What time is it? Watches and horology

🥺 quite a saving!

The snowflake hand is something Tudor revived from their vintage divers' watches. Originally Tudor used the Rolex layout with rectangles and dots, a triangle at 12, and Mercedes hands (and of course, actual Rolex cases and crowns).

In the 60s they wanted to differentiate themselves as a brand, rather than "Rolexes with cheaper movements", and came up with the famous snowflake Submariner. They changed their logo to the shield shape they use now and totally rethought the hands and markers. Twelve is an isosceles triangle (more or less), 3/6/9 is rectangle that's twice as long as its width, and the intermediate hour markers are squares. So it's all very geometric and mostly based on squares, hence the hour and seconds hands (which became known as snowflake hands for some reason) using rotated squares as large lume shapes. It was quite a cool and modern design at the time.

Modern Tudor have revived that basic design for the Pelagos line (although the triangle is a bit thinner than it should be), but they also just slapped the square hour hand on the more vintage styled Black Bay. Everything else on the Black Bay is aping the pre-Snowflake designs, except clearly Rolex have decided they don't want them to use a Mercedes hour hand anymore. So you end up with this odd collision of retro and modern.

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I don’t mind them mixing the round markers with the snow flake hands on the blackbay line. I think it looks great. I do think the square markers on the Pelagos 39 are too small though, that bugs me much more.

That square hour hand doesn't make much sense with those filled circled markers on the dial
And I prefer the shape synchronization used on the vintage one. The Black Bay doesn't seem to follow any of that and looks weird.

Literally cannot unsee this now. Thanks. 🤣

They're smaller than on a lot of the vintage snowflake dials, not sure they're too small for the watch! The triangle being narrower is worse, for me, because the sides of the triangle aren't parallel to the square markers at 1 & 11.

And btw what does the Merc star mean?
See it all over the place, but it never made much sense to me.

It’s just the shape of the hour hand as seen on any number of Rolexes. The circle section has three bars like a Mercedes-Benz badge. The bars are there so that the area of lume isn’t too big/fragile, at least, that was the reason originally.

(If you’re talking about the original MB badge, the three lines are meant to point to the air, land and sea, the three types of engine they made.)

https://www.bobswatches.com/rolex-blog/just-because/rolex-mercedes-hands.html

Aaaarghhh..

I would never have noticed.. now this likely to be all I see

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Surely that should be a pie segment not q slice of bread/ ruler?

Oooof. Did u just out geo the typog? 🙃

.

Still trying to shift my Seiko SPB143…. Any takers at £500?

Would really like to get it gone so I can free some cash for its replacement

Quite like this

https://iflwatches.co.uk/products/maen-manhattan-graffiti

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That's pretty cool. Just need one with London and all 32 Boroughs and I'm sold.

Indeed!

I'll ask them to collaborate with me. Thanks for giving away the idea for free :-p

As long as I get one as a good will gesture!

One free copy. Limited edition 0/500

Following on from my earlier post I’ve been making a watch box possibly for someone on here subject to its completion.
Nearly finished and will get some better photos when it’s complete - just the hinges to install.

American black walnut with a burr oak veneer lid - designed to hold 12 watches and small drawer box below for accessories.
If anyone is interested in a box let me know.

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Nice, what would be the price ?

That really is a fantastic bit of cabinet making.

Bravo....

Love these. Very cool.

Between £200-£300ish.
the veneer was £20, timber £40, hinges £38 be cheaper without the drawer obviously.

and thanks

thanks for the nice comment

Very nice work.