Colourful Montreal Olympic Chrono-Quartz with unusual lugs

Good idea, you should send an email with pictures to the museum in Bienne.

Happy to try that, but on the Omega museum website I can't find a contact email address. Do you happen to know it ?

Anything new? Keep thinking about it from time to time? What has happen since then ?

Hi Rogart.

Yes there is one thing at the moment. I managed to get some information from the seller, that the items came from a recently deceased ex-Omega employee from Bern. The seller was an old lady, and from the impression of the email I think it may have been her husband so I didn't want to dig for more information. Along with this case were other interesting parts that seem to be prototypes/samples from either Omega or Omega's suppliers (case, dial, etc).

I did some digging on this for the OP, I spoke with some friends at the factory in Bienne and the consensus (which I share) is that it originally started life as a standard CQ case and has been remodelled (extremely well) to accommodate s strap. This could well have been a factory prototype judging by where it came from and the quality of the case work, I have quite a few factory oddity cases (including a few for cal 1510,1511,1516) which were of production quality but never made it to market.

Scary as it sounds back in the day Omega simply didn't give a monkey about old part or prototypes, staff walked out the factory with prototypes and no one batted an eye lid. Last time I was in Bienne I had a great conversation with a guy in a bar (who I might add runs a local watch should) who said that in the mid 80's Omega emptied the contents of the Megaquartz F2.4mhz spares in to a skip along with a bunch of other 'obsolete' spares and the locals went skip raiding.

A lot of my prototypes come from this region of the world, in fact my 1500 elephant (now on permanent display at STS) and my 1510 prototype round dial both came from John Othenin-Girard, the man who project lead the Marine Chronometer project.

I dread to think what is still lingering in locals sock drawers.

Cool case. Hope you find more info and maybe you could build a complete watch from it? Would be awesome?

Yes that is the plan for the next step. I need to try and find a complete working cal. 1611, and must also figure out if anything else is missing (apart from the obvious missing screw from the caseback).

Then the fun will be finding a 25mm bracelet/strap that feels period correct. Can you imagine what might have been fitted had this been a production model. I think finding a bracelet will be very hard (and anyway it would end up looking like a standard production version), so probably a leather strap would be better (?). Maybe a black perforated rally style one like the contempory dynamics and speedmaster/flightmaster came with. Would probably need to get one custom made. Any other suggestions ?

A leather would look best? But strange lugsize could make it harder to find a nice one? Something like the corfam straps would look nice? Maybe a 24 mm could go? And easier to find?

More than a year to find... but... a movement donor has just landed 😀

Side by side you can see the cases are identical, and also it's clear that there was insufficient material on the original case to create the lugs, hence the small welded/bonded lug tips. The analogue side of the movement doesn't work so it's off to Simon to fix and re-assemble.

Have to get a strap sorted now too, and given the lug tips I would worry about a normal strap in case of a lug failure. Maybe it can start life on a NATO, or I'll see if I can get a custom strap made with some kind of retention system under the case.

It's funny, just finished a big project earlier in the week and already the next one starts. No peace...

This just arrived today, and I owe a big thank you to @simonfreese for such a fantastic job on combining my proto CQ case with the donor movement from my standard CQ 👍

I kept changing my plans for a strap, but now I have it in hand I think it looks good on fabric so I’ll just go for a black 25mm NATO or velcro model. I’ll try and take some better pictures over the weekend, but couldn’t resist posting something quickly 😀