re: #167 GeneJockey

Bravo for choosing a mechanical watch! Quartz can always be had for cheap, but there’s something about the engineering ingenuity of using an spring-regulated oscillating wheel, driven by impulses from the pallet fork which it also releases at a precise rate, controlling the release of energy from a wound spring through a set of reduction gears to tell time!

Heh.

I prefer automatic watches, as I never to worry about a battery going dead. They need to be cleaned and serviced periodically, of course, but I’ve had automatic watches in the past that I’d picked up in pretty bad shape, and they ran fine. They were Seiko5 automatics, and those are workhorses.

But here, yeesh……really expensive. A used one here in decent condition will sell for about $150 - I saw a really broken-down one at a second-hand shop downtown, and they wanted $50 for it, on the grounds that “It’s a Seiko automatic!”.

Yeah……a Seiko automatic that doesn’t work. Not even remotely worth $50; maybe $10 at the most. The one I want to get is a Seiko bullnose, like this:

but those are really pricey. Even a beat-up one sells for mucho dinero.