Titus NOS 1970s ESA Tuning Fork watches...

[Eeeb]

An interesting phenomena with Titus has been occurring on the big auction site...

All of the sudden NOS Titus tuning fork watches have been turning up... they have the ESA movement but without the id plate that identifies the maker... it has always been removed.

The movements look real and I can't imagine anyone going to the immense trouble of replicating the ESA 9162 tuning fork movements (the same movement used in the Omega f300 and the Longines Ultronic, among others) ... Several months ago bare movements showed up from a Swiss liquidator... someone dumped a cache of them.

I suspect someone in Titus's Asian ownership bought a load of them and then encased them for sale as NOS... the vendors are always Chinese... I've never seen a non-NOS Titus f300. I bet they never encased a tuning fork in the 70's ... interesting. :think:

[mrwatch54]

I can't answer your question. How ever history said in school was that the inventor of the Bulova Accutron later went to Switzerland and made the Swiss version of the 300 Mhgs movement. Bulova would not say how they made the index wheel with all the tiny teeth.

[Eeeb]

I can't answer your question. How ever history said in school was that the inventor of the Bulova Accutron later went to Switzerland and made the Swiss version of the 300 Mhgs movement. Bulova would not say how they made the index wheel with all the tiny teeth.

The inventor was actually Swiss, Max Hetzel... only Bulova was interested in the movement, the original Accutron. The ESA 9162 and 9164 were vast improvements on the original design. But they were developed only after Bulova proved the technology was worth exploiting.

That index wheel is an amazing piece of engineering!

Anyway, I suspect these Titus watches are 'recreations'... but on a much more advance scale beyond some crooks sitting in a room in the Ukraine trying to figure out how to swindle the gullible... more and more we are seeing fake vintage.

Several months ago I noticed some NOS watches that came on the market from Singapore vendors... different vendors... different watches... similar movements. The clincher was when I found the same serial number on two movements... fakes.

Caveat Emptor... Buy the vendor as much as the watch.