The rarest Audemars money can buy? Quartz haters look away

[dickstar1977]

Hi all

Sometime back I can across an image of an Audemars that took my fancy, now these watches are really not my thing but this one was potentially something special, not because of how it looked but for what was at it's heart!

My main collection is based around vintage Omegas, the most treasured of which are my Megaquartz F2.4 Mhz's, one stardust and one Marine Chronometer. For those of you that don't know much about them, they are singularly the most accurate watches Omega have ever made and are still to this day 40 years on one of the most accurate production watches in the world with a time keep variance of around 1 second per month!

The movement's where really something special, a quartz circuit which resonated at 2400000 times per second (compared to most of the best modern and vintage Quartz's which resonate at 32000 times per second), a real mechanical quartz hybrid of the early days of the development of Quartz technology, when the sky was the limit and the money invested in R&D and production was unrivalled! In their day the Marine Chronometers and Stardusts cost the equivalent of a good family car of the time!

Omega states where ever it can that they are the only manufacturer to have used and developed this movement and that they and they alone hold this technology, well today I found out different! I have been searching for the below beast for some years now and finally I have unearthed one, nothing special to behold you might think but I think you will be hard pushed to find a rare Audemar Piguet or one with such unbeatable accuracy, enjoy:













The movement is a rebranded and nickle plated version of the 1510/1511, made by Omega in only 1000 units of each, the 1510 being the famous 'Stardust' (although there are a few other variants) and the 1511 being the Marine Chronometer. The movement is clearly not Audemars own but more a rebranded Omega version, however, the fact that Omega released the movement to other manufacturers is amazing, I dread to think what it was new but I know the cost now was enough to make a certain orifice pucker

Perhaps not for everyone but in quartz watch collecting terms this is like unearthing real buried treasure

Here are my Omega versions:

[Declan]

That marine chronometer looks the dogs bollocks (y)

[Huertecilla]

That marine chronometer looks the dogs bollocks (y)

It was and still is.

[aosehus]

Thanks for sharing!

[sebastien1985]

Difficult to find a quartz AP in their collection (apart from the women collection... but priced as "automatic"). Who talked about men/women inequality?