Omega Stories: A Brief Guide to Gold Variants - Gold Filled vs Gold Capped vs Gold Plated Vs Solid Gold

This is a very common question we get here and one that gets answered constantly so I figured I'd write a longer explanation of the differences and what my preferences are as a collector: Read the full article here

Regarding replating, that might be worth an article on its own some time.

It varies in price drastically by location, I have helped arrange it on two watches in the past, one was an Australian brand Hardy Brothers watch and the other was an Omega Quartz from the 1980s, both with significant sentimental value to the owners.

Getting it done is a lot like having a car repainted, in the sense that the actual gold-plating isn't expensive at all, and you can get it done for under $50 at some places. To have it done properly on a watch though, you need to dismantle the watch, completely remove the existing plating, and then re-polish the surface of the watch case to a uniform finish, then prep it correctly for plating.

If it's done by a professional with the correct equipment and prep, the results are very good, but here in Australia that was about $350-$450 at the time several years ago. Having it just re-replated without any effort or prep looks terrible, and it degrades rapidly, just as rattle-canning a car would to cover up paint damage.

Given how much of the cost is labor, it is probably vastly cheaper in countries with low labor costs so potentially you could have it done there for a lot less, but when a perfect gold-plated Geneve Cal 552 is around $250-350 on eBay, there just isn't much point buying a rough one for $150 and trying to have it re-plated.

The watches it would make some sense on are pieces like the Speedmaster Mark II, rare Constellation ultra-thins and similar oddball Omegas that are worth owning but often have badly worn cases.

And on the subject of gold cases i feel we are going through another extinction event due to the very high gold price.

I know I have recently missed a couple of very nice watches ( including an 18kt 50s jumbo Seamaster chronometre ) being first offered by local pickers who quickly couldn't be bothered selling the watches and had scrapped them before a deal could be done.

The irony is in the seller's name 🤣

Thanks for the article @dsio. Isn't it true that the gold-filled cases were mostly (if not exclusively) local productions (US, UK) rather than produced in Switzerland? At least for me, a gold filled case, without seeing the inside, has been a tell tale for a local case. Talking strictly about Omega, don't know about other brands.

A good primer, Ashley. Thank you.

While I could be mistaken, and my observations are purely anecdotal, I have long believed that some gold-capped models appear be of higher quality than many others. I would use vintage Mido as examples. I don't know whether it is possible that they used a thicker layer of gold, or if, perhaps, the alloy which they employed was more durable than most. But in my experience, they have typically weathered the many decades better than most others.