The Breitling Watch Source Forums

Vintage aficionados, a story you might enjoy ?

This seems to be the rarest of the Breitling Worldtimers - we have no production figures, but almost none come up for sale and if they do, most are in sorry state, incorrect and/or ridiculously priced; these were expensive watches when they were launched in the very late 1950s or very early 1960s, same price levels as the Navitimer 806s, so apparently were only produced in very small quantities .

This Unitime ref. 2610, manufactured in 1961, was actually the first Unitime I acquired, almost three years ago. Case, dial and world time dial ring were in perfect condition, it came with it's original box and the original manual - but the bezel insert was totally destroyed, rendering it almost unusable.

First I waited and searched, hoping (childishly) a NOS insert would just pop up, then the watch traveled to several restoration gurus; Craig in the US was pessimistic (and rightly so) he would find somebody to restore the bezel, Kirk Dial had tried in the past but refused to try again - so Craig serviced it and suggested to just give up on trying to "make it whole".

Then Germany, Spain - nobody had the die, nobody claimed to know how to restore the anodized aluminum insert. My many collector friends tried to help, Eitan was asking around London; we thought about China, some were checking in Geneva; others in France - nada. Aldo, the milwatch uberguru from Milano had seen Unitime inserts from bakelite, but these were totally off - wrong fonts, wrong material, wrong look and feel; he said he knew of no possibility do do it correctly in anodized aluminum.

Years of searching, trying, waiting - here it is now with a quite correct world time bezel, surprisingly fabbed by ourselves (a small electronics manufacturer with some "handy" graphics & metalworking guys, but with absolutely no watchmaking capabilities) . We painstakingly recreated the rather unique font, fabbed the inserts from 0.3mm aluminum, found the right tool to reach the correct doming, made a dozen anodized samples, tried printing and failed - in the end succeeded quite nicely with a high resolution engraving laser. Still not totally perfect (we were afraid of "doming" the anodized and engraved inserts, so the cutting depth of the laser is not totally uniform), but quite workable. Do not ask how many man hours went into this, please.

Unsure if to - very respectfully - work a little bit on the hands lume, but basically: Happy Fred.

Amazing looking piece. And I guess that there is now a new Austrian supplier for vintage parts

Very cool....great story.

If someone can make something once then it can be made again. It's just a matter of finding that someone. Great job Fred!

Love the watch and a what a great attitude you have

Your efforts paid off. Very nice Fred. And thanks for leading me to this forum.

Schnapps.. you are the man Fred.

What amazing passion you have. That is amazing.

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"I don't got the bright watch I got the right watch" -Jay Z

Fantastico! That's amazing, Fred. Lucky you're a man with integrity. With those skills you could compete with the best of the Chinese in fabbing "Breitlings" for the unaware!

Beautiful story my friend and kudos to your friends for fabing that insert for you so perfectly, they must really love you to go through all those iterations before getting it perfect!

That's a great story and the watch looks amazing! Congrats on finishing that journey.

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk 2

thank you all, guys, for your kind comments.



Roff, I shudder to think about the hours that went into this - an ROI is about as probable as winning the lottery three times in a row; this will (hopefully) remain a single folly.

Should anybody (trusted) want to try a similar project, I will be happy to help by supplying the finally available fonts and some suggestions how to go ahead.

One of the best watches Breitling ever made in any of its combinations. Fred, thank you for your story. I have a felsa 711 movement that was used for parts. Occasionally I look for parts (gears, case, dial, hands & etc..) so that one day I could return it to be a complete watch. this story gets me motivated to start looking and restoring it.

Great job!

Looks GREAT! Better than I ever thought it would be!

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S. Craig Bergsma