Take it easy, reader: another Friday’s upon us. You’ve made it. Here are some interesting watches to distract you from the fact that, as of early Sunday morning, many of us will need to reset our internal and external clocks and watches due to daylight saving time.
Each week, I end up finding a few watches that seem worth highlighting, but maybe not about spending a few hundred words on. To that end, while I will never buy a Patek 3940, I admire them immoderately and find them beautiful, and here is one with much more historical heft to it than most (though in the same auction, there is a Rolex Prince that sure seems best to avoid). On good old Goodwill, there’s a Movado Datron HS360, almost certainly powered by a 17-jewel Zenith El Primero, and, yes, the watch is sporting a bit of wear, but the dial/hands/bezel all look great, the case is unpolished, and the watch is listed as being operational (though it’s also listed as having 31 jewels).
To continue the score-keeping, last week’s Speedmaster Teutonic sold for £1100, and the Gold Rolex Bombe sold for $5400. The Heuer Carrera has not, at the time of writing, come up for auction yet, and the Élégante also awaits its eventual high roller.
A Stunning Audemars Piguet VZ SSC
Twenty-some years ago, my dad serviced his grandfather’s gold-plated bumper Tissot and told me to wear it and see if I liked it, so I strapped it on and wore it as I did what I did at the time (biked, ran, goofed with friends). When I called my dad a week later to tell him I broke it, he told me it couldn’t be broken—he’d just serviced it. When I brought the watch over and showed him it was, in fact, not functioning, he asked what I had done, at which point I told him about the biking and the running, and he shook his head, sighed, and descended to the basement to fix the watch again. That was basically the last time either of us pretended I could wear a dress watch. The experience engendered in me a sort of guilty fear that I’m not gentle enough for dress watches, like some horological Lennie a la Of Mice And Men. The Arrow of Time.
Which is a long way of saying that this 1946 Audemars Piguet is not something I’d automatically be drawn to, but after a friend pointed it out (the inimitable Mark Kauzlarich, who definitely didn’t add this line about himself while editing my column), I couldn’t stop returning to it.
The easiest route, for me, to being bowled over by the watch is the fact that it’s powered by a ZVSS. You’re forgiven for not instinctively knowing what that movement is, or why it’s important, but if you’re into watches, you’ve almost certainly drooled over a watch powered by some relative of this same movement. The JB Champion Observatory Patek? Same movement base. The AP 5516 Mr. Clymer praised in 2015? Ditto. More contemporarily, perhaps you dream of someday owning (or, hell, even just trying on) a Dufour Simplicity? Huh, look at that.
But say you’re not someone seduced by legendary movements? In that case, maybe you can be tempted by the fact that the case of this watch was made by Jeanneret, a detail gleanable from the hammerhead 166 mark on the case back. Though I am wildly unqualified to serve as Sherpa regarding the esoterica of Swiss case hallmarks, here’s what Marcus Siems or Goldammer has to say about Jeanneret cases: “We can find two main trajectories for Jeanneret-made cases – intricate chronograph with angled lugs (Universal Geneve) and dressier Art Deco pieces with hooded lugs (Vacheron Constantin) – in both ways the detailed work on the lugs is the feature to keep an eye out for.”
Stress and note that bit about the lugs, reader, and look again at the pictures of the Audemars Piguet on offer. Those are extraordinary lugs (insert as many are-you-a-dial-or-lugs guy jokes here as you wish), and this watch is only one of three known to have come in this configuration. As with everything else regarding watches, lugs are both a) literally tiny and relatively overlookable to well-adjusted civilians and b) almost ridiculously critical if you are one of the sorts of people who care. Then of course there’s the impossibly lovely dial, which somehow, after the movement and the case, feels like the least critical element of the watch, which is bonkers, given the thing’s austere simplicity and beauty.
Available for €38,000, this is a lot of watch for, yes, a hefty bit of money. I’m going to keep telling myself I’m constitutionally incapable of properly caring for dress watches so that I can stop fantasizing about the thing.
Girard Perregeaux ref. 9034 “Playboy Moon Watch”
You’ve noticed by now, BAL reader (can we call ourselves BALLERS yet?), my preference is not only for auctions, but for lower-level auctions specifically. This was a function of necessity more than anything, and most of the nicest watches I’ve ended up with were because other people weren’t looking where I was, or because I took a risk on something with bad pictures and negligible description.
My first experience with the Girard-Perreagaux 9034 “Moon Watch” or “Playboy” (or whatever one wants to call it) came through such venues. Some examples came up, and I was able to secure one for relatively cheaply, and it was simply fun, a quirky watch that, beyond the dial, felt basically identical to tons of other 1960s watches. I’ve owned a few of these, none for more than a few months, and while they’re charming, I almost hesitate to note this one because I cannot get my head around how much they sell for.
This gets into tricky territory of worth and value, which is too vast a minefield to even know how to negotiate. Obviously, the watch will only ultimately be worth whatever someone’s willing to pay for it, but the eye-watering premiums paid for this version of the 9034 (or the “Roulette” version) confounds me. Aside from the dials, the 9034 is a bog-standard Swiss time-only watch, in this case powered by the GP 12.3, which is a fine movement but nothing extraordinary. I found the case to have slightly stubby and short lugs, but it’s otherwise entirely pedestrian. It is, in other words, a Totally Fine Time Only Watch.
This ref. 9034 is sitting at $368 as of this writing and will, I suspect, finish much higher. It’s in good condition and is likely to enjoy a final price-bump, as the watch’s dirtiness in this case likely indicates it hasn’t been messed with (presumably, all dirty spots on the stainless steel case arejust dirt).
A few minutes of buffing the scuffed crystal will reveal what looks to be an excellent example of the hand-painted dial beneath. The crown is (correctly) unsigned, and the back shows no marks—I’d bet this has never even been opened. I would 100% be tempted to chase this if it stayed under the $1k threshold, but those days are long gone. I would note, too, that if this particular time-only GP hasn’t quite hooked you, I’ve gone back to this one more times than I can count, and I’ll be tracking it closely.
Sportsways Skin Diver
I remember nodding along quite a bit reading this piece from Mr. Stacey (I’m in no way attempting to curry favor by linking to articles by Messrs Clymer and Stacey, merely noting that, like I suspect many of you, Hodinkee stories have been formative). I have even less need for a dive watch than I do for a chronograph, and while much of the appeal of the Real Dive Watches has eluded me, I was an early sucker for skin divers. Specifically, I was a sucker for the sort of skin diver Mr. Stacey wrote about—not necessarily the Silvana, but the sort of utilitarianly plain 37mm (or so) case and unfussy bi-directional bezel. I love such watches, still.
Like the Seaboard Yacht chronograph highlighted several weeks ago, the watch under consideration was made when small, industry-specific companies could have their own watches made. In this case, the company was Sportsways, which made a whole host of presumably fascinating and useful dive gear (if you are, in fact, a diver). For my own personal purposes—someone whose enjoyment of bodies of water goes no deeper than maybe 20 feet—I’ll never be gobsmacked by a “revolutionary single hose two-stage regulator,” but I am 100% here for the Sportsways Mariner.
The example available on eBay—$224.50 at the time of writing—looks to be in generally great and original condition. The case is entirely polished, though that wasn’t too strange at the time (the Aquastar 63 was as well), and the dial and hands here look extraordinary, with no visible lume loss. There are, yes scuffs, and the crown looks to have taken a serious ding at some point, and maybe you, too, think it’d look better with a black bezel (tho as the 1962 catalog picture makes clear, the steel bezel is correct), but of the watches that’ve popped up on ebay in the last week, this, to me, is hands-down the most accessible and likely fun. Who knows what it sells for? Given the price will likely stay in the hundreds, that data point feels less pressing. What you’re getting is a fun and interesting time-only skin diver, which, regardless of where you wear it, will almost certainly be the only one in the room.
A Glycine Airman 314.050 with Box
The Glycine Airman needs no introduction: it’s been around for more than 70 years, Pete Conrad wore one on Gemini 5, and the company still exists and makes any number of iterations of the classic, including a fairly faithful modern reproduction.
Given that the Airman was one of the first pilot’s watches, you’ll be unsurprised that it needed hacking seconds so that the wearer could synchronize his watch with a reference time. In what I’ve always thought was one of the most clever solutions used to create that complication, the Airman has a little wire that pops up between the 2 and 4 at the top of the dial when the crown’s pulled out, which wire manually stops the seconds hand. The listing doesn’t clarify if the hacking function is still operable.
The watch wears very well, but I feel compelled to note, for anyone who’s not experienced one, that one of the few truly head-scrambling experiences I’ve had in watches was wearing a watch with a 24-hour dial. This is firmly in the realm of taste and style more than anything, but I had a very hard time trying to make my brain grow accustomed to the fact that noon on a 24-hour dial looks—in terms of hand placement—like 6 o’clock. This may not present as any problem whatsoever if your tastes run to the more exotic and you’re fine walking on the horological wild side, but for normies like me, I never quite got used to it. Oddly, that hasn’t diminished my desire for another example, though practice, in this case, would likely make me go a little crazy.
The example on offer—$275 at the time of writing—certainly isn’t flawless, as crown has likely been replaced at some point (it should be cross-hatched), the painted numerals on the bezel has mostly worn away, and there are two bits of loose lume floating around in the dial, which is strange only because the lume in the hands and on the plots seems intact. You do, however, get the original wooden box, which isn’t nothing. The listing says the watch is currently running and the date changes, but also recommends a service, meaning you have, with this watch, yet another opportunity to get to know your local watchmaker.
Weston Cutter
2026-03-06 16:01:00