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Nice looking watch, well worth being able to wear it. Haven't used an extender before but will bear them in mind now.
Well here is a watch were I was able to make wearable on its original bracelet by using a clasp extender, something I had never done before.
Well as you can see it is a Citizen Independent watch, this dates from 1997 and was never sold in the West so is not seen that often here.
I was not looking to buy the watch specifically but came across this auction in Japan and nobody seemed interested so I picked the lot up for £45 including all costs and delivery to my door in the UK.
Not bad I thought, nine watches for a fiver each.I could see there was a Seiko QZ watch there from about 1975. These were expensive watches for their time and ran about 15 seconds a year in accuracy, pretty good even by todays standards, There looked to be a couple of other interesting things besides the G Shocks as well.
Anyway, this one turned out to be in decent condition, with a fairly unusual bracelet design featuring bent creased links.
The case is lobster like, redolent of the era and I am quite fond of the style.
So, battery replaced and a greased gasket for the princely sum of 50p. The watch has an unmarked domed crystal and has two alarms, hourly signal, 24 hour stopwatch, 100 minute timer, and dual time.
The bracelet was way too short for me to wear though, as these JDM watches often are if they have been sized and don’t have the spare links and I had no links that would fit, so rather than buy a cheap leather strap for it I thought I would try out a clasp extender as I quite liked the look of the bracelet.
So another mighty £3.85 lashed out on a SS extender. This came and I found a spring bar of the right size but I could not get a secure fit, the shoulders of the spring bar came up against the clasp extender and there was not enough of the end of the spring bar left to go through the clasp holes as well. So I sandpapered the shoulders down and voila the spring bars now protruded enough to get a good fit into the clasp.
Here is the result after a quick polish of the extender to get a reasonable match with the clasp.
Actually it looks much better than I thought it would, there is no play or movement at the join and the ensuing crease is a bit of a match for the creases on the bent links of the bracelet.
So a pleasant time was had sorting the watch out into a working wearable state, something I enjoy doing with watches.
Here are the fruits of the work on my wrist.
So has anyone else ever used a clasp extender? I must admit I thought they would look odd but they don’t, well not on this watch anyway.
Mitch
Nice looking watch, well worth being able to wear it. Haven't used an extender before but will bear them in mind now.
Started out with nothing. Still have most of it left.
Yes, I order them in the multipacks from Cousins! I have a big wrist and a number of vintage watches with too-small bracelets.Originally Posted by Mitch
As you note, they can work well. Or not. There's a certain amount of luck: You need the right spring bars, the extender and clasp need to be 'scaled' correctly with respect to one another, and two extenders in a row rarely works well (if the bracelet is really small).
The greatest frustration for me is when the bracelet and clasp aren't suitable at all for a clasp extender and you can't fit an alternative bracelet, strap, etc.
Must admit I have never heard of clasp extenders before, great work op -:)
These Citizen Independent watches are often very quirky, with some styles being 'challenging' shall we say.
I do have one other and that is a real oddity an led 'Snoopy' watch that I did a review on here.
https://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.p...y-in-the-house
More conventional lighting on this recent arrival.
Mitch
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