Well, it’s Cinco de Mayo and I don’t plan on downing any margaritas or menudo, so what to do with a spare hour? A review… of a different sort.
In light of all the talk of skyrocketing costs, I started looking for a sub $1000 automatic to scratch an itch. This is not the first time I have given it a go. But each time I was disappointed. Among others, there was Steinhart (please that same cheap five row off the shelf bracelet, Benarus (a fail in most every respect), Deep Blue (to hear the guys on the WUS dive forum, this was THE brand. Mine was a POS that was magnetized out of the box with a very poor GMT hand that never wanted to set correctly. Oh yeah, and that same cheap five row off the shelf bracelet…..), Boschett (now hear was one that had some goods – a great bracelet and on-the-fly micro adjustable bracelet and a non-catalogue case. Quite nice, but the dial was far too underdone for the rest of the watch. Ho-hum.). There were some others, notably the Xezo, which nearly caused a minor international incident on Breitlingsource. (I still have it stowed away in some drawer. You never know when it might show up at your door!).
As I looked around I kept coming back to the C60 Trident and Trident GMT by Christopher Ward. At first, I dismissed them as too Rolex “homagey.” Still, I kept coming back to them.
WTF, give it a shot…and so I did. I opted for the C60 Trident GMT on the bracelet, but just to get as far away from “homageness” as possible I went for the C60 Trident GMT – SKS. I don’t know what SKS stands for, but it denotes a model with orange lumed hour markers. I was initially off-put by the shape and lume color of the hands, mostly the hour hand, but at least they didn’t take the easy route and grab some “Mercedes-style” hour hands.
Willing to gamble $825 (plus $75 for expedited shipping), I ordered it on the bracelet. I subsequently got the black leather/orange stitched strap as well.
Now I am trying not to get carried away – this is just an $825 watch with an elabore grade ETA 2893 with accuracy of about -5/+20 seconds per day. And while it qualifies as “Swiss Made,” CW is an English watch company! (Sorry UK members). And it is a just one step away from Homageland. So I was not expecting much except another disappointment.
But here is the deal - I have had it for two weeks now and am wearing it frequently. I truly like this watch. THERE! I said it.
The watch comes in at 42mm, but wears much larger. The dial itself seems very large on the wrist. It has the wave pattern liberally “borrowed” from the Seamasters. The case sides are brushed and the top, including lugs, is polished. The lugs are short and down sloping with a reverse cut on the ends, so the watch accommodates larger or smaller wrists. Lug end to lug end is less than 50mm. Still, it is beefy, but thin enough at 13mm with a flat case back to sit perfectly on my wrist. The sapphire crystal is flat without a lick of A/R which makes taking pics frustrating. I truly like the bezel. It has a fine grain matte bezel insert, which, surprisingly, is perfectly done. All the other sub $1000s with black bezels were poorly done. Not this one though. The bezel is 60 click with smooth movement. It has nicely machined edges, but can be a bit tricky to grasp at times, perhaps a sacrifice to keeping the profile low. The GMT mechanism sets firmly without play as does the time. The GMT hand itself is subtle and I like that in GMT hands – 99% of the time I am not looking at it. I like the trident on the butt end of the second hand. The date aperture at 4:00 is as nicely done and deep as the best watches I’ve had. The date wheel sits flush against the bottom of the aperture. The crown is firm and signed. There is no wobble at all in the crown/stem assembly and the threads catch surely and screw smoothly – all a first for me with inexpensive watches. The lume is good, but hard to capture with my camera for some reason. One of the hour lume dots should have been painted better. The PIP sits too high, IMO, and is not symmetrical enough. In fact, it is the weakest part of the dial/bezel which is weird for a simple feature.
Now for the ONE inexcusable Christopher Ward screw up – the bracelet clasp. First of all, the bracelet itself is far superior to the ones on the other watches I mentioned above. There are 5 micro-adjustable holes. But CW put a diver extension on the clasp when it was introduced not long ago. The problem is, the last two sets of adjustment holes are not usable, because the diver extension will not close at those adjustments. This immediately became a fit problem for me. The only answer was to remove the extension, which was simple enough. The problem is the last link, the one that attaches to the extension, is a half link and the hole for the pin is smaller than the rest of the removable links because it was a compression fit with the pin on the diver extension. The clasp spring bar is too wide. Off with the half link. But now I had two fit choices – take a full link out and use the longest set of holes – a little too tight, or put a full link in and use the shortest set of holes – too loose. I needed the half link! Every spring bar in my box was too wide. Grrrrrr. I paid a visit to member mah’s house and he drilled out the hole so we could accommodate a 1.4mm wide spring bar. I still have to fit a couple spacers in there (See pic below), but it fits and wears perfectly. Even at $825 CW should have never let these clasps leave the shop. And worse, they knew about it. But I’m over that now and leaving aside the clasp-fiasco, the bracelet is pretty darn good for this price range.
Final impression, imperfections and all – this one wins by a mile over the other under $1000 watches I’ve tried. For what it is, I quite enjoy it. And I’m glad I gambled the $900 (plus $50 for the leather strap order when I was about to scrap the bracelet entirely!!!!). I like it, it fits well, it runs well and it serves its purpose – an inexpensive automatic that doesn’t try to fool onlooker’s eyes into believing it is something else. I don’t know anything about other CW watches or the company in general. I only have my experience with this one watch. For me, it is a keeper and well worth the price.
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That's quite a review Tom, thanks for sharing. No need to tell you I prefer the leather. 
