My friend has a vintage watch that used to belong to his dad, and I offered to show it the experts/collectors here, and see if I could find out anything about it. He sent this picture to me yesterday. At this point, I have no other pictures, but was wondering what, if anything you might be able to tell us about it. Thanks, in advance.
While this is not a FL forum, the watch is from the Seventies. During the near-death throws of the mechanical watch industry in Switzerland in the 70s FL released an incredible range of gold plated and SS cheap fashion watches with some amazing designs. FL were particularly popular in India, hence the plethora of FLs on eBay from there. I had a love affair with their manual wind Moon Raiders which are in my opinion one of the neatest designs in their late 60s collections. The Duo and Daymatics were powered by a fairly ordinary 17 jewel Schild movement I believe, and while there is a reasonably enthusiastic group of collectors buying them for their interesting case designs, the watches don't fetch much at auction and are generally not in the same quality league as Omega. There has to be an FL forum somewhere that will be able to add some more substance to the above.
This site provides a brief history of the firm, as follows: "Legal records show that Abraham Favre opened a small watchmaker's business in Le Locle in 1737. His son, Henry-Auguste, merged in 1814 with the watch-dealer, A. Leuba. The eighth-generation descendants of Henry Favre took over the business in 1970. Under the leadership of Henry Favre, born in 1908, the factory distinguished itself with a number of innovations launched from around 1950, including, for example, their own automatic caliber in 1956, the "Bivouac", a manually-wound wristwatch with mechanical altimeter in 1963, and the 1966 "Bathy 50" with a mechanical depth gauge. Similarly in the sixties, Favre-Leuba made itself known for its extraordinary twin-barreled movements, initially with manual winding and later with automatic winding. These movements - the caliber FL 1162 with a balance frequency of 36,000v/h - were fitted to the 1968 "Twinmatic" and "Duomatic" models. As a consequence of the quartz shock, the family company passed into the ownership of Benedom S.A., part of the Bacardi-Martini group, in 1985. "