- Messages
- 13,025
- Location
- Germany
I've got a Poljot somewhere, a more basic one, but a nice watch. Also fond of my Vostoks. Very affordable - I think I paid thirty quid for my last Vostok about ten years ago - but solid, reliable, and no worries about taking them out and wearing them.
I've got three Vostok watches. Two Amphibia and a Komanderskie. Two automatics and one wind it up yourself. They can take a fair old kicking and come back for more. Cheap to buy, they look decent and they have been reliable for me. I wonder if they'll be harder to come by now we are tense with the Russians once more?
I like that style of Komanderskie. they are just good daily thrash watches, decent movements, shockproof, waterproof and they keep decent time. They also don't look "cheap" or obvious copies of other stuff. You don't run into that many folk wearing the same watch either, which is quite nice. Folk say the metal straps are a bit rubbish but I've had the same ones from new. I did get a mesh strap for one of them which is quite nice to wear.I suspect that may be an inevitability, depending upon how the politics of the situation - which I won't get into here, House Rules - play out in the long term. Somewhere I have a manual-winder, and an Amphibia automatic (one with a plain dial). The Amphibia (which I must find at some point!) was a pretty good time-keeper as memory serves, wore it daily for six or seven years about a decade ago. The hand-winder was a very cheap buy to keep me going at a time when I needed a daily driver watch and didn't have much cash to spare. Always seemed a fairly reliable piece - as long as I remember to wind it. It did always have a sense of being that little bit more delicate of the two, but I don't know how much of that was my projection from the fact it just needed that inevitable bit more attention than an auto-winder.
For some time during The Plague I went without a watch. Since 2013ish, I'd been wearing an Invicta, a US-made, or so the labelling claimed, Submariner homage that I picked up on Amazon. A nice enough watch and very affordable, though I found on me it tended to gain five minutes every week. Bought it and replaced the metal bracelet with a nylon, Nato-type strap in the style of the one Connery wore in Goldfinger. Early in lockdown one of the pins fell out and I hadn't worn it for some time - mostly used the manual Vostok at that time. Come last Christmas and I'd looked at lots of different watches in between times looking for a daily wearer I could just settle with, rather than having loads. I collected a few watches over the last decade or two, no really big brands, a couple of 'right of passage' fakes picked up in China; the plan is to clear the majority of them out and get down to one, nice daily wearer, and then maybe thereafter a couple of nice watches for occasional wear - ideally a Hamilton Ventura Automatic, and something nice with a smallish, rectangular face. For Christmas last year, the wife bought me one of these:
View attachment 428089
Same lug-width as my Invicta, so my small collection of nylon straps still fit, which is nice. I've come to rather enjoy switching them around regularly. The strap in the picture isn't the one that came with it - it's another I happened to pick up because it's in my club colours. Currently got a black and grey on it, though the one I bought it with is the Goldfinger design.
Very pleased with this watch: now it's run in, I don't remember the last time I had to correct the time on it. It's got a lovely, retro-diver vibe to it, but I enjoy that it doesn't look immediately like a Submariner or a Seamaster, makes it more its own thing. I particularly enjoy the GMT feature. There's a lot of debate on this one - some purists insist the design is not a "proper" GMT watch because the 24 hour hand runs on the same spindle as the hour hands. It's the one that looks like a second hand (the actual second hand is in the separate, subdial on the upper-left quadrant of the face). Others tell me this is the way the first GMT watches were designed. Either way, the functionality to have two-timezones at a glance is there. The bezel rotates to facilitate putting the 24hour hand into a different timezone. Here I have it set to UK time +7 - Beijing time. I'm currently teaching a class based out there (alas, for the third year in a row, exclusively online - I desperately hope I can get out there in person again next year), so it's handy to have that. The 24hour hand gives me the hour - if I want to be exact on the minutes, I obviously just use the standard minute hand.... When I'm able to travel again, I'll just set the regular hands to wherever I am, and then the 24 hour hand to 'home' time. It's not quite as quick to read the time from the 24hour hand, but handy enough when you're away and just need a general idea of the time back home. Much faster than figuring it out mentally.
In truth, before I got this I was looking at several dive-type watches in the GBP800-1000 region, but while this one doesn't have that sort of price tag, I'm so pleased with it that I've really quite lost interest in having an expensive alternative watch in a similar stylistic vein to take its place, either daily or on occasions. We'll see how long it runs, but if experience of my other Vostoks is anything to go by, this one should comfortably outlive me as long as I take reasonable care of it. I absolutely appreciate a nice, high-end watch, though I'll also never forget when our old family jeweller showed me a watch at GBP20,000 and one at GBP150, then flipped them over and showed that they both had exactly the same £10 movement.
The touch of orange is niceUuuuh, very nice! Congratulations!
The below onion has been the evening watch for restaurant and bar...