Vintage divers

Dan S

When my watchmaker serviced my lovely "new" Wittnauer 4000, unbeknownst to me, he repaired it, and I was shocked to learn that it has a push-button quick-set date advance. After learning this, I searched for other examples online in sales listings, etc. and learned that the vast majority of them have broken quickset date mechanisms that have never been repaired. There is rarely any mention of the feature, and once you know how it works, you can often see from the position of the crown that it is broken. Since the date advances when you push the crown in, the normal crown position should be slightly extended as shown below.

Unfortunately, it was a pain in the neck for my watchmaker to find the parts and repair it, and a distraction from what he considers "real work". As a result, he gave me an ultimatum ... from now on he will only work on Rolex and maybe some Omega watches. 🙁

I may still try to convince him to work on some other complicated and valuable watches with interesting movements, but I won't ask him to work on pieces like this, since he feels they are beneath him. 😉

Ohmeguh

Here is a funky Vantage. I own the black variant. Never seen the silver dial. Picked her up this year.