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Archer
路路Omega Qualified WatchmakerThe dial lay-out and quality are great, nothing short of what you would expect of a watch for professional use. I find Sinn dials to be some of the best designed and most legible out there.
Legible, yes definitely. Of high quality, well there's a lot of variation in their line. For example my old 356 Flieger II had a very high quality dial:
So does my wife's 456 - the blue MOP dial is very nice:
But the black dials they use in say the U1, U2, 556, etc. are lesser quality in terms of the robustness of the finish. The matte finish is easily damaged, so by an improperly installed hand, like this one:
Hand was installed this way from the factory...the watch had not been serviced previous to me servicing it (I ended up replacing the dial with a new one):
The hands on some of these watches are about the cheapest you'll see in terms of construction. Very well lumed, but rather crude flat stamped hands:
In terms of movements the ETA's and Sellita's are decent movements, but Sinn doesn't do much with them. There are day/date misalignments that are common on the 104, and I think those were using Sellita movements. Again these are good value watches overall in my view, but built to a price. An example of that is from a 756 I serviced some years ago, and this one uses an ETA 7750 with the constant seconds hand removed from the 9 o'clock position. This is it next to my 356 at the time:
The right way to do this seconds modification is to order the movement this way if you have the clout to do so, or order in a second wheel with the shorter lower pivot. If those options aren't available, you would take the movement apart and modify the wheel to remove the pivot (I've done this sort of thing on ETA 6497's in the past).
Sinn did this:
They just used some sort of clippers and snipped off the post, leaving this rather jagged post behind. Since this is a Diapal movement, and to install the specially treated escape wheel they would have had to take the entire movement apart anyway, the way they just crudely snipped this post off really makes no sense. Have to say I was a little disappointed to see this sort of hack work from them. Still, I remain a fan of the brand overall.
Cheers, Al
