Lee's Watch Thread for MM'ers of Impeccable Taste

[WRXtranceformed]

Whew okay! What a weekend. I, like Dave, also took the plunge on another incredible piece but we'll get to that in a second.

Baselworld: I really want to go someday. I think it's kind of like SEMA though where you have to be in the industry or have press creds. This is the age of social media news though and I follow a bunch of guys on Instagram who pretty much live blogged the whole thing. In a way, it was kind of like being there...except I wasn't in Switzerland, or actually there handling each piece, or smoozing with industry powerhouses...eh I'll take what I can get

There was some cool stuff that dropped, I'm definitely missing a few here but the ones that really stood out to me:

Rolex released the new Pepsi GMT Master II, bringing back the jubilee bracelet and giving it a new movement:


I think it looks great and I am a fan of jubilees but I prefer my oyster bracelet on this case. This also apparently annoyed a lot of people, because previously the only way to get a Pepsi GMT was to get the white gold version, which is way more expensive than the stainless. That pretty much devalued the GMTs of anyone who bought the WG versions. I am happy, because they bumped up the base price of the stainless GMT to almost $10k, probably instantly adding a grand or two to the value of mine

They also released this monstrosity, but as long as there are oil sheikhs there will be watches like this:

Being a full blown Seiko geek at this point, I was excited to see what Seiko brought to the table. They have been releasing newer premium versions of the original divers, throwbacks to their heritage pieces. This year they introduced a modern version of the 1968 Professional diver, the SLA025:

The original 1968:

I really liked it but it is absurdly expensive, something like $9,000. No thanks

They also released an updated Marinemaster (SLA019) and I love the green color scheme. The removal of "Marinemaster" on the dial and the addition of the Prospex "X" is going to be really polarizing, and frankly I can see why because most people don't really like the X. I have always thought that the Marinemaster needed that extra verbage on the dial to set itself apart.



A few more cheaper recreation variants and homages were released as well, but those are the ones that wowed me. It was also nice to see companies like Tudor recognizing the demand for smaller watches and releasing 39mm and smaller dials on some of their most popular models (the new Black Bay has Joey all hot and bothered).

So all of this talk of modern interpretations....but I went out and sourced the real deal this morning. Yes it is a disease at this point, but I had been in the market for an investment grade vintage watch for a while. It's really just moving money around at this point. These are not only as good as money in the bank, they have been appreciating at an exponential rate.

I bought this all original July 1969 Seiko 6105-8000 from a fellow collector who had it up for trade. This was the earliest version of the second generation of Seiko diver. These were popular among soldiers during the Vietnam war and the later version of this model (the 8110 "Captain Willard") was made popular by the movie Apocalypse Now. You can read more about it here if you have a few minutes and are bored: https://gearpatrol.com/2012/06/12/timeke...eiko-6105/

This one was fully restored with NOS parts and relumed by Jack at IWW, who ironically is refurbishing my vintage 6309 diver right now. This was not an inexpensive purchase but because this one has been masterfully restored and because this earlier variant hasn't completely gone through the roof in terms of pricing, I think it will be a great long term buy! I was talking to another guy that had one for sale, I passed because it was in rougher original shape and he sold it half an hour later on the forums for more than what I paid for this one.

On to the pics! I'll take more when it gets here!







I'm putting the Sportura solar I just bought up on the block because I'm at the one-in-one-out point again in my collection