I am curious, more for myself to have perspective on value. What's the price for the watch, complete, versus what the value he got in gold from scraping the case?

 

I've sold a couple of solid gold Omegas in the past, and there would alway be someone asking for the case weight....the world is full of vandals and philistines

 

A moment of silence for our fallen brother

 

I hate seeing things like this. I started off in watches with American pocket watches and you will often see movements and silver cases separated with the cases being offered for scrap and the movements for parts. Luckily since pocket watches were usually sold in America as movements and cased when bought this isn't as terrible thing as when it happens with a wrist watch.

 

There is a "we buy gold" stall in a mall in the large town a few miles away from us. I asked the woman running it if she gets gold watches in, she said she sometimes does and whatever they are, she scraps them. I offered to leave my contact details and give over the gold value for certain makes (one of them Omega, as you have possibly guessed) but she didn't want to do that as "it's simpler for me just to scrap them".

It's an unfortunate fact of life that you can't educate pork.

 

They are just completely unaware that we (watch nuts) exist....and that we are willing to pay a lot more than the value of melted gold for many of these watches.... a shame indeed!

 

I visited Struthers in Birmingham a while back and was shocked to hear that they buy vintage watch and pocket movements by the heavy bag-load. Cases, all gone. At least they are bringing them (beautifully) back to life, but it is a shame to think of so many being lost.

 

Well, if you look at it from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. These kind of places in particular have only one thing in mind - making money. They are not interested in overly romanticized notions of preserving the past.

I would bet that for every real gem that gets rescued from a place like this, there will be 50 that aren't worth much more than melt value.

Maybe they have done this before, and found that holding onto these things (holding them costs money) until that picky watch collector guy shows up to look at them, and wastes their time going on and on about patina this and redial that, who points out all the flaws and then tells them they are just "parts watches" and only offers slightly above melt value really isn't worth their trouble. So they simply get on with making money by quickly melting it down...

I don't think it's about being uneducated (or pork), but just clearly different priorities when you are running a business like this.

For what it's worth, there are many in business who don't really want to work with "collectors" of any kind, simply due to the PITA factor that is sometimes involved. It's not the way I run my business, but I understand why some people might not want to have that sort of customer.

Cheers, Al

 

I wonder what the rarest watch might be that got melted down for gold weight? Someone finds an uncle's old Patek, and......

 

When you put it that way, I can understand their point of view. Still distressing though.

 

Belive me a lot of stories like this and they are true.


Its not rarest and super expensive, but I think it would be very hard to find simmilar.

Story went lke this: In around 2010-2012 when cash for gold was on its peak, someone brought 3 pocket watches to my father. He also did not care about vintage watches. Man asked if he can just take down cases of all 3 watches so he will sell it. My father did that and man who bring watches said you can keep what was not gold.

In the evening that day father showed me what he got and on all 3 dial it says IWC. Cant remember which calibers were in but I know I sold them for more than 100eur each on bay. I had conversation with my father that evening and explain to him a little bit more about vintage watches and what is more valuable than just scrap. From there on he now always calles me when he is in doubt. That was let say horror story, but next day what happend its little better.

Same man comes to my father and says hey I got another watch to disaassamble and sell for scrap. This time, thank god, my father asked if he can buy it when he saw it. Man said sure and they agree on price of gold. In that time he paid 100eur, what was scrap gold price.

Here she is:

 

As much as I hate to see good cases scraped for gold, in particular with watches that can bring very good money and have collectible value (trust me not al of them do), as you have shown there is an upside. These orphaned movements are often a source of spare parts for vintage watches where the parts are no longer available new.

I can often buy a used movement for parts cheaper than I can buy the single part I might need, and if it's a part that is not typically subject to wear (so likely will be good on a donor) then I'll buy the entire movement so I potentially have other spares too.

Cheers, Al

 

There's a local pawn shop here in town that used to hammer the movement out of the solid gold case before scrapping it. I told them I'd be happy to remove the movements and buy them if they don't want to sell the watch as a whole. That was five years ago and I'm still waiting for them to call.

 

I bought the watch below at auction a couple of years ago. I asked the auction house if they had any history, and they said the vendor had bought it cheap off a jeweller a decade ago who was about to melt down the case....