What? Universal signed Benrus Sky Chief? Universal signed Martel movement??

I disagree due to Occams razor...

First on the OP watch we cannot see the dial in enough detail to see if the paint matches or not.

Second no way this was an in period redial, as the 4 minute markers would have been pulled, it was an old way of checking wind at airports for pilots that was already on its way out in the 40's.

Third, why would someone do a redial to match an obscure watch posted on ebay 2 years ago? Or redial one 40 years ago to match a watch that odds are they had never seen, why not redial it like the an easy to source one?

It makes more sense that these are very early Sky Chiefs models, maybe even sales/marketing models. Sky Chiefs where sold to airlines esp early in production these could be samples taken around to airlines, where universal was a stand in for the Airline name. Or as the Japanese website claims universal was a subbrand for Benrus that never took off. At this point I have another theory below, that makes the most sense.

Everything just seems ro makes more sense then 2 redials being identical and both have no logic as to why they have been redialed that way.



Lets look a little deeper... The skychief came in 3 movements a Venus 178 and Valjoux 71 and 72. The movement in both of these watches match and is not any of those 3. But it does appear to be a Universal 281, hmm the plot thickens....


So again I will ask how did 2 watches that are identical in every way show up while one is an original dial and one is a redial? Or how does one have a higher quality dial and one a lower quality one.

Universal made watches for a bunch of people it is possible that these are production test models for a watch that never was ordered by Benrus from Universal? They had problems getting the Venus Movements as they where going to Navitimers, perhaps one of the bids was to Universal and these are 2 sample watches from Universal, for some reason made Benrus went with Valjoux instead, maybe so they could leverage their own existing factories instead of having Universal do final assembly. Perhaps these are the very first iterations of the Sky Chief that was never put into production and they ended up with Venus and Valjoux movements instead.

On a positive note, it is pretty plain to see why it says Universal on the dial now. You can also argue that these are not fakes at this point either.

Thanks guys 4 hours going down this rabbit hole....

Obviously they are different fonts and styles then the Sky Chiefs with valjous movements. The Benrus font does match though.

Don't compare them to the normal ones you see. These have to be evaluated differently then others. I think the data leads to these being prototype watches for a watch that never got made IE a 281 powered Skychief. There is simply no reason why you would take 2 Universals and fake 2 Benrus watches.

Again Occams Razor