archibald

I wouldn't get the VC Tourbillon at any price for a couple of reasons. 1) It's a carriage tourbillon and VC doesn't use them so having the VC brand of that watch is a "fatal" flaw if accuracy is an issue. I think Brequet or Blancpain do use carriage tourbillons but I remember them being @ 12:00 not 6.

If one of River's center tourbillons can be made to fit in a reasonablly accurate faux tourbillon case, that would be the way to go IMO since most tourbillons in gens are center tourbillon's like River's. The Muller Long island faux tourbillon is fairly accurate, for example. But you'd still have the problem would be pulling off wearing a "gen" tourbillon watch. Anyone who knows what a real tourbillon is is going to say, "shyeah right," unless of course you can clearly afford a real tourbillon---in which case you'd just take the AE Black card into the nearest AD...know what I mean?

So....if you want a tourbillon watch just because you think they're cool apart from any "cachet" you get by appearing to wear a 100k plus timepiece, I'd buy one of theno name or "off brand" tourbies available from many online watch dealers. That way, you'll get your tpurbillon and a warranty and no worries about accuracy.

I wouldn't get the VC Tourbillon at any price for a couple of reasons. 1) It's a carriage tourbillon and VC doesn't use them so having the VC brand of that watch is a "fatal" flaw if accuracy is an issue. I think Brequet or Blancpain do use carriage tourbillons but I remember them being @ 12:00 not 6.

If one of River's center tourbillons can be made to fit in a reasonablly accurate faux tourbillon case, that would be the way to go IMO since most tourbillons in gens are center tourbillon's like River's. The Muller Long island faux tourbillon is fairly accurate, for example. But you'd still have the problem would be pulling off wearing a "gen" tourbillon watch. Anyone who knows what a real tourbillon is is going to say, "shyeah right," unless of course you can clearly afford a real tourbillon---in which case you'd just take the AE Black card into the nearest AD...know what I mean?

So....if you want a tourbillon watch just because you think they're cool apart from any "cachet" you get by appearing to wear a 100k plus timepiece, I'd buy one of theno name or "off brand" tourbies available from many online watch dealers. That way, you'll get your tpurbillon and a warranty and no worries about accuracy.

Unbelievable work by The Zigmeister--painting watch hands and luming a Muller dial have to be two of the hardest procedures in rep watchsmithing. I bet not even the folks at the Muller factory lume dials by hand. Yet another excellent addition to the best rep collection on earth. Dudes, kruzer's too modest to admit it but with attention to detail, perserverence, and patience he has taken rep collecting to it's highest level. That Conquistador is one of about 10 watches that he and The Zigmeister have brought to the most accurate level humanly possible.

For those w/ white dial Mullers, that hand color makes all the difference--the out-of-the-box blue rep hands are a 1/10 second tell for a collector. I forgot the color #--it's the darkest blue Ford makes. Funny story: when I selected the color I brought a set of OEM Breguet hands that looked about the same color as OEM muller hands over to AutoZone (after burning through all the Testors paint @ Micheals)and stood there painting lines on their paint rack then putting the hands up against the paint. The guy came over to see what I was doing and instead of kicking me out actually got into helping me compare. BTW, Chevrolet makes a slightly darker blue, but since the Ford paint had the letters "FM" in front of the number I took it as a sign from God that I should buy that one...

Maybe I should have said:

Warning !

Individual results may vary !

Honestly, no brown or dirty 'film' on my dial, I compared it afterwards with my other sandwich dial and it looked identical, except for the darkened dial txt.

I didn't so much "smudge the tar around", just very lightly wiped the dial with the cotton bud, like the one women use as a make-up remover, it accentuated the ivory color of the text and no dirt or brown tar layer were left on the dial, well not visible one, anyway. It also preserved that matte finish, H-series PAM dials are known for.

I'm currently in Europe for few more weeks, so no pics of my 111H to be posted yet. I only took my Logo Base with me.

cheers,

babola

I don't have a 111H yet, but after reading babols's post I tried this last night w/ an old 111E dial just for kicks--IMO you do have to wipe off the dial to restore the slight "speckled" appearance that the dial has out of the box (don't know if that's accurate to gen H's or not). On my first attempt I tried a cotton ball, but got too close to the lettering and wiped too much of the cigarette "ink" off of the lettering, which BTW wasn't too even to begin with. On my second attempt I used a cotton ball for the majority of the dial and then a Q-Tip, on which I pulled and then twisted the cotton into a sort of paintbrush to do around the lettering--it's going to take some practice, but I think that will work for most.

Babola, what I'm not clear on is do you want to lightly hit the "dyed" lettering w/ the cotton to smooth it out or try to avoid it entirely?

Now all we need is an accurate H series guard to make changing the color of the text worthwhile, but that's a different thread.

Forget it. I found it myself.

Jos has it .... but what he labelling as a PAM 162 .... is a pure fantasy and very far from being a 162.

Blue subdials ??? ...... Gen has black-grey subdials.

IMO the last thing we PAM rep collectors need is another black dial luminor of any type. Don't you guys want to vary your collections? How about a couple nice radiomirs--a GMT would be nice, even a reissue of the 163 w/ date would be great (could use the poljot handwind chrono which comes w/ a DW) Or a white/rose gold one that actually corresponds to a gen? How about a decent blue dial auto in 44 or 40mm? How about a titanium auto w/ a dial that isn't flawed all to hell?

Whom did u get the 183 from? may i ask...?

Wear 'em well!

Yup, about as perfect as you can get!! congrats!!

I am tickled pink to see a new movement emerge from the underworld. Interesting stuff. I look forward to a slew of new & interesting reps.

I'll wait to see a The Zigmeister review before I either buy an asia 7751 powered rep or declare it a cluster[censored] without seeing one. Has anyone seen one of these movements in the flesh? It'd be interesting to see if they copied the 7751's moon phase function as well. If so, there's about 100 never before repped watches that just got reppable.

I just received the newest dial - I got a 177 couple months ago but there was a QC issue with one of the cutouts so he offered to send me his latest dial when it was ready. Here are the pics.

I hate to complain about davidsen's work because he is the only person on earth who is attempting to improve the accuracy of PAM dials, and I hope he takes the following comments in the spirit od admiration they're intended--but I think it's time for him to fire whoever is doing his graphics work. Even w/ my limited skills and knowledge it took me about two seconds to identify the problems w/ his new dial. I'd bet $1000 the cut out numbers were vectorized from a scan or pic of a gen dial--but done so with improperly configured sotware. I'm too lazy to explain how I can tell (except by PM to Davidsen) but the ends of the numbers are a giveaway. The kerning of the "Panerai, etc" which I bet was not traced but rather composed as text objects, is also off in relation to the H series gen, and as someone pointed out earlier the L-Swiss-L is too bold.

Two things bug me about the whole thing--when I was working on the vintage overlays I took some pretty intensive lessons from a neighbor who is an experienced talented graphic designer (a package designer for a HUGE candy company based near me)--and she repeated over and over: copying something 90% is the hard part. getting it from 90% to 100% is easy--once you use your skills to get it close you just continually overlay your work against the original and tweak until it matches. It would take a decent designer less than 15 minutes to get davidsen's dial from where it is to 1:1...It's almost as if hours were spent on the project and the last ten minutes were just completely blown off. My guess is nobody involved feels the need to cater to us nutcases, and that good enough is good enough.

sssurfer, that baby is a single "A" away from 1:1--the modded cyclops is truly 1:1...for that watch more accurate than any of the 3 previous projects. Excellent!!

I know the "A's" don't bother many people as much as they do me, but IMO its a shame to put so much work into these babies and not be able to get them perfect. I wish someone with more Illustrator skills than me could send one of our dial makers the right P-A-N-E-R-A-I vectors...or at least sell the file to those of us willing to find someone to do it--the printing itslef would be no problem for even small screen printing shops.

i guess it is a real functionnal "moonphase". This has been confirmed by two dealers;

This mecanism has been istalled on :

1) fantasy patek

2) fantasy A. Lange & Sohne

3) fantasy IWC Portugese

Very nice watches though !!!

Warm regards,

Xel

They sure are nice. I especially like the Patek...unfortunately, my "accuracy" psychosis is so accute that I can't put on a fantasy rep anymore without going nuts by 10:30 in the morning.

I just thought of something--there may not be many chronos w/ a moon phase @ 6:00, but there are plenty of non-chronos--GP, Patek off the top of my head--I wonder if there is a way for the factories to rig the Venus so that the center chrono hand becomes a running center second and the chrono subdials aren't used. Yeah I know the power reserve would suck and the idea of having an unused chrono function is silly, but I'd rather have a rep that corresponds to a gen w/o the chrono than a fantasy with one.

When I read that seagull was working on a moonphase, I figured they would just rep the DD calandar module since they already have repped the 2892 it goes on. The DD calandarmodule can't be that haute horological since it's on a lot of $500-600 watches. A An asian 2892 calandar movement would open up a whole world of reps since dozens and dozens of gens use that configuration such as the sweet FM master calandar.

Hi,

The caseback is real wood insert.. Same construction like the genuine.. I have not got the prices yet..It will not be cheap though..

Swiss movt should be avail for this watch..

Once info is in, I will update on my web and send out the mailers.. Stay tuned.

Thanks

Joshua

Sorry if this nitpick is already buried somehwere in this thread--the insert looks like real wood to me, but the difference between gen and rep is that the metal boat appears inlaid into the wood on the gen and glued on top of the wood on the rep. But it's a lot like engraved backs--anyone who knows what this watch is supposed to look like will spot its repness via other flaws (e.g. the bezel, dial finish, etc) long before they get to the piece of wood on the back.

Probably lots of people have seen the fantasy Lange w/ the Seagull "Venus." Jos calls it a working calandar;Andrew calls it a working moon phase. I've long predicted that a real moonphase would be the next rep movement breakthrough, but I'd be floored if it arrived first on the seagull handwind chrono movement...I'm thinkming it's a day/night and the infamous Mr. Happy Sun resides unpictured on the bottom of the "moonphase" wheel. Love to be wrong though....Can anyone confirm that this is indeed a functional moonphase? Is there a gen handwind chrono that actually has that dial configuration (moonphase @ 6/running seconds @9/30 min. @ 3)?

I just remembered something which you seldom hear about (I wonder why, given the "war on terror" talk that has obsessed our gubment for the last 5 1/2 years.) In the lat 90's Bin Laden-trained guy name Kansi, I think, walked into a gun store in northern VA and bought a semi auto AK-47 clone. A couple days later he murdered and wounded a number of CIA agents. Odd, isn't it? An evildoer kills people on US soil, at the CIA for God's sake, is succesfully "brought to justice" and we never hear about it? Wonder if the fact that he bought the assault rifle legally is the reason his attack never gets tossed into list along w/ the dozens of others repeated ad nauseum the people that never stop talking about terrorism?

Hypothetical: Imagine if the VT shooter were a muslim extremist and got the guns at the local Wal-Mart. Just wondering if anyone posting in this thread would be willing to submit to more stringent gun laws to make it harder --however slightly--for terroists to get guns.

This is statistics and can be interpreted any way you want, but I dont think US citicens like to murder more, than people in Australia for example.

So what is the diffrence social ? access to guns ... ? lack of education ? you tell me.

I don't know...but when it comes to charts, we Americans will take a back seat to noone.

Here's a chart I ran accross that shows what single issue voting gets you. The Republicans like to brag that, based on turnout polling, the support of gun owners and anti-abortion voters made all the difference in key states in 2000 and 2004. I don't know what NRA and NRTL members' average income is, but while many of them donate and vote for candidates largely on their position their favorite issues, I always wonder if they consider the actual dollars and cents cost of that support. The yellowish vertical line represents the changes in tax policy put into place in 2001.

Can I just interrupt this debate to offer a few thoughts about why this thread iexists at all?

In a country that's evenly devided, where information can be disseminated in real time, where grass roots organization is the order of the political day--"Debate" is the lifeblood of votes. Or at least of money, which is the lifeblood of votes. The medial loves, needs debate and so do political organizing groups--of which the NRA is one of the best.

The NRA is going to use this shooting in two ways. They can get Republicans, (which means, these days, the Prez runners) to get into a biddiing war over the gun voters. The winning bid will be the strongetst pro-gun statements. There will be many bidders seeing as 60% of the GOP primary field comprises moderates falling over themselves to look like a cross between Tom Delay and Pat Robertson. The NRA also wants Hillary and Obama to say something immoderate (which they may feel they may have to do, since they're fighting over the left of Dem Party) to be used to whip up the gun voters during the general election.

What about the anti gun crowd, arch? What are they doing? My answer--as a democratic operative--is "screaming loudly for handgun bans probably, but who gives a [censored]?"

Since manufactured debate is about votes, and reality is about laws here'w what's going to happen in real life: Nothing. No gun legislation. No big court cases. Just a bunch of people like us getting whipped up on the Internet, firming up our opinions of who we love and who we hate. Getting rared up to go vote for and against whomever. Guess what? There's no anti-gun movement. At least not in any way that has a 1% chance to affect gun ownership--an anti-gun bill wouldn't get enough Democrat votes to pass the house or even get a vote in the senate. Why? Because most realize that it's a losing and irrelevent issue: Talk too much about guns and you whip up a lot of freaks who are going to go out of therir way to vote against you. There are very few anti-gun single issue voters--not enough people have had their kids killed down at the college. Anyway, everyone knows that you can outlaw guns tomorrow and there will still be enough floating around to arm any crack pot hankering for a Glock.

What the NRA is really hoping for is that a few Dems do introduce some legislation--either to shore up the left for a bigger office run or to play to their urban constituancies--and that Pelosi and/or Reid are willing to let it come to floor debate. Mind you, that decision will not be based on any registration or background check bills chance of passing (it wont in a million decades) but the political juice to be gainded from the debate, but IMO unless someone like Hillary absolutely forces it, they should just let the NRA scream. The people they're screaming for won't vote for us anyway.

OK. Now back to the passionate "Debate" about GUN CONTROL.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a BTR series rep pretty soon. It has all the ingredients--nice looking sport watches which seem to be the most commonly repped, Asia 7750 compatable, a brand w/ expanding name recognition and advertising, etc...

But the bottom line is that the mind of the repmaker is incomprehensible--it's just as likely we'll see 4 IWC's, 6 PAMs, and 3 more versions of the BB first.

That is absolute perfection. Unbelievable....a not-too-good rep turned into a clone of a 50 grand watch with a few well placed smears of oil paint and some hammer dings. How cool is that?

Hoping someone knows the dia. of the rep BCE dial, so I can try to hunt down a gen from one of the usual sources. Somebody on Ebay is advertising a bunch of "80's-90's" Breitling dials, but they don't look right to me...If I can source a gen dial that works I'll pass along whatever source I find to anyone who's interested.

Hoping someone knows the dia. of the rep BCE dial, so I can try to hunt down a gen from one of the usual sources. Somebody on Ebay is advertising a bunch of "80's-90's" Breitling dials, but they don't look right to me...If I can source a gen dial that works I'll pass along whatever source I find to anyone who's interested.

I've only been refused by one watchsmith (the place that advertises "Swiss trained watchsmith" in Tysons for you guys in DC) and I bet he wouldn't have even known my 111 was fake if one of the foil bridge overlays didn't come off while he was working on it. Called me up and snippily said he doesn't work on "counterfeits goods." One of the local smiths I use and I sort of do a don't ask don't tell thing--he obviously knows all of the watches I bring in are reps but has never said anything and neither have I. The other couldn't care less. He happily works on my watches, including various mods.

god... I thought you meant this one...

That's a rare sight indeed.

Which reminds me...the guy who owns the cigar store by my house (and a cigar bar in DC that probably does 50k a week) collects vintage rollies--I've seen him with a 1680, a DRSD and a gold PN. Kruzer00 was kind enough to loan me his MBW great white (Singer dial, ubi bezel w/ OEM pearl, gen tropic, crown and tube, watchmiester DW, complete ziggification)...maybe I'll go buy a couple Hoyos tomorrow and see what happens!

dang

.

i'm more bothered by yet another spoiled rich kid (see kobold) getting into the watch business

Exactly... I'm going to get a bunch of bumper stickers printed that say, "Honk if you're starting a luxury watch company"

"Supper" Smog

"I am Cold Rock. I am Dull Grass." Various covers of Will Oldham songs, most better than the originals.

When I was in college I only listened to bootlegs since for some reason I don't remember I believed that Rock and Roll was only meant to be played live. Mpstly i just spent all my money @ Wax Trax Records--I have a hundred or so bootleg LP's in my basement somehwere if any old timers want a CD of their fav 80's college rock band playing live. The ones I remember are:

R.E.M--live in Ames Iowa ,1985. I think I had the entire Reckoning tour.

The Minutemen--San Diego, 1987?. Maybe the greatest 30 minutes of live music ever recorded.

The Replacements--CGBG, 1988 Someone yells "You Suck!" Paul Westerberg Replies, "Dad, you made it." Their encore consists entirely of horrfic versions Black Sabbath.

The Ramones--Cabaret Metro, Chicago 1983.

Husker Du: Minneapolis 1984.

Somebody (Metallica?) playing an entire set of Misfits songs around 1988 or 89.

Sounds like more of the same. QC problems galore and a premium price. This is exactly why my replica purchases are restricted to $90 asian 21j pieces these days. I don't care how good this thing looks to HBB owner wannabees, screws falling out and stripping, bracelet problems, the Asian 7750 etc.....$400 is an insane price to pay for a watch of this quality no matter what the fidelity of the reproduction. If you spent just twice as long saving your lunch money as you did saving it for this good looking/dubious quality gem, you could buy a used genuine Speedmaster or an Oris TT1 if you love big metal, and on and on......

But then nobody would think you're wearing a Big Bang. I say that with 100% seriousness. Open up any of the annual watch magazines. You can find an inexpensive versions of nearly every non-complicated watch made from--including the Speedmaster and the Oris TT1, by the way--but that's beside the point. IMO smart rep buyers buy reps because they'd like the brand cachet but refuse to pay the 6000% markup on mass produced ETA movements. If you canbuy and mod a rep to reasonable accuracy you get the best of both worlds.

But I do feel ya on the BB rep price tag. That markup is almost as offensive as a gen.

I have a new strategy too--I only buy reps of watches powered by hugely marked-up ETA movements (I may get a BB when the price goes down, but mostly it's Panerai and Muller for me) and save up the dough I'd ordinarily spend on mediocre reps of essentially unreppable or unmoddable watches and buy a couple expenseive, high value gens, which I did to pay for my JLC and Chopard, both of which have unreppable movements.

I guess I figure if I forgo $2500 worth of reps that aren't anywhere near perfect this year and add the cost of a Speedmaster, I can get pick up an AP this december.

Back on topic: From what I hear from various reputable sources, the new Asian 7750 is a lower build quality 1:1 copy of the swiss 7750--and all hands, DW's etc can be swapped one for one.

The US government cares about what they're paid to care about just like everybody else. They're pressuring the Chinese, to the extent that one can pressure its largest creditor and trading partner, on movies, software etc. There might be some Paneristi House comittee staffer somewhere who cares about rep watches, and some Press Officer at the Customs Bureau did get a little carried away with the post-911 funding grab by putting out a release that said reps fund trerrorists, but other than that nobody cares much about fake watches--that's why some PI hired by GAF with local cops in tow is runiining around putting pinhead-sized tiny dents in US rep distribution.