THE MAKING OF A NEW OLD-STOCK WATCH PART 1:THE ROLEX GMT OFFICIALLY CERTIFIED CHRONOMETER (OCC) PCG 1.60

First and foremost, let me begin by emphatically stating that this story has nothing at all to do with Rolex, which I consider to be one of the greatest watch brands in existence. Rather, it is a story about vintage watch collecting and the dangers its precarious shoals are fraught with. Further its purpose is to highlight some of the techniques that are being used today to make watches look brand new. This is of course admirable, as thanks to modern technology, restoration has reached an unprecedented level of achievement, which is admirable — that is, unless of course a watch that has been made to look new is being sold to you as new old stock, which it is not. Ultimately, this is a cautionary tale stemming from a very personal experience.

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 realisation 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