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My neighbor says, "You know anything about this watch?"

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LittleWatchShop Distinguished Member

LittleWatchShop

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Thinking further about Petek Philippe...and their Calibre 89 watch   It was the most complex watch until Vacheron upped the ante with their 57260. The complexity and genius must be admired, but there is a part of my brain that is conflicted.

For $30 bucks I can put a Raspberry Pi in service to do all those functions and more.  In addition, the Pi has more than a billion transistors squeezed into 10's of square millimeters of silicon.  Zoom in to those silicon chips and you will observe a different kind of beauty...and consider the brilliant technology that enabled printing of billions of transistors, each of which is about 20 nanometers square. 

My entire career was spent as an integrated circuit designer, so I have seen this beauty first hand.  Even so, when I peer into a beautiful watch and see it's fine workings, another part of my brain lights up.

Circuit and watch...both very beautiful.

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spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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Looks to me like a seconds-only stop watch (grandmother was a nurse maybe?). The column wheel is under the screw/plate around 3 o'clock in the photo. Crown is the pusher. 12 o'clock is the typical stacked third wheel arrangement, and the other non-center wheel is the clutch wheel. The rest in the lower section is levers and springs.

Definitely a beautiful watch, and definitely worth a small fortune. 

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LittleWatchShop Distinguished Member

LittleWatchShop

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9 hours ago, MechanicMike said:

My extensive and vast vocabulary is about to kick in: "Wow."

That is a ripper!  Feel heavy in your hand? Is your neighbor aware of what they have?

It feels slightly heavier than a typical watch of this size.  Yes, of course, I told her it was worth between $8k and $12k.  She has no interest in converting it into cash.  However, now that she knows its value, she is going to put it in a nice display case.

There is one on Ebay that was listed for $8k.  I started watching it and the owner offered it to me for $7k.  That one has been serviced and in perfect working order.  I am tempted, but I have recently spent a boat load of money restoring a 1964 Chevy C10.  I will never recoup that...lol.

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spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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There are definitely a handful of car guys on here. I used to have a K10 and a K5 (2wd isn't so hot up here). Currently DD a ZR2 Bison. My old Karmann Ghia is the 5th result in google images if you search "57 karmann ghia". Black and white, Texas plates, ironic coniferous background because the photo was taken at a Cars 'n Coffee at a BMW dealership in Dallas, and ultimately ended up actually in the mountains with more or less that exact background. Lots of others in my portfolio.

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spectre6000 Distinguished Member

spectre6000

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10 hours ago, Michael1962 said:

I'm not a car guy really, but I do like my Lotus Esprit S4.

Continuing the sidetrack...

How do you square the two clauses of that sentence? I feel like paying for the purchase (and maintenance) of a Lotus indicates a certain amount of enthusiasm that would probably earn one the "Car Guy" badge. My next door neighbor has a Nissan XTerra, and he's a car guy (by his definition and mine). 

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