Gruen Question

[wspohn]

Anyone have any idea on date for this one - wire lugs, 14K white gold, my best guess 1910 - 1925. That's the problem with Gruen - no serial number records!

http://www.rhodo.citymax.com/i/non-rhodo/4970190244-011.jpg

[JohnF]

Hi -

Yep, that's the fundamental problem in collecting Gruens. No records.

I've got two problems with the watch you show.

First, Gruen made very, very few watches that didn't have a decentral seconds in that time frame. I just perused Shugart and the few that didn't have them were the very small women's watches of the period.

The case design certainly points to your time frame, more towards the latter half than the former. Definitely art deco, the style of the numbers if very reminiscent of Elgins of the 1920s. There were a few art deco enamel faces watches of that period with no decentral seconds, but they had enameled faces (duh), which this one does not.

Both of these issues, as it were, raise more questions, but since there are no historical records, we're stuck.

I'm guessing around 25mm square with 12mm lugs? The crown otherwise looks too big for the watch, but that may be a replacement (no signature on the crown, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything...)

I'd place it in the second half of your time period, and actually would go later than that: probably between 1920 and 1935 or so...

Is there a caliber designation on the watch? It looks to have a very nice pedigree: separate bridge for the escapement wheel, a very large balance wheel if my size guess is correct, which should give it very good time-keeping charachteristics (all things being equal, a larger balance wheel can be better tuned and is more robust.

It's probably not later, since post-mid-1930s the hands probably would've been radium hands of the benz type (Mercedes-type circle divided into three equidistant parts on the hour hand, usually elongated), rather than these very nice blued hands. The art deco details on the corners is very, very, nice

And there is one other thing that makes me go hmmmmm. The face is off-center! There is more room to right of the 3 than there is to the left of the 9, and there is especially significant room to the northeast of 1 and 2. And if you look carefully at the center of the watch, the hands are off-center as well...

It looks like a Frankenwatch when I think about it...the face is definitely off...

JohnF

[Ray MacDonald]

I agree with JohnF that this one is definitely a "mariage" as Hartmut Richter would say.
The case and movement look to be prior to 1920, but the dial is later. I saw one in Shugart from 1925 that looks like it.
The watch probably had originally a subsecond dial that was enamel. You can see that the dial and case do not match up size wise.
Maybe the original dial was damaged and a replacement was no longer available. Most makers switched away from enamel to painted dials around 1920.

[wspohn]

Yup - right on 12 mm lugs and 25 mm case. Marked Gruen Precision on face and movement, and 'adjusted temp' on the movement. 17 J, but no number for the movement.

I do like the term 'marriage' better than 'Frankenwatch, but the result is the same. :-)

Bought this knowing it might well not be 'right' because I liked the dial - and the price wasn't too bad at around $60.

One seems to get a lot of part swapping in the pre-war stuff, probably just to keep them going.

[wspohn]

I've been told that the movement is a 9 3/4 ligne caliber 99-7 which dates to about 1925. The case is probably around that - when did wire lugs go out of fashion?

[JohnF]

Hi -

Wire lugs were around well into the 1940s, but more or less disappeared after the war. There are quite a few German military watches that have permanent lugs, but they weren't necessarily wired (i.e. thick wire soldered to the watch in order to attach a strap to wear it as a wristwatch).

But for the civilian side, I'd say more likely end of the 1930s than end of the 1940s. There were of course holdouts, as some of the early systems didn't necessarily hold all that well, and a fixed lug will hold at least as well as the strap.

JohnF