I keep posting unknown brands

[soviet]

I collect vintage watches for fun, so that I concentrate on those unusual items of unknow brands and unusual designs. Here are a few examples with a brand name I have never heard of. The one with a flashy dial is a Swiss Honor brand with an ETA 2789-1 automatic movement.It looks more like a Russian watch than Swiss.

[JohnF]

Hi -

Don't know about the first - it does look more like a Russian than anything else, doesn't it! - but the last two are ones that I have seen before, but I couldn't tell you where. Probably in the window of a shop I used to go by almost every day when I worked in Basel, sold antiques.

There is a huge number of orphaned watches out there from the heyday of the Swiss mechanical watch industry when it was still largely a family company business instead of the megacorp business it is today. Sometimes there are amazing calibres inside of such watches, such as AS or FHF vintage calibres that are really great quality calibres.

But it is good that you collect them for fun, since it allows you to get some great watches at a great price that will probably never appreciate in value, since they are orphaned (i.e. the company making them has completely disappeared).

Enjoy them! It's a reall piece of history you have there, even though the watches aren't "horologically significant" as my watchmaker says, since they are a better indicator of what a Swiss watch was to the vast majority of people than the highly sophisticated and overwraught wonders we see today...

Thanks for sharing!

JohnF

[soviet]

Thanks for your comments. The Honor also has a Russian type caseback that was fastened by a retaining ring.:-D I am learning watch repair these days, so expensive, big brand gold watches are not necessary. I understand that once a watch manufacturer mastered the skill of making top grade base movement, it should not be too difficult for them to move upwards from there.

[quoll]

Interesting stuff. The third one - ROFINA on the dial - has the logo of Orfina, a brand that is still making watches today. (www.orfina.ch) Maybe it is either a redial with an error, or a copy of an Orfina? Looking at the dial, which seems to be damaged along the 11 o'clock radius, I suspect it is a dial repair gone wrong. I have a (non-working) Orfina of a similar age in a box somewhere. Nice watches.

[soviet]

Interesting stuff. The third one - ROFINA on the dial - has the logo of Orfina, a brand that is still making watches today. (www.orfina.ch) Maybe it is either a redial with an error, or a copy of an Orfina? Looking at the dial, which seems to be damaged along the 11 o'clock radius, I suspect it is a dial repair gone wrong. I have a (non-working) Orfina of a similar age in a box somewhere. Nice watches.

That is very interesting. Rofina is on my list of Swiss brands(5th category), but no Orfina.:-S The movement is also signed Rofina that is a FHF 73 caliber. Maybe the company changed its name at a point? I would say that the dial is original. The caseback with the Rofina logo is also signed ROFINA SWISS MADE.

[quoll]

More and more interesting. I had not come across Rofina, but clearly it is a separate brand entirely. I found the watch I referred to. Interestingly enough, it has an FHF 73 movement. Note the logo similarity.