Originally Posted by
Wibbs
Is it so wrong that I'm drooling on my keyboard here? Some lovely Seikos in this thread. Gregory's digital is well cool IMH. Like Jneds I too got my first Seiko for my birthday in 81. One of those calculator jobs with the teeny tiny buttons. I was near welded to that thing until the bracelet fell apart. I still have it somewhere, in "well used condition". :) Still works mind you.
When you consider that when the Seiko guys showed up in the watch chronometer trials in the 60's they were regularly beating all comers in the prizes and only Zenith and Longines were holding the side up(IIRC Patek, Rolex and a few others got their bottoms handed to them on a plate). In the end the local Swiss got so peed off with them winning they changed the rules to exclude them. That's a prize in of itself. While the Swiss were getting together to build the first automatic chrono, Seiko built theirs(6139) a column wheel, vertical clutch, auto that was smaller than the Swiss ones and got to the actual market ahead of them by a couple of months. The fact you can get a vintage one today for a few hundred quid, while the Swiss versions go for multiples of that is amazing to me.
Their movements don't usually have any fancy adornments and finishing of the top Swiss names, but they seem to be near bulletproof. One example I can think of was a mate's diver(the particular model escapes me). The seals had gone and he wouldn't be the gentlest of souls, so the dial showed clear water damage, the case looked like it had been dug outa King Kong's footprint and when he asked me to look inside at the movement, you could see corrosion all over the place. It looked like a scrapyard in December. Timekeeping? Even in that state, within 10 seconds a day. Seiko, the Tonka trucks of watches. :D