Has the modern watch scene lost a bit of Spark lately...

Now that I like. There are bits and bobs borrowed from other designs but the whole doesn’t look like something I can point to that has been done before.

....but they had to blow it with a 42mm width and 51.5mm lug to lug 😲

Could you call that caramel 👍

But what if the Tudor version is better? The Black Bay GMT lights my fire in a way that no luminova GMT Master ever could. And while I'm so horribly bored by the Daytona and the breathless coverage of it anytime there's even a slight update, I'm seriously considering going after one of the new Black Bay Chronos once they're regularly available in stores.

For me, Tudor is Rolex, but interesting.

The sad truth is that watchmaking is dying. Brands are having a hard time finding people to work in their service centers. So there are a few ways of dealing with this...

1 - Use trained watchmakers for less of the work - for a long time the watchmakers have typically only worked on the movement, and the other tasks like decasing the movement, removing hands and dial, all case work, and then putting the whole thing back together have been done by unskilled labour. These people are trained to do this work after being hired off the street, and have no formal watchmaking education. I know the Swatch NJ service center does this - saw it when I was there for training.

2 - Dumb down the watchmaking part of the work. More and more parts are replaced, rather than being repaired. More sub-assemblies are replaced than the individual parts, and this is all done in the name of efficiency. Good example is the mainspring barrel, and in most cases in a service center, the entire barrel is replaced. It's common practice to replace the mainspring, and then check the other parts of the barrel and use them again if they are good. But that takes an extra few minutes, so the watchmakers just install a "barrel complete" and the entire used barrel is not used - many times they are replacing parts that are in perfectly good condition.

You can see this when people post the parts that are returned from service - here is one example that someone posted:



The mainspring barrel is lower left - this is an assembly of 4 parts - barrel drum, barrel cover, barrel arbor, and mainspring. They didn't even take it apart to see if the other parts were good or not, they just replaced the entire unit. This is very common.

3 - Selective assembly - this is a term that is used for a process that takes what I described in item 1, and expands it to the movement. So you have people hired off the street who are trained to assemble one small portion of the movement, and they do they day in and day out. Like a car assembly line, the movement moves down to the next person who installs the next part, and so on. The watchmaker only does the final tweaking and timing, so has even less to do with the service then what I describe in item 1. Breitling does this in the US for example.

4 - The final step is movement swaps. Omega does it for some like the modular chronograph movements, but other brands like Cartier do it on a lot more, and of course Tudor. Often the used movements are sent back to some central facility to be broken down, serviced, and sent back out to be used again.

5 - In rare cases brands have invested in training new watchmakers. But with only a very small number of spaces available in every year of school, watchmakers are leaving or dying off faster than they can be replaced. Most of the major brands or conglomerates are involved in some sort of school, but they are also doing many of the other things I've listed above.

I would expect more of these things to happen in the future, because brands realize that they can't produce the watchmakers fast enough. You can already see that designs are creeping in to make servicing more modular in some movements...

Cheers, Al

@Archer would there be a price that a whole movement replacement for a Rolex would be still profitable for Rolex. If it’s able to be done on a Tudor
As Rolex services are creeping up to nearly $2000 in Australia

Yes, there probably is, but I don't know the number obviously. For Omega, I see prices of whole movements on the Omega Extranet, but I have no way of knowing how that number is generated, or what sort of profit margin there is in it, since these are retail spare parts prices.

For example if I look at a COSC version of a 7750 based movement, like the Cal. 1164, a new movement is listed at $1400. But if I look at a Cal. 3330, the column wheel co-axial version of the movement, it's about 3 times that. Not going to do it, but if I went through and added up the additional costs for the parts that are for those different features, I'm guessing it won't add up to the difference in price...