As you may know both my Breitlings are in the shop for complete overhaul. I kind of abated the sadness of their loss to my wrist with purchase of a Casio G-Shock GW-7900b, but the G-shock just wasn’t cutting unless I was wearing a T-shirt.
Fortunately my wife is very understanding and she knows when I am besotted with a new product. A brief visit to watch dealer one Saturday afternoon revealed that product to be an Omega Speedmaster. Now I tried all the current models on but my wife only liked the bog standard smaller moon watch. She thought the co-axial 9300 was just too big (she thinks all my watches are too big – meh). Just as well as my budget was way below the current line-up. I wanted something not too pricey but still nice enough to help keep my more expensive watches in top notch condition.
Another day and another visit to watch dealer sprung a real surprise. I went down there to check out a few Hamilton or Sinn watches. Turns out they had just finished the overhaul of a 1991 Speedmaster Reduced. I was quiet surprised to see it at such a knock out price too – approx $1000! (12mth warranty too!!) Needless to say any thoughts of Sinns or Hamiltons were left far behind.
Now I was not too knowledgeable about the Reduced model, but I’ve done a fair bit of reading since my acquisition. Needless to say it’s no moon watch despite the similarities. It is slightly smaller at 39x12mm and uses an automatic movement – ETA 2892-A2 with the exclusive Dubois-Dépraz 2020 module. I believe due to the age of my watch it’s the slightly less decorated 1140 movement as opposed to the 3220 later version- thus making it a 45 jewel 28k bph movement. It has been keeping good time and only losing about 5 seconds a day and does indeed reach its 40 hour reserve. The watch is in as new condition and should not need touching for 4 years.
The only detracting issue about the watch is that the luminosity is almost completely dead. However the patina finish to the lum is growing on me and nicely reflects the age of the watch.
