I own about 60 watches, but I try hard not to be too tight-a$$ed about them. Every manufacturer these days is a corporate conglomerate, and everyone of them has violated some watch-idiot-savant sacred trust at some point or another, usually by some clueless Harvard Business School type who thought nobody would notice. The last watch company represented in my collection to have been founding-family-owned was Ebel, which was so until 1994. They are all corporate now. I swear I see so many reasons to boycott this or that brand I wonder sometimes if watch enthusiasts actually like watches.
As for me, I'd love to own a Luminor GMT, despite that one of the seven bazillion models put out by Panerai in the past had a poorly finished movement. I don't because they are loved by a lot more people than watch enthusiasts, apparently, and thus they are expensive even on the secondary market. I'm attracted to unique buying opportunities.
And I happily own several Heuer watches, despite that Heuer once overstated its role in designing a (good!) movement design they bought from Seiko, modified, and then started producing themselves. (Really?) Yet there are watch nuts who believe that the managers of Heuer past and present (to include the "sellout" Jack Heuer) should be lined up and...whatever.
My own special collection brand is Ebel, which is owned by (horrors!) Movado, which is (even more horrible!) American, and despite (ultimate horrors of them all!) that they are sold to regular people in shopping malls. (For the record, I've seen lots of Movado watches in malls, but the only mall I have ever seen with an Ebel in it was in a store that also carried the likes of Rolex, Lange, Vacheron-Constantin, etc.; I bought my Zenith El Primero in a mall, and also my Cartier Santos, and also my Heuer Monaco for that matter.) (I'm not counting Movado's own retail stores where they sell overstocks. Like I said, I like unique buying opportunities.)
Watch collectors love to be snobby.
Speaking of Ebel, here is an Ebel FastBeat from about 1970, with an ETA 2738, which was a high-grade automatic that came only as a 36,000 bph movement, and most of which were COSC-certified chronometers, as this one is. Like I said, sometimes I go old-school. There's a little patina on the dial, but then it's 53 years old, and closeup photos like these reveal age far more severely than in real life. If my surmise is correct, Ebel made fewer than a thousand of these. The reference is stamped on the caseback: 9436927, which means the caliber code is 436. That happens to be the first three digits of all the six-digit movement serial numbers for these that I've seen, so there had to have been fewer than a thousand of them.
Rick "needs a better strap" Denney
www.timex.ca
