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Posted

My name is Hans, I live in Hanover, Germany.

I have been collecting watches for more than 20 years now and over the time I learned a lot about watches, their different functions and mechanisms. I also started to overhaul my watches by myself 3 years ago. I am very lucky to get a used watchmakers bench. This makes working on watches much easier and comfortable. I also own a huge collection of different tools in order to do as much work as possible in my own little workshop. But when it comes to very difficult tasks, I know a very good master watchmaker in my hometown.

I am retired since 2015, or better said, early retirement at the age of 55. I was working as a flight attendant with the major German airline for more than 30 years. During my job I had the chance to buy some watches abroad, especially many Seikos and Orients only available in Japan. Until 1998 the city of Mumbai in India was also a good place to buy some Omega vintage watches.

Now I have plenty of time to further improving my skills as a amateur-watchmaker. Right now I am working on a Orient Star GMT with a Orient cal. 40P50, which was also only available in Japan.

I have collected more than 70 watches, from Seiko to IWC, JCL, Omega to Zenith, from new to vintage. But I am planning to start selling some of them soon.

I still enjoy travelling together with my wife. And I can still make use of discounted airline-staff tickets, which I use at least once a year to travel to Japan, a country I appreciate very much and still very interesting concerning Japanese watches. I also visited the Shizukuishi-Watch Studio of Seiko in Morioka some years ago. This was definitely one of my most interesting trips.

Posted

Hello Hans, 

Fascinating career, and what better way to celebrate retirement than by playing with all of those watches that you were able to collect. 

Posted
11 minutes ago, dadistic said:

Hello Hans, 

Fascinating career, and what better way to celebrate retirement than by playing with all of those watches that you were able to collect. 

Hello dadistic,

thank you!

I can very well remember my countless  layovers in Chicago, a city where I always felt home away from home. 

Indeed, there are too many watches to play with. But I wind each one once a month to prevent the oils from getting sticky. And there are many waiting for to be cleaned and oiled.

Posted

Hi Hans and welcome to this fine forum. You have an interesting collection of watches. I had a Junghans once but it has disappeared over the years. I just fix most of them now. It is a hobby for me, I was an electronic engineer but I had a watchmaker friend who was Geneva trained years ago and he taught me theory and practice of how watches work and to how service them etc. I don`t think much of it really stuck but it was a help. Well, keep going and my regards to you, Mike. 

Posted

Hello Hans, welcome to the forum from Cambridge UK, there is a part of the forum that you can show your watch collection. Best wishes. Johnnie

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