For Watch lovers: A good watch tells its history.

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

I find this story particularly interesting. I personally owns a Rolex 16610 LV for the same purpose. Hopefully, it'll get passed on for generations with it.

http://www.smh.com.au/executive-styl...611-2o10t.html

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The time of your life
Date
June 11, 2013
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Jeremy Loadman
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Sydney Swiss Australians

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Watchmaker Nick Hacko with the Davosa watch he has sent travelling around Australia. Photo: Edwina Pickles
For women it is usually a piece of jewellery, but for men the item that is most likely to be passed down through the generations is a watch.

As Quentin Tarantino reminded us in truly unforgettable fashion in his masterpiece Pulp Fiction, when a watch is passed down from one generation to the next, it may not come in a box like a new one, but it will come with a story attached.

Sydney master watchmaker Nick Hacko couldn't agree more. “A beautiful watch is one with some provenance, some history behind it.”

The belief that a watch with a story is a watch worth keeping has led Hacko to set up the "Where is the Davosa" project.

The project will see a Swiss-made mechanical watch from the Davosa company venture on a year-long trip around Australia where it will be worn by a different person each week. It's a trip that Hacko hopes will remind Australians that watches, the people they belong to, and the journeys they go on can be a great vehicle for storytelling.

The brand new $800 Swiss-made Davosa Panamericana (dubbed the Davosa Panaustraliana) set off from Hacko's watch shop in central Sydney at precisely 2pm on May 10 and soon afterwards was on its way to the Central Western Plains of New South Wales on the wrist of the Hon. Anthony Roberts MP, the NSW Minister for Fair Trading. The following week the Davosa found its way on to the wrist of a Royal Australian Navy medic.

Throughout its journey, Hacko wants to see people wear the watch in all sorts of weird and wondrous places and to share their story through social media. And it appears his wish for the spectacular will come true in late July, when a Sydney man will wear the watch underwater while observing Great White sharks from a cage off the coast of Port Lincoln in South Australia.

“There are thousands of watch enthusiasts around the world who would love to learn more about our country. And through a photo or two we hope participants in the project will capture a moment in an inspirational Australian setting that the rest of the world would love to see,” Hacko says.

While Hacko hopes the Davosa's year-long trip will result in some interesting stories and incredible pictures, the purpose of the trip has another, more serious, side to it. It is to do with the decreasing availability of spare parts for the repair of Swiss-made watches.

“The trend in the Swiss watch manufacturing industry is to restrict the availability of spare parts to independent watchmakers,” Hacko says.

“Its something that many people are not aware of but nowadays if you buy a luxury Swiss watch you cannot repair it anywhere else but with the manufacturer and they don't disclose that to you when you buy the watch.”

For independent watchmakers and repairers this is a very important issue and one that Hacko is trying to highlight with the trip of the Davosa watch.

“A good watch is one that can be repaired, serviced and restored. So I say, buy a watch, wear it and enjoy it. Scratch it even – it will tell a story. But having access to spare parts is essential to both watch owners and watch repairers.”

Interestingly for many watch buyers over the last decade, a good watch increasingly means a mechanical watch (which needs to be wound approximately once a day), or its close cousin, the automatic watch (which winds itself when gently shaken).

“There has definitely been a surge in mechanical and automatic watches,” says Andrey Eierweis, from Melbourne's Ekselman Watchmakers.

“Most of the manual watches we sell are vintage rather than new and overall they make-up approximately 20 per cent of our sales. While they are popular among purists and collectors we have many young people come in who are sick of battery-operated and other mainstream types of watches that you can find in any shopping centre. They want something different.”

And as Hacko reminds us, it is the vintage watches that come with a sense of history. Sure, they are not the most precise tellers of time, but then you wouldn't wear a mechanical watch if you are only interested in the accuracy of its hands.

The fact that they can also pass on a good story has got to make up for a lost second or two.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/executive-styl...#ixzz2WWk34Wxc




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