The Breitling Watch Blog

For those of you well-versed in watch movements this may not be anything new for you, but to many of you guys who aren’t that familiar, this is a handy primer.

Most of us that buy and collect watches have heard of the ETA Valjoux 7750 Movement. The movement was designed in 1974 and in it’s present day format is a 25 Jewel, 28,800 vph chronograph. More info on the movement itself can be found on Timezone.

The Valjoux is seemingly everywhere. It seems like nearly every single Automatic Chronograph watch out there not using an in-house movement has a Valjoux 7750 in it. The Valjoux 7750 is by far the most common swiss made chronograph movement in production, with the ETA 2894-2 in second with a 37 Jewel movement. The ETA 2894-2 differs in that it uses a base 2892-2 with a chronograph module attached. The Valjoux 7750 is a purebred Chronograph.

The interesting thing about the Valjoux 7750 movement is that watches using the base movement can be found as low as $1000 to as high as $10,000, if not higher, depending on the level of modification and *cough* marketing. I’m going briefly go over and describe several of the watches on the market that use this movement, throughout the pricerange:

Eterna Airforce
MSRP: $1650 Online: $800 approx.
The Eterna’s represent some of the best deals in the Swiss watch industry, with their watches up there in quality with Tag Heuer. They used to be quite the force in the watch industry, pioneering many watchmaking firsts, but now have slowed down. They also produce watches exclusively for Porsche Design. Movements are largely stock with decorated rotors.

Hamilton X-Wind
MSRP: $1050 Online: $900 approx.
Hamilton is an American brand that produces swiss made watches, with a focus on value and nice looking peices quite often with exhibition backs. Movements are stock Valjoux 7750’s with little modification, mostly decoration. The X-Wind is one of their nicest designs in my opinion.

Oris TT1 Chronograph
MSRP: $2375 Online: $1200 approx.
I personally am not a fan of most Oris designs, but they make a nice watch. The TT1 is popular and a good performer, and Oris does some modifications to their movements to improve performance.

Tag Heuer Aquaracer Automatic Chronograph
MSRP: $2300 Online: $1800 approx.
That uses the Caliber 16 in this model, and for double the price of the Hamilton X-Wind you get a Certified Chronometre movement. The Aquaracer is a nice watch with a substantially upgraded movement.

Fortis B-42 Pilot Professional Chronograph
MSRP: $2995 Online: $1900 approx.
Fortis does minimal modifications to the movement, and it is not a certified chronometre. Their watches are nice and offer a good deal in the lower end of the spectrum but their higher end watches do not give much bang for buck. In this price range the watch should be a Chronometre.

Breitling Chrono SuperOcean
MSRP: $3500 Online: $2600 approx.
Breitling’s entry level Valjoux 7750 Chronometer Movement using the Breitling Caliber 13. This caliber is used in many of their watches including the Super Avenger and the next one in this list. This is a COSC certified Chronometre, with substantial modification, but too bad Breitling doesn’t do many exhibition backs to show it off!

Breitling Chronomat Evolution
MSRP: $5100 Online: $3600 approx.
This is one of the higher end models using the Caliber 13. There is also the Breitling for Bentley GT that uses a similar 7750 based movement (13B). As you can see the Online pricing is about $1000 more, but all the extra goes into the case and bracelet, not the movement!

IWC Portugese
MSRP: $6700 (up to $14,000 or so in gold) Online: $5100 approx.
This is one of the more expensive watches out there with the Valjoux 7750 based movement, especially in gold. With a highly modified Valjoux 7750 movement called the Calibre 79350, it is probably the highest quality movement of this lot, but without the COSC Certification. IWC rarely certifies their watches.

So that is a brief roundup of some of the watches available in the range with the Valjoux 7750 base movement. Hope this article was informative for you guys!

EDITED TO ADD (06/07/2008):
An email from a reader that is very interesting:
Hi,

Cheers
Julian

Had a visitor ask me about this watch and since I don’t know much about the vintage stuff, I turn to you guys 🙂 His email states:

“I was wondering where I could get information on my Breitling Chrono-matic 2111 which I recently inherited from my father.

I have not been able to find a matching picture of the model I have.

It has a white face and blue “diamond” with soft edges around the two small dials which are symmetrically lined up. The hands are orange/red. The case is silver. As with the other versions I have seen, it has the crown on the right at “3 o’clock” and two push buttons at “8 and 10 o’clock”. On the back, there is a number, I don’t know if it’s a serial number (1325871). I haven’t dared to open it to look for other information.

I have seen versions with black face or asymmetrical arrangement of the small dials.

I’d like to know what year it is from. I don’t think it’s the classic 1969 I have seen in catalogs, probably early 70s. I’d also like to know what strap would be authentic for it. Mine doesn’t have the original one anymore. My father preferred nylon (!) straps … endearing but I’d like to know what strap was on it originally. Brown? Calf/Aligator?

In any case, if you could point me in the right direction where to get more information, I’d really appreciate it.”

Any help guys would be great!

This is the second stop in the Watches of the Carribean series, and buying watches from St. Thomas is different than St. Maarten. Since St. Thomas is a US Virgin Island, US/American visitors import allowances are higher than in other countries. I am not sure about the allowances… you may want to google for more information.

St. Thomas definately had much more to see and choose from than St. Maarten. The most notable of the watch dealers was Azura/Jewels. I spent most of my time there and at Princess World Jewelers, which carried Roger Dubuis, Ulysse Nardin, Hublot and also had a really nice Breitling Cockpit, solid gold bezel with diamonds, Mother of Pearl dial, for more than 50% off!! That location is not a Breitling dealership, however, they had that one, in the back… I really wanted to buy it!!

I spent a lot of time at Azura/Jewels. This first location, which is just called Jewels, carried Chopard, Jaeger LeCoultre, and many others:

I looked around at the JLC stuff, really nice, but still not my style, though the Grand Reverso was kinda cool:

The Jewels by Azura location is the one that has the massive 6 display sized Breitling booth. Check it out:

I tried on one of the small Breitling SuperOcean Heritages, and the new Bentley Mark VI Complications. The guy there, Tom, was really into the newer stuff.. I almost bought a White dialed Chrono Avenger there.. if it weren’t for the fact that the Tour was late and took forever and just took us back to the ship I may have just had to buy it! They also had one of those 8 Days alarm clocks like the Aviation ones for 40% off retail.. but retail is like $1200.

Some more pics:

I thought that the mesh bracelet for the SuperOcean heritage was pretty cool, since its mesh but still uses the Breitling styled clasps, giving it an updated mesh look. The new Ocean Racer rubber strap is nice as well.

A couple of the other booths in the Azura location include Patek Phillipe, Rolex and Omega. I took some pictures of the Omega and Patek booths, which no one was at, the Rolex booth was busy as usual… with the rep being able to rattle off the retail prices by heart. I’m not sure how much they offered for discounts off Rolex… and didn’t even bother asking to try on any Pateks… can’t afford ’em! 😉

St.Thomas has some pretty sweet shops, and I could have spent a full day alone in Jewels/Azura and Princess World Jewellers, but I refrained! Its far too easy to spend your money there… not to mention they have some pretty expensive Cognac there, I saw a bottle of Hennessy Ellipse for $5500US! I’ll take that Breitling instead, thank you very much. Anyway, that concludes the trip to the Caribbean, hope you guys enjoyed the articles, and its back to your regularly scheduled watch programming after this!

Here’s a quick video pass-through of St. Thomas’ Main Street. Not a whole lot to show but it gives you an idea of the amount of watch dealers they have!

First stop – St. Maarten (or St. Martin for the French side)…. This was a great place, with lots to look at. I was not really that thrilled with the prices of the watches for the most part in St. Maarten, but the selection was hard to beat. The only time I’ve ever seen more watches is in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, where Patek and Frank Muller dealers were every other store in some districts.

That’s a shot of the King of the display cases at Little Switzerland in St. Maarten. They said that I wasn’t allowed to take pictures, but that’s after I already took that one, so I got one. Note the Solid Gold Diamond covered Motors T in the back left. The entire Bracelet and dial and case are set with diamonds.

Some of the stores I visited included:

Kay’s Jewelers – Ball Watch + others
These guys were one of my favourites. GREAT discounts, almost bought a Ball Mad Cow there! And no nonsense.. straight to the goods, these guys. Beautiful diamonds too.

Ballerina Jewelers – Frederic Constant, Martin Braun, Cvstos, Paul Picot, Alpina and More
These guys were great to deal with… I have to say that the guy working here was a great watch enthusiast and he was very eager to try and sell me a Cvstos or a Martin Braun, and I was very tempted, believe me!

Art of Time – Breitling, Panerai, Omega, Franck Muller, Bell & Ross, U-Boat and More
Also very knowledgable, and as they do carry Breitling and Panerai, one of the hottest watch shops in the area.

Little Switzerland – Breitling, Omega, Zenith + more.
Little Switzerland was nice because they have Tiffany & Co and Coach… buying stuff there keeps the women happy. Their discounts were slim, and their staff were less knowledgable than at the other places, but still a very nice store to visit with lots of selection.

I also went into Cartier, Goldfinger (Tag Heuer + more) and Diamonds International Watch & Design. Diamonds International W&D had some nice stuff including Hamilton, Ebel and some others, but for the most part did not have anything too interesting.

Here’s a little video I snapped outside Little Switzerland and Goldfinger and Art of Time and some others. Amazing selection:

Wrist Shots
Note: My wrist is about 6 3/4″, so it is smaller. When I was at Little Switzerland I was allowed to take a wristshot of the Zenith Chronomaster that I liked very much. The Zenith Defy open heart was not as much to my taste as I thought it would be, perhaps the white dial would have be preferable… but here’s the Chronomaster, white Guilloche Dial version:

Then at Ballerina I tried on a couple of the watches… the two that I thought were notable were the Martin Braun Eos, with white sunburst dial and the Cvstos. The Martin Braun was really nice, and probably one of my favourite dress watches I’ve tried on in a long time. There was a blue dialed one that was even nicer!

The Cvstos was deadly.. I tried on both the Round and Tonneau shaped Challenge Chronos, but I far liked the Tonneau shaped one, it had much larger presence on the wrist. Look at the detail! I was told by them that the owner of Cvstos is the son of Franck Muller’s owner… and is only 24 years old!

This second video was taken outside Goldfinger and Art of Time. Art of Time has a killer selection of watches!

Art of Time and Panerai
I tried on several models of Panerai at Art of Time, and decided that I do not like the Radiomir models definately. I much prefer the Luminors, and the 44mm models are actually quite nice on the wrist. Not quite Breitling for Bentley sized, but still quite nice.

They offered NO DISCOUNTS on Panerais.. nothing. I found that odd, since I had seen discounts at other Panerai dealers before. Perhaps it is because they get so few and they sell so easily, that they choose not to give them. At any rate, the cheapest one they had for sale that I liked was around $9800 or so. I would have rather bought the Bell & Ross for 1/3 the price. That is one watch that I really liked!

So If you are going watch shopping, the Caribbean offers selection like no other place around here, that’s for sure. Everything in a 4 block radius! Stay tuned for my look at St. Thomas!

I will be visiting the Caribbean shortly here, so there will not be any updates for the week. However I will be following up shortly with video tours as well as photographs of all the nice watch stores hopefully.. such as the famous A.H. Riise.

I surely hope that they will let me videotape the inside of the amazing stores!

Maybe I will return with some new additions to the collection! I will be interested in Panerai, Zenith and Breitling mostly. Perhaps Anonimo and Martin Braun as well, but who knows. Also upcoming should be a review on the L&B Schaumburg Aquamatic COSC that should be arriving. lots of new stuff on the way!