Quote:
Originally Posted by Dottore
In almost all cases the giveaway is if the second hand doesn't sweep.
But I have occasionally seen a fake where the second hand does sweep.
The other way to tell pretty easily is by weight and heft. Many fakes are far too light.
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Not exactly. Modern mechanical movements commonly have balance wheels that oscillate at 28800 beats per hour which equals 8 beats per second. These beats of a "smooth" sweep second hand, if observed closely, can be seen, if not easily counted.
The Rolex Perpetual movement beats at 28800 bph. So does the Swiss ETA 2824 25 jewel movement which is significantly less expensive than the Rolex. There is no visual way to tell if the movement in what might appear to be a genuine Rolex is an ETA 2824 (or some other 28800 bph movement) without removing the case back and examining the movement itself.
If a fake Rolex has a second hand that sweeps, it just means that it has a cheap mechanical movement.
Incidentally, I own two automatic watches with identical ETA 2824 movements; an $800 Jacques LeMans and a $250 no-name gray market titanium cased watch. One loses about a minute in two days and the other is extremely accurate, well within the COSC standards of -4/+6 sec. per day (as good or better than most Rolex COSC certified) and it is not COSC certified (only 3% of swiss made movements are COSC certified).
The heft of a watch is determined by case material. Most decent watches today are stainless steel, some gold plated (with an insignificant weight of gold) or are solid gold and MUCH heftier than stainless. A stainless steel cased Rolex knock-off will have the same heft as a genuine stainless steel cased Rolex. Titanium cases are, of course, very light.
A cheap quartz watch is more accurate than any mechanical watch and most, if not all, beat at 1 beat per sec., clearly identifying them as quartz as opposed to mechanical.
Uhh...is there a difference between weight and heft?
