REVOLUTION_International_Vol 54

There are several unenviable sensations in human experience.
Amongst the worst of these are: receiving inadvertent blows
from metal objects to one’s reproductive area; feeling as if your
volcano-hot Indian meal has burnt a hole through your digestive tract;
and the sucker-punch realization that you’ve been sold a fake watch.
To be fair, the first two are largely avoidable as long as you are not
trying to make it onto Thrasher magazine’s Instagram feed and do not
overestimate your Herculean ability to withstand the incendiary chillies
of the Indian subcontinent. If, however, you take the plunge into
vintage Rolex collecting, chances are, you will experience the third —
especially if you’d started buying vintage Rolexes 15 years ago as I did
when there was little to no information available to you. Indeed the few
sources of information were ironically weighty tomes written by dealers
so that they could set themselves up as voices of authority and sell you
basically anything they felt like, as was the case with me. However, I
should state that things exist in marked contrast today, thanks to the
rise of excellent, reputable and stand-up dealers like Eric Ku, Eric
Wind, Andrew Shear, Phillips Perpetual, the boys at Analog/Shift and,
if you’re into Omega, the Davidoff Brothers: these guys I would trust
implicitly. But back in the early days of my collecting, the scene was a
no man’s land of opinions often perpetuated by those who stood to gain
the most from them.
The following chronicles my journey related to the very first vintage
watch I ever purchased: a 1675 OCC dial GMT that, from the very
beginning, plagued me with one nightmare scenario after another — so
much so that in the ensuing decade I put it out of my mind. Until one
day, more than a decade later, I unearthed it and decided to examine
it in the cold light of day, only to discover that all its faults still weighed
heavily on me. When I approached the seller of the watch to address the
matter, he proposed to exchange the dial with that of another watch.
I would use the colloquialism “Frankenwatch”, but it was already a
Frankenwatch to begin with. He also broached the idea to use all the
available modern technology to bring this watch back to “new old stock”
condition using modern refinishing techniques that have advanced
significantly in recent years; the plan was to meticulously record each
stage of this process for an article that he would write.
Why have vintage watch restoration techniques evolved so rapidly?
To respond to nothing less than a seismic shift in collectors’ tastes.
When the vintage craze first started gaining momentum about 15 years
ago, buyers — especially those in their nascent forays into vintage Rolex
— would purchase based on the superficial appearance of watches
relative to their pricing. As such, whether it was a Double Red Sea-
Dweller or a Paul Newman Daytona, less discerning collectors would
tend to purchase pretty, often refinished or polished watches based
usually on asking price. Then an interesting thing began to happen.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, people started to become a great
deal more discerning about their vintage watches.
Thanks to the Internet, the perception on vintage forums, at
auction houses amongst the best-known dealers and the most
respected collectors started to coalesce. Gradually one quality began
to be prized above all others: originality — meaning watches in their
original condition, which had never been polished but had dials that had
140 VINTAGE