Quentin R. Bufogle loves being wrong. Especially about watches.He loves it when his snobbery, short-sightedness and completely unsupported preconceived notions are suddenly imploded by a brand or a particular piece he only thought he knew. As was the case with the Montblanc Nicolas Rieussec GMT Chronograph.
While GaryG thinks it’s all the more impressive that designers continue to delight us with new looks, many watches are often very similar. And trying to describe the slippery slope from vague resemblance to outright theft is not a simple task. So he begins down at the lower end of the grade with so-called homage watches and moves up the GaryG Styling Statute of Limitations from there.
Until recently, Raman Kalra appreciated the Santos from afar, but lately, something has clicked, and this watch has jumped up towards the top of his wish list. By sharing his impressions and feelings, he is hoping that it may do the same for you.
The first time Bhanu Chopra strapped a borrowed BR 03-92 Black Matte Ceramic on his wrist, he thought that it was the perfect Bell & Ross watch for him, checking all the boxes for the characteristics he expected from an aviation-style instrument watch. He bought one and it has been part of his core pilot’s watch collection ever since. This is why.
The framed aventurine central dial of this bespoke Sartory Billard SB05 has a depth that allows us to easily imagine we are looking through a maze of galaxies toward the far edges of the universe. And framing that is a ring of meteorite, a true space material. What else makes this watch so unique?
If there were a watch enthusiasts’ encyclopedia, under “embarrassment of riches” the image might just be a side-by-side shot two of contemporary watchmaking’s great complicated pieces: the “mighty” A. Lange & Söhne Double Split and Patek Philippe’s Reference 5370P split-second chronograph. In this article, GaryG compares and contrasts them to come out with a winner.
When Rolex put the Sky-Dweller Caliber 9001 in a Rolesor case in 2017 (“Rolesor” is a Rolex term for stainless steel and gold) and dropped the price down to $14,400 Chris Malburg became a player. And, as he soon discovered, so were a goodly number of other Rolex admirers. Here is why he bought this watch and what happened then.
As a collector, and a fairly visible one at that, GaryG has been paying attention to reports of muggings and thefts of watches and wondering whether it makes sense these days to wear valuable pieces in public. He polled a group of 20 watch enthusiast friends on their personal safety while wearing watches to learn what steps they take to keep safe.
You can like everything, but you can’t buy – or keep – everything! Inevitably, the choices involved lead at times to regrets; for GaryG, along with many of his pals, the sadness is much more often about pieces they sold too soon or failed to buy rather than pieces they were sorry about buying in the first place. Here’s a story of shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Big brands are now making beautiful, reliable, and relatively accurate “traditional” mechanical watches, but the handcrafted work many of us value is disappearing. Highly skilled watchmakers and artisans are rare and expensive: there just aren’t enough of them available to churn out the large quantity of nice watches now being sold. And why bother when nobody seems to have noticed?