Couple of recent projects - Gruen and Seikoak

Charette · March 18, 2023

Hi all, hope everyone is doing well.

Here are a couple watches I have finished up recently.

Before these I worked on an orient but that one is not quite done - I have my third crystal coming my way from the UK. The 1st from Perrin did not fit; I then found out I needed a specific crystal. A mishap with my crystal press put a big crack in the 1st shipment from Cousins, and hence the second order. Unfortunately I have now spent way more on the crystals/shipping than I did for the watch, but you have to pay to play, as they say. Learning experiences.

I don't believe I have anything specific to note from the Gruen, it was pleasant to work on.

I had been watching a lot of Roman Sharf's grey market on youtube. I was becoming numb to the values of the watches on there, every once in a while I would snap out of it and realize what they were dealing with cost more than my cars or my house. Inspired by the show though, I decided to put together my own 'Seikoak' homeage of an AP Royal Oak, using parts from ali express and ebay. There is an NH35a movement inside - my first time putting together a watch with this movement. It was running very well straight from ebay so just plopped it in. I have yet to service an automatic seiko, I am sure it will be a learning experience when I do.

I am very pleased with the final look. The Aliexpress parts overall are very nice, but hard a couple rough quirks. The seconds hand I found extremely difficult to fit. I am not sure this is just something to do with the NH35 movement or not. I eventually got it down a satisfactory amount. On the bracelet, I could not get one of the fastening pins/screws through as there was some slag inside the screw hole. I just ended up using a small drill bit on a hand vice to fix that issue to make it all work.

I see many of these Royal Oak Seiko's on etsy - it is amazing how much people are offering them for (expensive!). This one cost me about $49,900 (CDN) less than a real one.

I will find myself taking a break from watches for a bit now I think to get back to some other hobbies - I had planned on making myself a nice wooden watch box, so that is on the table. I also recently purchased a course on arduino/microcontrollers. I am hoping I can learn something here to improve my diy watch cleaning machine.

Take care all.