Here's mine. A Buren Grand Prix. It's not really valuable but I still wear it every day.
I have two of them. One, I received from my late father-in-law and this one was a flea market buy.
In an earlier life, I was a watch importer and distributor and acquired a few special watches for myself, all vintage and my small collection includes Rado, Revue Thommen, Omega, Baume et Mercier and Girard Perregaux.
The Buren shown here was a bit cosmetically challenged, requiring re-goldplating and some work on its movement - both jobs left to my esteemed master Swiss watchmaker here in Cape Town.
Max did a superb job with the mechanicals and from him, the watch went to firms offering 'goldplating'. I specified minimum 10micron plating but the results were disappointing with the plating coming off after a few days.
A second firm was tried and the result was even worse.
Soon after I started my watch distributing career, I built a plating facility specifically for refurbishing watch cases, using chemistry for plating with 24ct cobalt-hardened gold.
This equipment was put in storage after I changed careers a long time ago, and the Buren watch was packed-away as I don't like to wear tatty watches.
A few weeks ago, I needed to goldplate some unrelated objects and decided to re-do the plating on my Buren myself.
This involves quite a lot of work as plating cannot hide case blemishes. So I disassembled the 70-year old dear, filled the pitmarks with silver solder and first plated nickel and then 20microns gold.
In the pic, you can see the result. Next up, I am sending its dial to England for refurbishing.
Mr Bojangles
I have two of them. One, I received from my late father-in-law and this one was a flea market buy.
In an earlier life, I was a watch importer and distributor and acquired a few special watches for myself, all vintage and my small collection includes Rado, Revue Thommen, Omega, Baume et Mercier and Girard Perregaux.
The Buren shown here was a bit cosmetically challenged, requiring re-goldplating and some work on its movement - both jobs left to my esteemed master Swiss watchmaker here in Cape Town.
Max did a superb job with the mechanicals and from him, the watch went to firms offering 'goldplating'. I specified minimum 10micron plating but the results were disappointing with the plating coming off after a few days.
A second firm was tried and the result was even worse.
Soon after I started my watch distributing career, I built a plating facility specifically for refurbishing watch cases, using chemistry for plating with 24ct cobalt-hardened gold.
This equipment was put in storage after I changed careers a long time ago, and the Buren watch was packed-away as I don't like to wear tatty watches.
A few weeks ago, I needed to goldplate some unrelated objects and decided to re-do the plating on my Buren myself.
This involves quite a lot of work as plating cannot hide case blemishes. So I disassembled the 70-year old dear, filled the pitmarks with silver solder and first plated nickel and then 20microns gold.
In the pic, you can see the result. Next up, I am sending its dial to England for refurbishing.
Mr Bojangles