run it would cost about $16 each not to have to measure everything and deal w/ the possibility for human error, measurement error, match doing, etc. Sure sounds good on paper...Which brings me to my next point. I think that if anyone does this it's crucial to find a shop that has done watch related projects. I've worked with several print, lens, and machine shops trying to do cyclops, DW, and CG projects. All claimed to have the best technology available. Almost none of them had the slightest concept of the tolerances watch projects require, or at least pretended not to. I suspect that the shops that do work at super high tolerances don't mess around w/ our tiny little jobs. in fact I was told several times that a mm margin of error aligning printing on a dw couldn't possibly be meaningful, that 1/16 inch tolerances cutting 1.2 inch circles was good enough for any project the guy w/ a 10 grand laser cutter could think of, that it was madness to require less than a .2mm thickness variation is a lens, and on and on and on. When combined with the fact that for most people a watch is a piece of plastic with flashing numbers, it makes for a lot of frustration. No offense to anyone here @ RWG who have made the heroic efforts Iwe all know are required to bring something from BSing in a thread to reality: but what percentage of all the projects have worked out fine the first, second, or even third time? I jest think chosing the shop is 99% of the battle and all the stuff discussed so far in this thread is the easy 1%.

Can anyone ID the most correct logo caseback? I have one that's #616 that looks really, really good but if there's a better one, I'd be all over it.

I bought both of those versions for a colleague. You're both right. Those are 2 completely different watches. Nikos sold you a 1st gen honpo. I believe paul sold sold a version of the honpo that was slightly different from eddie's. As you can tell from kruzer's pics neither one is the latest version sold by king and others, which is also available in swiss 7753.

That's exactly right. The guy who owns the local AD wears one.When I saw it my first thought was, "this guy owns watch store and he wears a digital?" And don't forget for your $1000 you're getting the wrong materials except for the bezel.

My wife just walked past, looked at the computer and said, "I guess you guys need fake watches with t*ts these days..." I did NOT say, "Only if they're big t*ts, honey."

That's a very very nice result, but what am I missing looking at the WM9 case? It looks a lot like a modded MBW or TW best case.,,,but there must be a reason that you guys are using $600 rep for the movement and the case, which still needs to be modded. Is it just the rehaut? The metal? I remember thinking that if WM9 had executed his original plan to use the asian 2892 and get the crown position/rehaut right, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but these have 2836, right? For my in-progress LV project I'm almost tempted to start looking for an OEM case---Even if it's a lot more expensive than the WM9 (The last sale I could find using google was a service case, whatever that is, for $998) you can use an asian 2892 and have a true franken for $400 more.

A while ago someone compared the rep and a gen side by side and concluded that aside from the usual fit and finish issues that separate 99% reps from their gen counterparts, the black dial is damn near flawless, while on the white version, the hands color is the only issue. I love most of the seatimer, but I just cannot do the chain-link crown thing that cartier has decided is one of their trademarks. If they ever put a santos-100-like crown on that badboy I'd be in.

The cartier and tag stules were exactly the watches I saw. Doing the math @ principalmetals.com, the cool thing is that since tugsten is so heavy if you're doing a daytona for exanple--only the case would have to be made of tungsten to get the weight very close to an 18k gen. The bezel, crown, pushers, etc could be made from steel.

I don't know jack about AV software so I just bought the 2 that had the average highest security ratings & lowest resources usage ratings from PCworld, cnet, etc.--Spyware Doctor and Kaspersky Labs AV. Both are working fine w/ vista and don't seem to mess w/ bittorrent at all. Lots of annoying popups from Kaspersky every time i started ANY program for about a week, but that seems to have abated after it figured out what applications I run. Over the 2 weeks or so I had them on my PC they seem to find and remove more bad stuff (they haven't been tested by anything really nasty, though) than my previous combo of Mcaffee and spy sweeper.

I doubt the guy selling those watches is much of a metallurgist, but thanks for the clarification. Whatever process they were made by couldnt have been too expensive--they were selling for $100.

Langes are in the top 2 or 3 most beautiful watches, in both form and function, to my eyes. But the 31 is an ugly design housing a completely unimpressive technical achievement. How long does it take set a watch? Does a winding key seem like an unelegant solution to anyone else? If I were going to shell out the money for a Lange I'd go for a the 1815 on left 31 days out of 30.

Every gen PAM I've ever worn that had AR had exactly the same color AR, autos and handwinds from various post-G series.

Went down to the local outlet mall today and as always killed a few minutes at the little watch kiosk which sells a lot of "off brand" versions of watches that have to be built at the sam factories that make the sub-$200 reps carried by a few of our dealers--lots a "rolexes," "omegas," "patek" etc usually under brand names that look like the gen's brand name 5 feet away. Anyway, the guy showed me a couple of "daytonas" and a "patek" that he said were milled from tungsten and then plated. Judging from the weight of these pieces he wasn't lying. I'd guess they were as least as heavy as they'd be if they were 18k. They also had a couple dozen non-plated, non-rep pieces that has tags that indicated they were tungsten as well, and they were also very heavy. I wonder if someday we're going to see some decent "18K" reps that weigh as much as they would if they were solid gold. Since gold watches, gen or rep, are dumb buys these days and since since the main tell between a 18k YG plated watch and a solid one is the weight, this would be a welcome development.

Why bother w/ casting? Even a low end CNC shop could make 1000 copies--1:1 copies regardless of whether the originals are cast or milled--in a day w/ very little tool wear. ACNC guy explained to me that CNC has gotten so accurateyou can mill stuff to copy the characteristics of other processes--tool marks from certain kinds of machining, the marks left from other kinds of engraving processes, etc.

It's QC pure and simple. Only thing you can do, Jay, is to keep sending them back and hope DSN is honorable enough to keep trying until he gets it right. Pls. keep us posted so new members can get an idea about which direction DSN's customer service is heading.

The rep/gen cost ratio is way better on the chrono. I like them both but will probably get the chrono--got the PO in non-chrono so might as well do this one in chrono since the black PO is pretty similar to the black SOH. I won't sweat the dials since I'd bet $100 gen dials are available pretty soon and even if the chrono dials cost $400, one would get you a 99.9% rep of a 4k watch for les than $800.

Can't warn the bidders, just the way ebay likes it. http://cgi.ebay.com/Panerai-Luminor-Marina...1QQcmdZViewItem

Swiss movements, many engraved by Benzinger, german made cases, etc. Not the most elegant brand name I've ever seen, there's no scam and no chinese parts I can see. In fact T's prices are excellent for what you get. Since you have made patently false claims that may affect another member's legitimate non-RWG business, you should edit or remove your posts, if not in the spirit of fairmindedness at least to avoid looking like a fool and a d ick.

Granted, I checked out of your analysis of the editorial decisions of the New York Times somewhere in the middle of the second graph, but I figured the main reason the Times ran this piece is because of, you know, the Torch. Gottta do China pieces during Torch Week.

As long as it's the TiN process and not DLC, I'm in.