To establish the manufacture date of your movement, simply obtain the movement number then check it against the table, below. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new listings by email.
Email Address. Purveyors of Classic Vintage Mechanical Watches. View Our Vintage Watch Collection. Shopping Bag. No products in the shopping bag. Identification of a watch is a process, typically done as follows: First, establish that the watch is, in fact an Elgin. Second, attempt to identify the model by matching the case to known examples or to identification resources. If that fails, identify and date the movement to narrow your search and try again to identify the case.
We look at each of these issues, below. Is it really an Elgin? Elgin made a very large number of private label watches, that is, Elgins released under different brand names, typically with difference cases. A star first appeared on Elgin dials in August, , and ceased appearing in the late s. The DuraPower logo first appeared in The Shockmaster logo first appeared in The DuraBalance logo first appeared in Dating, based on Movement Serial Number Movement serial numbers provide useful insight in the manufacturing date of the movement.
How to Open a Watch Case While opening a watch isn't rocket science, a watch can be damaged if you try to open it incorrectly. Never use a screwdriver to try to open a case. I find using my finger nail to be quite effective and it is soft enough to not scratch a watch case.
If you really aren't sure what to do, take it to one of your local jewelers and ask them to show you how to open it. While it is open, make sure you record everything written on the movement of the watch and the watch case.
These details can sometimes be important. Kent Singer has written up a good explanation of how to open a watch case. Chris Ozdoba has also written up a good explanation of how to open a watch case. Chris' explanation isn't as detailed as Kent's, but it includes pictures which can be very helpful.
Elgin Watch News If you visit this website frequently, you may be interested in some of the things that have changed recently. In theory , this should all be transparent to everyone and there should be zero downtime. If things don't go well, you might have problems connecting for a while, but rest assured that I'll try and fix any problems ASAP. The power supply on my webserver went out last night. I bought a new one, it is installed, and things appear to be working ok now. Sorry about the 12hr outage.
Sometimes, the watch case companies would mark the bezels with the last few digits of the case number using Roman numerals. Usually the Roman numerals are scratched in by hand. This code is kind of strange since each digit is written as one block of Roman numbers, the "X" is for zero, not ten, and the 9 might not be written as "IX". So, if someone is selling a watch as solid gold, and it has a movement serial number of, say, 3,, and it has a case serial number of 1,,, a red flag should go up in your mind and you should be even more cautious about the claim.
The reverse, however, isn't true, a small serial numbers doesn't mean it is solid gold. Case serial numbers, if they are recorded, can help if the watch is ever stolen. Both the movement and case serial numbers should be written down, since the movement and the case can be easily separated.
All of these are rules of thumb, not absolutes, there are many exceptions, especially for rule 2. Again, for the most part, case serial numbers just serve to confuse people. When a watch was brought in for repair or cleaning, the watchmaker would often, but not always, scratch some kind of code into the back of the case so that can tell if they have repaired a the watch before. Sometimes these scratches would be some form of date code, or maybe just the initials of the watch maker, often just an invoice or repair number.
There was no standard across the industry and individual watchmakers may change codes over the years. Accuracy of the Estimates of When Watches Were Made The table below with the serial numbers and years has be compiled from many sources and I believe it to be reasonably accurate, However, no table like this can be completely accurate because Elgin didn't produce watches in sequential order. It was very common for groups of watches to be set aside and finished months, years, or sometimes as much as a decade later.
After the watch was finished, it might sit in a wholesaler's warehouse or a jewelry shop for months or years. About the best you can say that the watch was probably not produced or sold as "new" before the date listed. High volume watches will tend to be closer to the date listed, while expensive, high quality watches will tend to be the ones that have misleading dates. New models of watches may be released before or after these general dates. Finally, I can find no definitive source of official dates, and there seems to be some disagreement between the various sources that I've found.
This is especially true for the earlier years. The raw sources that I created this list from can be found here.
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