archibald

I'm nota big Cartier fan either, but aside from the date font and the pretty rough-looking fit nd finish, this one looks pretty accurate.

Excellent idea, experiment, and write-up guys...Great Job!!!

Hands down, the most overrated reps are the H series PAM manual winds--even some of the most anal retentive of my fellow anal retentives are so star struck (by sandwhich dials is my guess) that they seem to overlook the instant-tell CG, the thickness difference, etc. I've always read that, as ubi said, MBW's are the best modders platforms...I don't recall any knowledgable collector ever claiming anything beyond that. Also, for a long time, they were the only vintages and non-hole moderns available. I think that's when they achieved their mythical status. But, yes, like most hard to get items, the reality can never measure up to the hype..

They still are for me, but I think it's more noticeable on slower connections. Down in my office w/ cable I don't notice much difference, but on my laptop's slow ass wireless conncetion there is a big difference since the latest upgrade. Being the loyal RWGer that I am I still click the ads even when I'm on the laptop...

Unless they've recently changed, I believe Spy Sweeper detects and cleans during the free trial period. After that, it will only detect spyware until you pay up. IMO, spy sweeper is a very good program. Ms. A says Ad Aware is better, but I've never tried it. Pug, I've been a dedicated PC user since the days when my (IBM designed) Radio Shack TRS-80 used a tape deck as a hard drive....since I've started using my wife's Mac to do the DW project, I have to tell you, for graphics work there's absolutely no question of Mac's superiority.

Yes, I once had a package delayed for three weeks. Leave it to me to get the guy dressed as E.T opening the package....couldn't he have just taken off the goddamn gloves?

ooops....double post.

Oh...I didn't see the unlimited budget part in the OP. Most people I now who actually have unlimited budgets go for understated proof that they have unlimited bugets, so if I were one of them I might go with an 18k Stainless watch:

A welcome reminder tha this is a hobby, which die hards we sometimes forget, is supposed to be fun. Best of luck to you, Finepics.

I have a gen w/ the brown dal, which I love...and the 2894 is a great movement. What I don't understand is why they don't rep the non-chrono version that came out last year. IMO, the Monaco is a much classier watch than the idiotic golf watch, the link, etc all of which have been accurately repped.

Love the white dial version, and the strap! Might have to be my first breitling.... Can one of you Breitling experts clue a clueless pal in on the flaws on this rep, if any?

Another option would be to try to make a contemprary 8-day pam...can't remember the #, but you which one I'm talkng about--the one in the fiddy case, which I (briefly) considerd doing the first time I saw an Angelus powered travel alarm. Although you can find the travel alarm versions of that movement in major metro area flea markets (I've seen about 5 in the DC area) for $150 or so, according to my watchsmith, it'll cost you well over a $1500 in parts (vintage and custom made) and labor to make the movement function and look like the one used in the 8 day "fiddy." Pug's $2000 figure might even be a little low for a movement that has already been modified and serviced...if you can even find one. Then you'd have to have the 8-day thing @ 3:00 laser engraved onto the the fiddy dial, and have a back custom CNCed and engraved. Since the gens are, what, 20k the 3k this project would cost might be worth it if you are PAM obsessed and have pockts a little deeper than mine....

Great post....I think plausibility is the #1 factor in pulling off any rep, especially well-known brands.

You guys want reps of $125 cufflinks?

Just in time..... I never thought I'd see the day, but I'm actually going to buy an MBW vintage. Ubi, I know you already told me this, but it might help people choose which MBW to buy if they knew which vintage Rolex is the least rare, most rare ect. For plausibility reasons, I'm going to go w/ the least rare---and thus least expensive and most believable if I ever run into a WIS at work--that would be white SD, right?

I agree with almost e erything said in this thread. What's really interesting to me is how, as reps improve, the definition is becoming more ethical/legal than practical/horological one. Let's say I buy a jimmyfzu case and CG; davdesen hands; a nearly 1:1 rep caseback and AR crystal for an old 005 rep; a gen dial; a palp crown; and a 6947-2 from Ebay. All of those parts, save the dial and movement, are rep parts made outside of Switzerland and the watch is assembled in the USA. Even though the dial is OEM I say modded rep, since a franken to me would have more gen parts, but the quality difference is minimal between that rep and a gen panerai. Visually not even a WIS could tell the difference without opening the case, but it is definitely a rep...legally. But it looks identical, works indentically. Things get a little murky once you close the law books, IMO.

I'd be in for a pair w/ the FM logo...

I lived there for a few months in 2000, Bill, so all I can do is recommend a couple of places to eat, my other obsession: First, high end anything in Milwaukee (Sanford,Osteria Del something, slick nightclubs, any of the the high end German places) is probably going to be a mediocre rep of some bigger city counterpart. On the other hand, Milwaukee is one America's great working class cities, and you definitely can get unbelievably good down home food. 1)Polonaise--don't be fooled by it's absolute dumpiness and rock bottom prices. The old Polish grandma in the kitchen cooks some of the heart-clogingly good Polish food outside of Warsaw. 2)Kopp's Custard--Speaking of heart cloging, Kopp's is a Milwaukee institution: Frozen Custard that has about as much butter fat as triple cream brie and they actually put a pat of butter on their hamburgers, but both the burgers and custard are awesome, it's copy-cat, Culver's, is about a 90% rep. 3)Comet coffee: may be a typical granola-eater coffee shop, but they roast their own coffee, and I still think about that stuff every morning as I slog down my Starbucks---Comet Coffee is hands down one of the best cups of coffee I've had anywhere in the world. 4) For the quintessential Wisconsin "supper club" experience (a "relish tray", soup, salad, a decent and gigantic steak, and some home-baked desert---all inclusive) try to get into Coerper's Five O'clock Club which is hard to do on short notice. 5) The bar at Landmark Lanes on the upper east side has an unbelievable collection of draft microbrews and german beer which I've never seen on tap anywhere else. Try the New Glarus cherry beer if they have it.

I agree...the all time dumbest practice of rep collecting. Not only are people who do this deluding themselves that that they fool any watch salesman who actually knows anything about watches (I know for a fact that at the AD I go to to regularly look and rarely to buy, every new salesperson is instructed NEVER to call a potential customer out on a rep) but they're not doing themselves or their felow collectors any favors-"Hey, let's go show off how good reps are getting to represntatives of an industry that has a financial incentive to demand stronger anti-counterfeiting laws!!!" Taking a rep in to "fool" and AD is almost as dumb as hiding your watch's repness from your wife.

I love regulations like this (US Law is filled with similar rules) which are marketed as some sort of ensurance of quality, but are realy to make sure that is anyone wats to mark their product made in wherever, they're paying taxes in wherever. The laws themselves actully make it pretty easy to put the "made in" mark on, as long a company actually sets up shop in the country in question. Franck Muller is my favorite example. Aside for their "Haute" pieces, most of Muller's parts (even some of the movements are poljot) are made in various eastern european countries, and are made to follow those stringent swiss made laws with the addition of a rotor made of platinum (which they market as somehow making the watch run better rather than it's real purpose:to make 50% of the value of the parts "swiss". Proably they would have used gold if the price of a gold rotor equalled half of th cost of the other parts...but sadly for muller, the had to shell out for the ".999 Platine."

You should tell your pal that a)he ain't never going to see is watch again, and b)if he thiks he still feels the need to impress his wife with a fancy watch, or if he's afraid she'd think he's pathetic for wearing a fake watch, he has far more serious problems in his life than his rep.

Looking at that pic--(which is about 4X zoom plus the 3x cyclops) something pretty funny, or at least ironic, occurs to me. What I'm proudest about about that number 31 are the imperfections, which (sorry about the self-bell-ringing), are 100% perfect in that ithey're exactly in the same places as the imperfections on the number 31 on the wheel ubi provided. The hardest and most expensive part part of the project was finding a combination of technologies and materials that were durable and cost-effective and worked together at a high enough resolution to duplicate the low-resolution of 1960's printing, which is harder than it sounds. Most processes available actually either create different flaws (by making the bumps and wiggles of the original ink look bizzarre through pixelation, like, say, on an ink jet printer) or smoothing out the numbers so much they look too uniform, like they rolled off an assembly line in 2006 instead of 1966. In other words we had to go right to the cutting edge of high tech to 1:1 (LOL) duplicate low tech...

Guys, relax. These are going to happen VERY shortly. We have many in hand, more are on the way. They all look as fantastic or fantasticer than the pics ubi posted. We may even offer a couple different versions (same appearance) to fit different "models" of watches. Please be a little patient, as anyone who's done a project knows the first days after you do your offer are nuts w/ orders and 1000 questions. Randy has been swamped at work, I am in the middle of negotiating a partnership agreement for a new business I'm starting, kruzer00 travels the world for his job. We're deciding who is going to do what: shipping, pay pal, etc, figuring how much we have to charge to make our money back and maybe take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese, and write the "offer" post. You won't have to wait much longer guys...

OK, so now Jos and Andrew have responded. Their response is: We've changed, sort of, just because we were asked to. But we really didn't do anything wrong. The translation of which, of course, will not be lost on anyone familiar with this type of response: "[censored] you." Keep in mind that Andrew and Jos's earliest response to the "ETA" issue was that calling Seagull movements ETA movements was standard operating procedure in China which I personally found amusing since running over people with tanks was also standard operating procedure in China, too. Apparently the SOP excuse didn't fly, so now Andrew and Jos say it's reasonable to call a Seagull movement an ETA movement because it is a copy...er...clone...of an ETA movement. They won't do it anymore, because those wacky admins asked them not to...but, hey, it was reasonable. Andrew and Jos also pretend they don't know what the term super lume means. "What does 'super' mean," Andrew asks. As you know Andrew, the meaning of super is determined by the word that comes after it. And, as you also know, when the word "super" is followed by the word "lume" it indicates that the watch has been lumed with Superluminova. Now it's the perfectly reasonable Superb Lume. Of course the biggies are not even addressed: Using the terms "1:1" and "Perfect" to describe watches that are not even "best of class" reps. Maybe reasonable explanations for those are a little harder to come by? As I suggested on TRC, there is a simple solution to this whole issue. If we assume that rep forums, as the all their respective Admins state, is designed to help prevent rep collectors from getting mislead, then there is an easy way to fulfill that inteded purpose 100%: There should be a prominenetly placed, stickied thread or, better, a "welcome" PM sent to all new members, that clarifies any misleading advertising terminology in use. If anyone joins and does not read the PM or thread, getting fooled is their problem, and the purpose of the rep boards will have been fully accomplished. Nonforum members who get fooled by misleading ads are not our problem. In fact, I think quoting liberally in a Post or Email, from Andrew's response would greatly help people decide who they should buy their watches from. We owe the RWG powers that be a thank you for quietly asking Andrew and Jos to change their ad copy. It will be interesting for long time members, especially those of us who moved over from the original RWG, to see if the admins act further based on the content and tone of Andrew and Jos's "response."

A couple of years ago, you'd have been laughed off the board if you asked when the chinese were going to copy the 7750, 2892, and 6947. The 3035, like the el primero, is a slightly different animal, but I'm not going to be one of the people in thread who are going to tell you, "No way, never going to happen." Judging from their products, I see seagull and other chinese factories improving their technoloigy and capabilities at an amazing rate... If you're asking if you can build a 3035 from parts you scrape up piecemiel, the asnweer is yes if you know how to build a watch, but I bet at the end you'll wish you'd just gone and bought a gen rolex because it's would have been cheaper...