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I joined this forum April 2009 because I was in search of a very specific replica. I so very badly wanted to find an IWC Regulateur. I found so many scam sites selling this particular watch and thankfully that endless searching brought me here. It's been about a year and a half since I joined and I have finally brought a Regulateur home. This is a well known timepiece around this forum as this is the one that Trombone had modified by none other than our resident modder, Francisco. You can find discussions about the movement here and the modifications Francisco did here The Regulateur is a very distinctive looking watch. Upon first glance, one might consider this to be just another Portuguese Chrono. Further inspection reveals that it is, in fact, an entirely unique and unusual watch face. The measured units of time, seconds, minutes and hours, are spatially separated from each other. The hour display has it's own sub-dial at the 12 o'clock position, the seconds display has it's own sub-dial at the 6 o'clock position. Only the large minute hand occupies the center of the dial, radiating outwards towards the outer perimeter of the watch face. The Regulateur comes from a very old tradition of horology. The quintessence of the horological precision instrument, which in the 18th and 19th centuries, had it's place in observatories, laboratories or watch manufacturers. This form of time display, which differs from that of all other watches, served a highly practical purpose in the early days of precision chronometry. The clocks of that time – mostly intricate grandfather clocks or wall clocks – were built with this dial architecture for observatories. Marine chronometers also occasionally had such an arrangement of the hands. The intention was to prevent the “slow” hour hand from concealing the important seconds hand in particular. For it had a crucial role to play in the observatories, on board ships for navigation, but also in the watch manufactories, where new watches were “timed” or “regulated” with reference to such timepieces. The name says it all. And so, without further ado, I present my grail time piece: The IWC Portuguese Regulateur And finally, a wrist shot: So what's next? Well, since this is my grail piece, it will require some very, very special upgrades. The movement modification is superb, but unfortunately the movement plates have the decorations from a very rare Wempe Limited Edition Regulateur. I would like to re-decorate the back plates to look more like the gen: Additionally, the crown is completely wrong for this model. The gen has IWC stamped on the crown and it is about twice as thick. So, a new crown will need to be sourced eventually. I would also like to see if there is anyway to modify the display back to include the screws. And the last mod - change the hands to make this the Platinum model. I do like the blue hands, but the platinum model with the silver hands is much classier in my opinion UPDATE: Now serviced and blue hands stripped to be silver like the gen above: