CL1112
Buying from eBay can be risky, sometimes you get better than you hoped for and sometimes you don't. I must admit when I initially opened the (immaculate) drum case for this lovely blue dial Kirium chrono I was a little disappointed. The description spoke of 'light marks', but this was pretty scratched up - by my standards at least. And then I realised the hand with the 'arrow' on the point was stuck at the 4 position and wouldn't reset to 12 and I got that sinking feeling...
Which was unexpected because the seller seemed like a decent chap and responded quickly to my emails - even the ones about the hand being stuck, and he sent me a helpful youtube video showing me how to put it right. So I think, he believed he was 'honest' even if I felt slightly cheated - but wear is a difficult thing to quantify and it's not as if the pictures were unclear - it's just that scratches can seem worse or better in pictures than they really are, especially on polished surfaces.
I consulted the manual and because it spoke of 'split times' for some reason I thought the watch was a rattrapante, so that confused me even more... it isn't, it's a regular chrono with a second hand and minute hand (with the arrow) just like my Aquagraph. Eventually, I realised that if you pull the crown out to the second position you can reset the chrono minute hand to 12 using the 'B' pusher. You have no idea how happy I was when I discovered this and then ran the chronograph for over an hour and everything worked perfectly!
But of course the watch was still scratched up and so I set about cleaning it up using some jewellers rouge, some Scotchbrite and a Dremmel. I must have spent a couple of hours carefully cleaning up the bracelet and while it still carries marks it is a vast improvement on how I found the watch on arrival.
The picture above shows the state the watch was in on arrival, the centre links are supposed to be polished while the outer links should be brushed, but you really couldn't tell. To be fair the seller bought the watch in 2001 and wore it for seventeen years before he sold it to me (he even included the original receipt - the watch was £1325 new and he got a £200 discount) so when you think about it, the decline was gradual so it probably looked okay to him.
This was the watch after I spent a couple of hours on it. I could have kept going but it's okay for now. Maybe some day I will have it done properly, but we'll see. The other thing I did was to re-black the digits on the bezel as they were completely gone. It looks so much better with them back, unfortunately I didn't take a photograph 'before' I did it.
I do think the watch looks smaller than my F1 Kirium, even though they are the same size. I think it might be because the dial on this one is busy, whereas the F1 Kirium is almost totally blank (I never use the digital functions).
The seller supplied me the three original links that were taken out of the bracelet when he bought it, which is great because I need two of them put back in. Sadly this means I haven't been able to wear the watch yet, although I think once it gets sorted it will be taken off me and saved for my birthday in October as my wife is talking about giving me the money back that I paid for it. :)
While fiddling with the watch I also realised that there is no quick set date function, but the minute and hour hands are changed independently - and the hour hand moves the date, so in effect it is a lot quicker than having to go through the full cycle, and you can move the date backwards, which I definitely didn't expect.
So this then is TAG number ten, which means my cabinet is now half full. Next on the list is definitely some kind of S/EL, and after that I don't really know... but I'm sure it will be fun finding out.
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