Accutron 214 Astronaut

Waltesefalcon

Even after the Astronaut lost out to the Speedmaster during the Gemini trials Apollo used Accutrons for the clocks onboard the Command Modules.

bobbee

Here are the first steel Accutron Astronaut ads from 1962. They show pear hands, and if you zoom in they are skeleton pear hands. The dial says only 'Accutron' and has no 'pips' between the hour markers like later models.

Here is a made up example, that was sold as genuine back in 2016. The buyer took it apart and found the dial was fake, and the hands were blued railroad hands that had been painted, instead of plain steel.


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Uscjake87

Oh boy. Don't mention him please. It's like conjuring up beetle-juice when you say his name. He is a very knowledgeable guy on Astronauts, but from everything I have heard is that his "early astro" watch was advertised as being owned by an X-15 pilot when it wasn't. Lots of rumors about that sale and how he had to refund the money to the collector. As far as it being a fake dial, it's entirely possible it was faked but "bobbee" is frequently found doing back and forth banter with Accutronitis on about 5 or 6 different websites about this. Both of them get banned as a result of their arguments which have spanned any decent thread on astronauts. A re-dialer company could take the simple silver dial seen in this thread and re-dial it to any color and text arrangement, so the prospect of faking the dial without the astronaut text at the bottom is very easy. You would need to check the date codes on the back of the dial like I posted to see if it's original or not. On his own website he talks about getting the lume updated on a different M2 astronaut with luminous markers at a re-dialer and he basically destroyed any originality in that watch. I personally haven't seen any other astronauts with the white spade hands on google images or any other source except for his watch, so that makes me question if any exist or if it was a demo model only for the advertisements.

Uscjake87

There are other early variations of the 1962 astro dial. I picked this one up recently.

Uscjake87

Bob,

I don't disagree with your assessment that he cobbled it together. If you gotta paint the hands to make it look like the ad, then you are trying too hard to reproduce something. Nothing of that age should look that crisp and new unless it is redialed. I have not seen ANY examples in the wild that show this so called gen 1 astro with spade hands. I would like to be proven wrong though. Astronaut watches were certainly produced in 1962, but I agree that they all had luminous markers and said "Accutron" or in my unusual one that says "Accutron - Bulova". I wish collectors would appear and start showing early astros with white spade hands, but I doubt it.

I do find it strange that you feel compelled to interrupt a lot of posts about accutron astronauts to discuss his watch. I get that you want to educate the public that this person does unscrupulous things with watches, but it is borderline internet stalking. If he starts trying to cobble more of them together and swindle people, then yeah, educate everyone. If you went to every thread on a particular Omega reference and constantly posted an old re-dial to bash some other guy, you would be banned in a heartbeat. Get over it.