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Hello from Hanover, Germany!

watchhans

By watchhans
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watchhans New Member

watchhans

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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.

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watchhans New Member

watchhans

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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.

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ecodec WRT Addict

ecodec

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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. 

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