Cases for an Omega Seamaster XVI

So many gold cases being melted these days.

... probably found it's way into the fiery furnace ...

I just looked it up. Many of the parts as noted are shared with the 50x and 55x. 25mm for 47x 27.9 for 55x and 28 for 50x.

Noticed that the movement thicknesses are interesting as well. 5.5 for the 47x, 5.55 for the 50x, and only 4.5 for the 55x. I think there was a trend for thin watches at one time. Many of these were placed with dials 30mm and larger.

What this is is basically a parts movement. The sum of the parts is worth more than the movement as a whole. I find I need to bid around 35USD for most parts on online auction. Sellers tend to list some individual parts for up to 80 bucks.

Since I have the book open @dsio mentioned while I was typing in the above the 490. This is a sub seconds version, so the wheel train is a bit different as there is no sweep pinion.

Another outlier is the 570. I got a bunch of 570 parts by accident. A bunch more were listed today, but I opted not to bid. 35 by 10 is about 350 bucks, One can get a complete watch for that sort of money. Although I find such a bit boring to chasing after the elusive parts needed to complete a project.

This caliber numbering just goes to indicate that there is no pattern. 570 is 24.9 by 4.5mm so the parts are ever so much smaller, yet all these movements take a 330 yoke and a 470 pressure spring. much of the variations seem to deal with the date and setting mechanisms, so the thicker movements often had date wheels.

My guess is all these variations were for checking off marketing points. There seems to have been a lot of statistical grading in the manufacturing and marketing processes. The bits and pieces of archive data that has turned up or leaked out, indicates that a lot of this information was stored on punch cards. So Omega must have had a mainframe computer.