On Greatness In Watchmaking, And The UK Swiss Replica Omega ‘1894’

One day, though, for reasons I can’t remember, I had a little more cash than usual and I found a small, hand-wound Omega replica for sale UK in a gold case. Today, I’d be suspicious of the dial, which was a little too clean for its own good, but it had the word “chronomètre” on the dial, right above “Omega.” It was one of my early grail watches – an AAA fake Omega chronometer, from the 1940s, with the caliber 30T2RG.
“From contemporary times, the top copy Omega 30mm calibers are, in my opinion, one of the best designed movements ever made, and it has appeared in many different forms and types through the years. In horology, one always starts a new idea by taking the best from the past, and then you reinvent it. This best 1:1 replica Omega caliber has been a source of ideas and inspiration that has influenced my approach to the design of the Series 2 movement.”

And, in another interview with watchmaker Curtis Thompson:

“In my view, the finest of these movements were the cheap fake Omega 30mm’s. They were superbly proportioned and for a production movement there were no short corners in the quality of construction. Because of these qualities worn components were rare and servicing was a pleasure, with the disassembly and particularly assembly being simple with the movements virtually falling together.”
I bought the Swiss made replica Omega for $500 (the seller, who was not a watch specialist, said to me defensively when she quoted the price, “I think it’s made of real gold.”) I took the watch home, cleaned and oiled it and despite it being a watch from the 1940s it ran flawlessly. Smith is right; it almost seemed to assemble itself. The chronometer super clone watches online of the 30T2RG had a special fine regulator and mine was an earlier caliber, with a split-rim compensation balance and blue-tempered balance spring.

Last year, I happened to be nosing around on Crown & Caliber and found a watch that I’d more or less forgotten existed. The luxury fake Omega UK in question was basically a modern 30T2RG – or, more specifically, the caliber 269 which is part of the same family of movements. I stopped breathing. This watch didn’t come from the forties. It was made as part of a limited edition in 1994, for the one hundredth anniversary of perfect replica Omega, using new old-stock movements Omega had kept in storage. It was exactly what I would have wanted a couple of decades ago and it’s a grail watch for me today – too much to spring for with a couple of kids in college, alas, but I did manage to more or less bully a friend into buying it.

There is not much more to say. Normally I don’t have any trouble finding words to throw at high quality replica watches I love but in this instance, it feels inappropriate – as if hyperbole would be not only unnecessary but actually silly, if not downright juvenile, in the face of such horological self-sufficiency. It’s one of the most pure expressions of watchmaking rising to the level of art through the simple pursuit of excellence. I doubt that this was a specific intention on the part of Swiss movement fake Omega when the 30mm family of watches were being produced commercially, but it feels to me as if the purity and elegance of the case and dial are a seamless continuation of the purity and elegance of the movement – an outer expression of an inner beauty.

The movement has not been made in half a century. The 30mm family of movements is long gone but so is the entire genre of precision-made, solidly built, hand-wound movements intended not as mechanisms for luxury replica watches for sale, but as highly accurate, extremely robust, easy-to-service movements deliberately made to last a lifetime.