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67K views 269 replies 60 participants last post by  OhDark30 
#1 ·
A thread to show off pics of your Smiths watch, old or Time Factors new

There's some nice vintage ones on the Bay at the mo, btw

I'll kick off
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#15 ·
Great start, folks!
(and thank you, music lovers)

Looking forward to seeing your Dad's watch again when it gets back from restoration, @Man of Kent

And Ric's mysterious thingies when they see light of day..
 
#19 ·
Nice looking diver, that Dorset, waterdude! I see there's a Smiths diver listed on the Bay too

This is one of my most unusual
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A 70s Smiths jump hour with Swiss movement - will investigate when my case tools finally arrive

Bought this from a blurry seller photo out of curiosity - it's huge!
That's a 22mm strap and the watch is 43mm across, of course being square it wears bigger!
 
#25 · (Edited)
Serves me right for wandering away from the Russian forum; Got distracted and then sucked in by this Smiths thread and lo-and-behold (aka oh buggerit) now have this World Time winging its way across the pond to the colonies. Can't find much about it (other than it was made in Wales), but it is a looker; and I am intrigued by the jewel "count"; I'll assume that "jeweled" means > 1 jewels.
 

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#26 ·
Serves me right for wandering away from the Russian forum; Got distracted and then sucked in by this Smiths thread and lo-and-behold (aka oh buggerit) now have this World Time winging its way across the pond to the colonies. Can't find much about it (other than it was made in Wales), but it but it is a looker; and I am intrigued by the jewel "count"; I'll assume that "jeweled" means > 1 jewels.
I'm looking forward to seeing some clearer pictures of that one.
 
#28 · (Edited)
Thanks, @Chascomm !
Great to see those pictures of your 1950s Smiths.

A site with info about Smiths movements, the Astral and Empire models etc:http://smithswatches.com/SMITHSWATCHES/Welcome.html

And looking forward to seeing more of your diver @Ham2.
I'm wondering which language has Moskau and Roma

In all the excitement of its arrival I forgot to post pics on this thread of my newly acquired birth year watch, a 1967 Smiths W10



I'm delighted with it - wearable and lots of character (OK, scratches :) )

Interesting to compare it with @Samael and @river27's PRS29s - that is a really faithful homage, down to the different widths of hands, and the subtleties of the bezel shape. Wear them in good health!

Keep those pictures coming guys - old and new!
 
#32 ·
Thanks, @Chascomm !
Great to see those pictures of your 1950s Smiths.

A site with info about Smiths movements, the Astral and Empire models etc:SMITHSWATCHES
I didn't find anything on that site about Smiths Empire :-( but they mention Smiths Imperial. Looks like the site is only about the English Smiths watches.

To find out about the 'Gt Britain' Smiths, made in Wales by the Anglo-Celtic Watch Co, you'll need to look at this site:
http://history.powys.org.uk/history/ystrad/tockmenu.html

Here's my TY model being assembled:
 
#31 ·
Well, Roma is Italian so no great surprise. Moskau is the German spelling, so I'm wondering if we have a bit of cack-handed British stereotyping going on (German? Close enough...). I suppose Mockba would be a bit politically incorrect in the middle of a Cold War, anyways. And I'm not sure if the typesetters of the day even had a font for that.

The main international airport of Moscow (these days) is Domodedovo which is a riot of Cyrillic spelling. Looks more like a mathematical formula than anything else.

True story: when the suicide bomber blow the bloody place up (Domodedovo airport) a few years ago, one of my better colleagues was standing in front of passport control (safe, it was the baggage area that was blown to bits). Moscow regulars know exactly what and where I mean. I was in London at the time coincidentally meeting the Russia COO (who was on a trip to Blighty) discussing a project crisis, when he received the call. He listened, went pale, and repeated the name. I heard him, and for the first time I me life knew what it meant to go weak at the knees.

Hours later, I heard Christian was shaken but safe. Still bless that news.

Then later that day I got the second call from my boss saying that I had to take over the Moscow project. Oh dear. Thought about it over the weekend, discussed with Frau Capucho who said "That airport's probably the safest airport on earth right now". Which is how I started commuting to Moscow every other week (at least) for a year and a half. Few people have as many Russian entry/exit stamps in their passports as me. Counted nearly forty pairs. Need a new passport soon (few remaining pages) although that stint's now over.

Ric
 
#34 ·
Thanks, Chascomm, that's brilliant!
Excuse my Empire/Imperial slip

The 2 links I've posted are the best ones I've found, so please folks, if you know any others, slap 'em on here

Yes, Ric, a wiki sounds like a great idea

And thanks, lactardjosh, for the pics of your Radio Room, a handsome piece of kit and cool alternative to the Amphibia version
 
#37 ·
Thanks for the tip, tribe, I've just ordered a copy.
I had a copy. I thought I still had it, and was about to give it away through this thread - but found it was gone...

It's not fantastic, mostly comprising old catalogue pictures, as you say - but I think it's all there is. And it's not much money.
 
#40 ·
I've alerted the CIA and NSA....bunch of Brits meeting on a wiki, discussing Brit watches...I don't like it, no sir, not one bit...seems suspicious to me...

I'll be keeping an eye on you lot...no sudden moves...you know us yanks are itching for a war we can win...or lose, doesn't seem to matter to us anymore...
 
#39 ·
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Hi All,

A carrier pigeon just dropped this off; tis a vintage Smiths Great Britain, gold-plated, with a Crosshair dial. Cute.

Actually, it was delivered on Saturday morning, it seems, but for some reason neither myself nor Frau Capucho happened to check our post box until Sunday afternoon.

From what I can glean (from Chascomm's post) this watch would have been made in the Ystradgynlais factory (from now on I'll call it the Powys factory for obvious reasons) in South Wales, and as that was setup to produce modestly priced watches then that's how we should set our expectations. Modesty. Well, there's definitely a budget feel about this watch, which a certain other watch (wot is at the menders having its second hand reattached) doesn't have. The gold plate's looking a bit tired and chipped, the dial has a few dots on it, and the case is on the border of feeling a bit... tinny. But no more tinny than a vintage Raketa, I suppose. Some of that wear and tear's down to age, but some's down to durability. And only seven jewels, tsk tsk tsk, although I'm holding with my previous observation that any watch that keeps acceptable time with such a low jewel count's likely to have been better engineered with better matched tolerances and materials in the first place.

On the other hand, the gold plated case and the golden hands, numbers and markers complement each other very nicely. There's a subtle touch of Bauhaus about the lugs and crown, especially the little "sink" cut into the side of the case that the crown sits in. Oh, and the diddy red diamond on the second hand is very sweet indeed. i do like that. The crosshair's been added to the silver dial in black which contrasts well with all the gold that's going on elsewhere. Oh, and yet again my eye's drawn to the font that Smiths used for the numbers. Something uniquely British about these old font, don'tcha know, and this font is quite different from the *other* uniquely different font on the *other* watch that I haven't told yer about yet.

Yep, at just 33mm it's a wee thing compared to modern watches, and the acrylic crystal of those days would put a lot of people off (not me, quite the opposite). And yep, it's vintage (old) which is even scarier. And few people are drawn to gold watches anymore, never mind a gold *plated* watch.

But it's a nice looking thing, innit?

When was it built? Dunno. Maybe the late 1960s or early 1970s? The seller states "1950s" but I'm sceptical because of the size and shape of the crown. Doesn't seem of that era, but what do I know? Doesn't matter much to me anyway, but I'm sure both age and model name'll pop up somewhere in one of the Smiffs catalogues.

On the subject of the seller, my eyebrows raised when I first wound the buggah up yesterday afternoon intending to lie it fallow for twenty four hours as a quick accuracy test: the entire movement and dial wobbles inside the case which leads me to suspect the restraining screws are missing. That needs me to take yet another trip to my trusty watch mender (the poor Swiss chap'll end up in therapy one of these days). But then when trying the watch on for the pickie I realised that the 16mm brown croc suited it quite nicely *and* the strap's both new and of very good quality. Oh, and the time (so far) remains right to just a few seconds which makes me think it's been recently serviced. So we'll call that a wash and move on.

Normally I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but in this case I'd say modern facilities can greatly improve on vintage era materials and techniques; so thank god they don't. But I will say that they don't *design* 'em like they used to. And that's the lesson here: tis a lovely little thing.

Ric
 
#41 · (Edited)
Definitely later than the 1950s. This one is marked 7 jewels so I reckon this was one of Anglo-Celtic's in-house-designed jewelled-lever 'slim line' movements. I think this series was actually initiated by Ingersoll (UK) but then they sold their share of the company to Smiths so most of these came out branded as Smiths (can't remember where I read that; probably Max Cutmore's 'Watches 1850-1980').

more pics from the site I mentioned earlier:
 
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