I have been lusting for the beautiful aventurine "stardust" megaquartz for a while now. I collect early quartz and tuning fork watches, so this has been on my radar. When this watch popped up on ebay I messaged @Tom Dick for some help seeing if the watch checked out. It ticked all the right boxes. The dial has zero cracks or fissures which is a known issue in these dials. Keeps perfect time. Tom pointed out something interesting when I sent him the movement photos. The movement has an "R" replacement serial number which he said he hasn't seen before. I sent a note to the operator of omegamegaquartz.com, Stuart, and he said he has only seen one before and that I should message STS in the UK to see if they ever serviced it or acquired any of these replacement serial movements. STS said they have never serviced this watch, so I am leaning towards it being a legit factory replaced movement rather than a parts build watch. I am waiting to hear back from Mr. Tony Coe to see how many R serials he has seen, but he was out of town. It would be nice to see some paperwork showing the factory replaced it, but I heard that the extract of the archives doesn't cover the R serials.
Thanks for the kind words, always happy to help. The R movement can only have really come out of the factory and would have been done pre them stopping servicing these, which I believe was between 2000 and 2010, most likely would have had some sort of major movement issue to replacement the whole thing OR there was a problem with the whole bridge section Non the less nice to see something unique like this and it appears to be a cracking example Well done Tom
very nice could i ask if the price reflected the fact that the movement is a replacement? it wouldn't bother me as has been said it would only have been swapped by someone with the skills and a dial with zero cracks is a massive plus
I paid a good price for it. I cared more about the dial than anything. Since the 1510 caliber is unique to this watch the R serial isn't that big of a deal like it is with speedmasters, but I am paraphrasing from what @Tom Dick told me about it. It is more of an oddity than anything. I find it strange that the R serial isn't seen more frequently in this watch.
Interesting. Can't say I've ever seen an "R" movement before on an Omega caliber. Has it been seen on movements other than the 1510 ?
R denotes replacement and was exclusively done at the factory when a movement was beyond reasonable repair In terms of it impacting the value of the watch, the OP paid a cracking price for s stardust and IMHO there is no devaluing impact of the R movement number as this movement was exclusively used in this reference and this reference only Cheers Tom
@Tom Dick, Did the factory keep records of these replacements? It would be nice to request the records. Everything I have read about extracts says that R serial extracts do not pan out.
It's surprising there are so few of these R "movements" showing up with 5 digit numbers. The numbering is mysterious too, maybe the sequence is shared across all calibers.