My Hamilton watch is on its way to Secaucus, New Jersey this evening. I was in the shower last week and pulled my towel off the sink, carrying my watch onto the floor, where it stopped working. From what Rob tells me, high-quality mechanical (winding) watches are delicate beasts; the spring and moving parts are held together by millimeters and don’t respond well to shock. While I won’t hide the fact that I’m disappointed, I suppose it’s understandable.
Hamilton is owned by the Swatch Group, who also own the high-end brands Breguet, Longines, and Omega, among others, but their service procedures are straight out of the back of a comic book: You mail your watch to a nonspecific address and hope it gets there, then pray someone acknowledges receipt. No RMS number, no automated service; no way of notifying them you’re sending your expensive timepiece in advance. I’ve had better returns service from counterfeit sidewalk vendors in New York City.
Rob still has my Field Watch, and promises to get to it when he’s not pulling so much overtime. I miss old faithful.
At WRI, I’ve been working on a web project, which has been a lot of fun: I’m building a workflow to port all of the content from an InDesign file to HTML. I’ve been pushing to get all of our reports online in mobile-ready format, and built a template version using an open-source framework, a handful of jQuery tools, and some elbow grease. I’ve figured out how to get inDesign to spit out basic formatted HTML that gets pasted into the template, cutting back on the tedious work of formatting tables and boxes. The most time-consuming element now is formatting live charts, but I’m tempted to just use images. It’s been a lot of fun, having been away from pure web production for two years, to dive back in and get my hands dirty. I remember more than I give myself credit for, and after some initial roadblocks I got a lot of new technologies hooked up and working correctly. Not bad for an old man.
I’m spending the first couple of days with a gift from Santa: The Hamilton field watch I’d picked out months ago appeared under our tree, and I’ve been wearing it since Christmas day. My first impressions: It’s bigger and heavier than my Field Watch. Overall, I like the dimensions, and I’m getting used to the extra weight. The stock wristband is made for a bigger wrist than mine, which means it likes to slide down behind the far side of my hand, so I put one of the bands from my old watch on it. It looks great, and the crystal is slightly beveled instead of flat. The knob is about three times the size of the one I’m used to, which means it tends to get snagged more on my sleeves. The biggest issue I have with it, though, is the fact that it’s a manual-wind watch, something I didn’t notice on the listing. That’s not a dealbreaker. It just means I have to remember to wind it in the morning and in the evening. I like it a lot. It fits my aesthetic, and I’m keeping it.
In the meantime, my buddy Rob (he of the Seiko modding underground) clued me in to the huge eBay market in replacement watch parts. I did a quick search in the summer and found handfuls of replacement crystals which should fit my trusty Field Watch, so I’m going to drop off the watch and the parts with him to see if he can help me out.
I also found a Benchmade Mini Griptillian in my stocking, as a sidekick to–but not replacement for–my Skeletool. I’ve carried a Leatherman around for the past four years (my first was the original, now residing in the toolbox of the Scout), and I can’t begin to explain how many times I’ve used them for different things.
The Benchmade is lightweight, solid, and compact. The blade is razor-sharp and I’ve used it for ten different things this weekend. The action is smooth, and the locking mechanism is rock-solid and impossible to accidentally release. It’s got a pocket clip that reverses to either side based on your preference. I’m still taking the Skeletool most places I go, but the Benchmade will be my slimmed-down companion.
I’ve been trolling the ‘Best-of’ lists and plugging a lot of the individual songs into Spotify to find some new music. One of the tunes on constant repeat is Mike Doughty’s new single ‘Light Will Keep Your Heart Beating In the Future‘, which starts out with an odd banjo figure but slides hypnotically into Soul Coughing free-association wordplay territory from there. I’ve always been a fan of MD, in spite of his spite of Soul Coughing, and I really dig this tune.
I have a love/hate of Aphex Twin from back in the day, but ‘minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]‘ from Syro is another heavy rotator. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was a masterful album, but I had a hard time going in some of his more exotic directions. This tune is somewhere in the comfortable middle.
‘Brill Bruisers‘ from the New Pornographers is a third favorite. They have a distinctive sound, which is to say, none of their songs sound the same. This one is a loud stadium sing-along that always gets Finn moving.
For Christmas 1990, I asked Santa for a LL Bean Field Watch, which he kindly left under the tree for me. I’d picked it out of the mail-order catalog in those pre-Internet days, and in a rare instance of luck, it fit my rather small wrist almost perfectly. This was out of character with the rest of my wardrobe at that time, which was baggy and ill-fitting. I had it until about 1997 or so, when I put it on in haste and dropped it somewhere between my apartment and my office in Baltimore City. I’d neglected to tuck the end of the band into the loop and it slipped off my wrist during the bike ride.
Santa gave me an identical replacement that following Christmas, and I’ve had that watch ever since. It’s been with me all over the world and has the scars to prove it–the crystal is cracked, scuffed, and chipped. The nylon band is worn but functional. The battery, dutifully replaced by LL Bean every three years or so, is losing steam again, and several years ago they notified me that they have no more replacements for the crystal–their new Field Watch is a different design. It’s bigger, thicker, and uglier, actually.
I’ve been searching for a replacement for months now, and I’ve narrowed it down to a few candidates. My criteria is simple: the same classic design, a date display, stainless casing, and size. The current trend for all watches seems to be to oversize everything, so it looks like you’ve strapped a tuna can to your wrist. I look ridiculous wearing these watches; I want something that fits my arm.
The gold standard is a Hamilton Field Watch, which set the template during World War II. Unfortunately, these soar high above my price range, mainly because they have a sapphire crystal face, but they’re almost equal in dimension to my current watch. I’d like to buy one of these someday–when I have $300 in discretionary income just laying around.
Next, I looked at the Seiko 5, but ruled it out due to its thickness (13mm). It’s inexpensive but big.
The next contender is a Citizen Eco-Drive field watch, which is slightly wider than my current watch but equal thickness according to the published specs. I like it because it’s self-charging solar through the watch face, and it looks pretty good.
Given all of these choices, I’m going to buy a Citizen when I get some cash together. Not having a watch throws my ADD into chaos, and it’s become an extension of my arm over the last 20+ years.
I also have the option of replacing the crystal on my current watch myself, which I’m going to try. eBay has replacement crystal and toolkits all over the place, and I feel no fear in pulling a laptop apart in my spare time. Plus, my friend Rob has been heavily involved in the Seiko watch modding scene for several years. I may call upon his expertise to help me nurse my ailing friend back to life.
Wow. I probably definitely don’t have enough money for one of these, but I love the Bell & Ross WW1-92 Military watch. I also like the BR 126 Original too.