For over thirty years I've had an old Seamaster Chronograph sitting forlornly & forgotten in a draw and whilst doing a tidy-up it re-surfaced so I decided I ought to get it serviced and in use once again. The only trouble was that it had suffered a case of dial fade (and not in a good way) with the wonderful vibrant blue main section of the dial going grey around the sub-dials. Also I never did treat it very well and the glass (or crystal as they call it) was very scratched & the case was a bit battered, all of which was the reason it got put away in the first place! So I started looking at restoration as well as servicing - now for the avid watch collectors, they insist that everything should be as original as possible, so both dial restoration and case refinishing are absolute no, no's - but I want to wear it again so decided to go ahead and send it away to be 'done'! Couple of before images below and as you can see it's a bit of a state, so will be interested to see how it looks after some TLC.
While I was researching the what, how & who to get the restoration done by, it also re-kindled my interest in wrist watches, now I've always been a fan of Omega's, certainly in preference to like likes of Rolex and some of the more ostentatious marques so during this 'research process' I must confess that I ended up with two new (well 40 & 46 year old) Omega's which I just really liked the look of. Just had the 46 year old one serviced and it keeps time as accurately, as my new quartz watches, indeed as does the 40 year old un-serviced one, not too bad at all for vintage wind-up watches - we're talking about a few seconds a month! Some pictures of these can be seen in the Product Gallery, but here's a taster.
The first is an Omega Genève MD 136.0049 with a Caliber 613 manual wind movement dated 1972 and the second is a Seamaster MD 166.0203 with a Caliber 1010 automatic movement from 1978.
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