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The Last Great American Watchmaker


GBOGH

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A little off subject (Apologies), but below is a short and interesting article about American start up (Detroit based) manufacturing firm...they intend on producing watches as part of their range. Its great to see this kind of local design, craft and manufacturing resurgence stateside.

http://www.fastcodes...er=newsletter#1

The company is called Shinola - They have a nice story.

http://shinola.com/#our-story

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"I did have the opportunity to talk to him once or twice and in all honesty he was not a nice guy."

I bought parts and a few watches from him at watch shows in the early 1990s when he worked for SMH (now Swatch) in Lancaster PA and talked to him quite a bit.

He was a bit 'distant' but always nice to me and his prices were reasonable.

'distant' in this case = seemed like he would rather be somewhere else

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"I did have the opportunity to talk to him once or twice and in all honesty he was not a nice guy."

I bought parts and a few watches from him at watch shows in the early 1990s when he worked for SMH (now Swatch) in Lancaster PA and talked to him quite a bit.

He was a bit 'distant' but always nice to me and his prices were reasonable.

'distant' in this case = seemed like he would rather be somewhere else

Agree with the distant part. And when it came to get a repair done he was a complete jerk.

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They (RGM) were hard to deal with. Several years ago, they were the authorized service center for Doxa. I emailed them about a vintage Sub 300T Doxa Divingstar that I bought of a guy in France. I actually bought two of them form him at the same time, both were watches that had been issued to the French navy. At some point in time, both of them were serviced by whatever facility did the work for the French military. At that time Doxa was pretty much out of the dive watch business (1990's) and parts were unavailable. The service facility replaced the hands on both watches with Tudor Snowflake hands! Nice enough, but not correct. At any rate, I wanted to send one of them in to have the watch serviced, replace the crystal and gasket and replace the hands with Doxa hands. They told me to send the watch to them and they would let me know what it would cost to do the work. Well, I sent it in and waited about amonth, never heard a word, so i called them. They told me that they had my watch, and it was in line but probably wouldn't come up for repairs for another month. Fine, iwaited a month plus and called them back. yes, thye had looked at the watch, and were "looking" for parts! Now this is supposed to be an authorized service center. Well, long story short, they kept my watch for almost a year, never found the parts, and shipped it back untouched, overa year later. I made up my mind that i would never ever buy anything that came from them or needed service by them. Wasn't long after that that Doxa gave up on them as well.

I ended up sending the watch to Jack Alexyon at IWW, he kept the watch for about a month, found the correct hands and replaced them, new crystal and gasket and it looked as good as new (well, not quite, but it looked as good as and old ex military beat up Doxa dive watch could look!"

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below is a short and interesting article about American start up (Detroit based) manufacturing firm...they intend on producing watches as part of their range. Its great to see this kind of local design, craft and manufacturing resurgence stateside.

Good to see truly skilled artisans returning to Detroit. About time, too.

Now if they can just rid the city of the progressive rot that has infested & destroyed what, 40 years ago, was 1 of the greatest cities in the world.

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