Since it is quite recent, and so as not to see it lost in the closed thread, I am repeating my review of the 38mm 1963 Reissue which I received from Thomas a couple of weeks ago...
My 1963 Reissue arrive today. I purchased the 38mm version, with the cream-colored dial and acrylic crystal.
And I've spent some quality time with a microscope and a loupe.
First, the case. The case is really excellent. The lugs are long and stylish, and the stepped bezel makes the watch wear bigger without being bigger. I put it next to my Poljot (late version with a round case) and the clunkiness of the latter becomes really apparent. I put it next to my vintage early-60's EBEL dress watch, which is to my eyes perfectly proportioned, and it holds up. The crown is big enough to hand-wind (necessary here, of course). The pushers are proportioned correctly. The watch looks better on a leather strap than on the provided NATO strap (pictures soon)--the case holds up to nice leather. The lug opening is not quite 18mm, and an 18mm strap has to be encouraged to fit, though it does not look compressed once it's there. I think a 19 or 20mm strap would look better. The 36mm case on my old EBEL takes a 19mm strap, and I like the proportions of the strap being at least as large as half the case diameter.
The detailing on the dial gives no cause for complaint. No weird printing artifacts or the like. And the acrylic crystal is perfect. The watch looks like a 60's watch, but without looking too small. And I'm glad this is an homage to an earlier Tianjin-made military watch--the writing on the watch is in Chinese characters and that means I don't have to feel guilty for wearing a watch that is pretending to be western when it isn't.
The bluing on the hands is a bit bright for real bluing, but that's a subtlety that will not bother me at all.
The movement is excellent. Obviously, I didn't tear anything down, but I did study it very closely. No Venus 175, as installed in, say, a vintage Breitling Navitimer, looks as good as this one, even if the imitation Geneva stripes were fly-cut rather than the result of polishing. At 30x, the grooves that give the stripes their look were even and large, versus the more random and far finer grooves that result from using tripoli on those tiny little buffs. But to the naked eye, they give the right effect. The chamfering on the bridges is done pretty well considering the price point.
The color of the blued screws suffers the same defect as the hands, but at this price it could not possibly bother me. But plain polished steel might have looked as good or better. The Seagull movement's chronograph control levers were highly polished--unlike those same levers on any Venus-made caliber 175, and unlike the control levers on my EBEL cal. 137. That really made the surface features of the movement sparkle, and it has great "curb appeal" through the display back. Look deeper, though, and the base plate and other inner workings are not pearled or decorated as they are on that EBEL movement and on the better Swiss watches (especially those wtih display backs). One has to look past a lot of sparkle to see that, though. Seagull just chose to polish and decorate different bits.
It's fun to study a hand-wind movement through a display back--no rotor to block the view.
I tested the watch with Kello (that cheapie iPhone timer thing), and the watch ran +12 dial down to +6 with the dial vertical and 12 o'clock pointed down. No other position ran outside that range. We'll see how that plays out in the real world, but I call that very little positional variation and at least close to chronometer timing, at least with a full wind. Yes, I realize that COSC measures time gained and lost in each position for a full 24 hours, and I"m considering this test just an indicator. My new EBELs are all within about 30 seconds of each other, having all been set alike four weeks ago. And they are all maybe 90 seconds fast, which means they are averaging about +3. That's right in the COSC sweet spot, it seems to me. The Seagull will need a week or two of keeping it wound to know for sure, but it doesn't seem as though it will be much outside that range, if at all.
Of course, the ST19 runs at 21,600 bph, and not at the 18,000 of the original Venus 175.
And now that I have a chrono with a column-wheel control, I understand it somewhat differently than how it is usually described. The column-wheel requires force to turn to the next position (which is what the start/stop pusher does), because the pillars are actuating a couple of levers as that is happening. The pillars are small, so the part of a lever falling off of one as it moves away, or climbing onto one as it is pushed underneath it, has to be close to the lever's pivot. That means whatever the lever does has a lot of leverage to exert onto the column wheel, and that adds to the workload of the start/stop pusher. One other thing that is happening is that the reset lever is being cocked when the chrono is first started. When the column wheel is in the run position, that reset lever is held in place by one of the column wheel pillars, which prevents it from becoming uncocked even if the reset pusher is pressed. Thus, the reset pusher does not have to wind anything up to have enough snap to roll those heart cams back to the zero position. That pusher requires almost no force at all. The start/stop pusher requires as much force as the start/stop pusher on my lever-actuated EBEL 137, and both require less than the one on the Poljot 3133.
I was surprised to discover that the minute totalizer is designed to jump minutes. The chrono seconds wheel has a single tooth that aligns with the minute wheel, and engages just enough to catch one tooth. The minute totalizer wheel has minute detents, and that passing tooth moves it to the next detent. So, the minute totalizer jumps to the next minute as the chrono seconds hand is passing 12. The minute wheel on my EBEL does not do that, and it's a nice feature.
The case could be made that the Venus 175 was one of the key innovations that helped restore the Swiss watch industry coming out of the Great Depression, and keep it going during WWII when they were powering the watches favored by military officers. But it was not an auto, and that was a crippling defect by the 60's. That's why Venus sold the tooling and so on to Tianjin--they were trying to fund the development of a lever-actuated chrono that could be thin enough to have automatic winding. (Column wheels are not thin. But Zenith figured that trick out three or fours years later, and kept the column wheel.) Given the 175's role back in the day, there is some lamenting that movements like it are no longer available. Well, they are. And they seem to work as well now as they ever did--maybe better--and there are nice watches available that use them.
Here are the pictures:
1963 Reissue, in original cream dial and 38mm case. I like a black leather strap with the cream stitching on this watch, rather than the NATO strap it came with.
A closeup of the dial to show that the printing and applied markers are really done quite well.
The ST1901 movement--a modern 21-jewel version of the Venus 175, made using the vintage tooling.
Here's a closeup of the movement, showing the column-wheel chronograph control at top center.
And, finally, a poor iPhone wrist shot:
View attachment 982915
Rick "to keep the information alive" Denney
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