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