The Breitling Watch Source Forums

Hello folks, I am recently registered to take advantage of your collective knowledge re: a used Breitling I recently purchased.

By way of background, I am not a collector. I have worn Seiko automatics for 30 years, but recently, while in the watch repair shop, this Breitling caught my eye, and I did an impulse buy. Now I have some nagging doubts, and unanswered questions. If I screwed up buying this, say so, but gently, I have a fragile ego.

Here we go: I hope the pic files are adequate. Near as I can tell from reading here, this is an early Chronomat. Movement is B13048, no. 1 70061, Chronographe 100M.

1. The bezel does not turn. The watchmaker tells me it was never designed to. I'm not sure I buy that story line. According to data gleaned here, it is a unidirectional bezel. Question: Is it a fixed bezel watch?

2. It has two inner scales. the outer one reads left to right 60-1000, the inner scale reads right to left, 0-100. The scales are small enough that even with my old man glasses I can barely read them. Questions: What is the purpose of the two scales? Is there a downloadable instructional for them? If the bezel is supposed to rotate, then can I assume, the bezel is used for doing whatever one does with these two scales? If the bezel is fixed is it still used for doing scale calculations?
Is there a practical use for these scales? This coming from a guy who uses a rotating bezel for countdown features and not much else.
3. The bezel is lifted up a bit at the 7:00 position. do I need to worry about this? It seems very solid.
4. The watch has a 100 M water resist stamp on the back. I regularly never take my watch off. I shower regularly( well, sort of), and am a lap swimmer. Is this watch going to survive those two activities?
4. The start/stop button seems to work the sweep second hand just fine, and it appears to stop the top and bottom dials, but the reset button only resets the sweep second hand, it does not re-set the two small dials. Is this correct operation?

Thanks in advance for your responses. any and all info relating to this model, operation, function, history, etc., will be mucho appreciated by LOM. I look forward to reading them.

Kendall

Welcome to BreitlingSource.

To answer the questions.....

1. The bezel should turn, but only anti-clockwise. If it doesn't then Breitling can fix it.
2. 60 - 1,000 is a tachymeter - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachymeter_(watch). 0 - 100 is basically 'decimal time', breaking the hour into 100ths - think useless
3. May well be the cause of the problem in 1.
4. 100m should be fine for showering - see here - http://www.breitlingsource.com/articles ... ance.shtml
5. (or the 2nd 4. ). The hour and minute counter should reset - sounds like the watch needs a service.

Hands are not OEM.

True enough, didn't even look at the pictures.

@ the OP, that implies that the watch has at some point been serviced by someone other than Breitling and that reinforces the suggestion to get it serviced by Breitling straight away.

Some additional background.

The watchmaker said that the previous owner brought it in for repairs and then forfeited the watch when repairs were too high of a cost for him. In walks I and buys the watch.

After I initially purchased the piece, ( I know, Caveat Emptor), I noticed that the bezel was skewed, and it didn't turn, and that the luminosity was gone. Being retired Army, a hiker, and generally an outdoorsy type, luminous hands are important to me, so I took the watch back, told him to repair the bezel, get the hands a glowing and now, four months later, I pick the watch up. He used some non-isotope paint on the hands, and I'm pretty disappointed with how they turned out too. I don't know "nuttin' 'bout OEM, I'll take your words on that. Additionally, this time before I leave his store, I check the bezel. It doesn't turn, although it has tabs put back on that were previously missing. I question him on the bezel, and he tells me the bezel was never designed to turn on this watch. That's when I call BS in my pea brain, started perusing the web for answers, and found this forum.

I paid $800 for the watch. It looks like a Breitling "service' is going to run ~$700?. I'm not sure I want to do that. Maybe, but I might take it back to the watchmaker and see if he'll exchange the watch for something else. Third option would be shove it into an orifice:)

Thanks for the responses.

sorry to say that, but that does sound as if that watchmaker has taken you for a hike or ride, not in the way you probably like to do that.

try to reach an agreement to exchange it, leave aside the orifice shoving, but the service charge for that watch will probably be quite high .....

Here are OEM hands for your watch... http://www.breitlingsource.com/watch_de ... er_73.html

One last follow up for anyone interested. I called the Breitling service center in San Francisco, an older gentleman with a germanic accent. He confirmed it as being an early chronomat, made in 1989 and that the bezel indeed is supposed to rotate. He quoted me $536 to repair and also questioned the wisdom of putting that much money into the watch. That would leave me with ~$1400 invested and he thought I could do a lot better for that kind of money.

I went back to my watchmaker today, and in all honesty, I have been happy with his work in the past.
I was hoping to get a refund, and maybe I could have, had I been real pissy, but I'm not like that. He told me that when the watch came in for repair, the crown had been left unscrewed and it was rusted up inside. He told me that he put a completely new mechanism in it. I'm assuming that means a new ValJoux 7750 movemnt. He also told me that the bezel had never moved and so he assumed it was a fixed bezel. Again, I'm not sure whether I buy that or not, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Is it possible that in pulling this watch apart and replacing the movement, that he would not notice that the bezel was supposed to move? also, when I pointed out that the reset button didn't reset the minute and hour chrony dials, he seemed almost confused, like it was only intended to reset the second hand.

C'est la Vie. If I get a watch in the end that runs the way it is supposed to, I'll be happy. It might make you collector types cringe when you look at those non-oem hands:), but I just want a watch that I can depend on.

I will resurface here when this is wrappped upm and finish the story with a (not that way) happy ending.

I guess worst case scenario, I can always send it to Breitling.

Txs again for the info.

There's a major part of very bad news in that most recent post.

Your watchmaker replaced the entire movement. That means he took a Breitling caliber 13 - a fairly heavily modified 7750 and replaced it with a perfectly standard 7750. Breitling would open that watch up, see the differences, note the non matching serial numbers and refuse to service it.

The actions of your watchmaker has made that watch virtually worthless.

I don't suppose its possible that he replaced it with a Breitling movement?

I'm not a collector, but I don't really want a watch that has zero value from that point of view either.

If he has the original movement that he removed, would Breitling accept it and the watch for the express purpose of putting it back to original condition??

There is zero chance of him using a Breitling movement because he couldn't access it because he's not authorised by Breitling to work on the watch. The best thing that he can do for the future of that watch is return it to original condition if possible - the Breitling movement, hands, etc. However.......

If the movement was rusted out then the cost for breitling to replace it will be huge - way beyond what you were quoted for servicing. With what we now know about that watch it is beyond economic repair.

Thanks for your candor on this. I wonder if the reason the reset button isnt resetting tbe small chrony dials has sth to do with him putting a generic movement in it?
At any rate, I'm going to have a frank discussion with him, and see how it all shakes out.
beware of someone on Ebay in the near future selling a chronomat for what seems too good a deal:)

you definitely should have that frank discussion; as Roff has said, with what we know now, there is no economically reasonable way to restore that watch into a fully functional, authentic piece.

regarding the reset button: on a generic Valjoux 7750 (though I am quite convinced the movement he popped in is a made-in-China "compatible" and not a Valjoux, but even then) as on the Breitling OEM version, the reset "pusher" should reset all three chrono hands to zero, ie. chrono seconds - the large center hand, chrono minutes - the subdial at "12", plus the chrono hours subdial at "6".

You should be able to convince the watchmaker to take that watch back and ideally return your money; leaving aside the fact that it is as far from an authentic Breitling as you can get, it does not work the way it should, chrono functions are clearly faulty !

So if you did not buy this watch as a declared non-authentic, non-functional wreck, you have all reasons to expect and demand a refund.

Yeah the chrono reset is going to be down to bad watchmaking rather than the movement - hardly surprising from what we have learned so far!

Thanks a lot for sharing your story. I'm new to this world and learn quite a bit from these cautionary tales. Best of luck finding a reasonable resolution.

_________________
David
Je suis désole pour mon mauvais français.

Zenith Pilot Big Date; IWC Vintage Collection Aquatimer; IWC Portuguese 7-day