OP your post is timely. I picked up the following Clifton Baumatic in March of this year and wanted to post comments. Thanks for getting this started.
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I will start with I enjoy this watch. The burgundy-ish dial with gold is a great color combination. The watch is 39MM but wears smaller. I am not complaining about that. I say it wears smaller, because the face of the watch is small as the gold bezel takes up a lot of space, which is good thing. If I am buying a gold watch, I don't want them to skimp on the gold. It is a very classy looking, might I even say vintage, dress watch, which appeals to me. What follows is a random list of observations.
1. I am not happy with the accuracy. See the photo below taking on June 1st of this year. I keep both watches below on a watch winder (Heiden which is a great winder at a fraction of the cost of others) at 650 tpd when not wearing them. The results you see are in the photo are basically the results for the month of May. The BM is 4 minutes and 7 seconds fast, which equals 247 seconds, which I think translates into ~7.9 seconds per day, which is outside of cosc specs. As mentioned, I am not happy and I'll probably get the watch back to the dealer to send into BM. I have called both BM and the dealer and the first comment from them was maybe it is magnetized. I had to remind them that while this version does not have the silicon hairspring (?) it is supposed to have other properties to prevent magnetism. The accuracy of the Nomos speaks for itself. That watch is over a year old and is extremely accurate.
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2. If you look at the first picture, do you notice how the 3 does not seem to be parallel / even with the 2? I don't think anything is wrong with the numbers. I am not sure why BM designed the dates this way but they did. If you look at the other post with the blue watch, you can see the same thing (if you look closely) with the 26. The 6 is not quite parallel with the 2. Not a huge issue, but an issue nonetheless that I did not pick up on when I viewed the watch on several visits to the dealer.
3. While I am on the subject of the date. All of the marketing photos of the watch that you see from BM use the number 8. That 8 fills up the whole window and gives the impression of a big date. The problem is that when you hit the double digits (11, 12, etc) the size of the date shrinks. BM could have made a a larger date window to accommodate the same size for all of the dates. That I suspect would have cause a host of other other issues - larger face would have been needed, which maybe shrinks the size of the bezel, etc.
4. If you look closely at my first photo, you will see that the date window has chamfered edges / corners. In bright light, I have noticed at times that it seems as if the top left hand corner of the date window has a white dot. There is actually not a white dot. It is just the sun reflecting off of the edges. It took me several minutes to figure that out.
5. The black band in all types of light seems to have a burgundy tint to it, which I think is quite cool given the burgundy dial. I don't know if BM did anything in particular to generate that effect.
6. The band also has another small detail which includes blue thread near where the tang clasp is. I think that is also another cool little detail that only an owner would notice.
Am I happy with the watch? Yes. Am I dismayed by the accuracy? Very much so. Accuracy is important to me. On paper this watch was a winner for me: affordable, gold, quasi in house movement, that is a chronometer. Hopefully, when I send this watch back for review / repair, it won't take months and they will be able to significantly improve the timekeeping. Thanks for letting me vent and I hope others find value in the comments.
