Off the top of my head, I’ve thus far gone some down the following affordable vintage rabbit holes:

-Seiko

-skin divers (miscellaneous, often RIP, brands)

-Russian

-Military issued

-Neovintage Swiss (e.g., Tag, Zodiac)

-“Known” value prop vintage Swiss (e.g., Omega)

All presented options galore, often under $1k. 

But these are just the 🕳 s to which I’ve thus far been drawn. I can‘t imagine there being a “best“ affordable vintage watch/es. Rather, an infinite variety of stuff to explore, to different tastes/interests. 

Fratello offers some nice highlighting of some cool vintage stuff, sometimes affordable. W&W occasionally does too. 

👋 Just learned of the site and am checking it out. So far I’m digging it 👊 I mostly hang out on WUS and IG. This seems like a nice blend of both 👌 Thanks for the new community to explore 🙌

Lots of vintage skin diver rabbit holes one can go down, as they were sort of the microbrand scene of their day. 

There’s some killer IG accounts of deep vintage skin diver collections. I follow them for ideas. You can find good profiles via hashtags like #skindiver #skindivetwatch and the like.

WUS also has a skin diver thread that‘s pulled together a fair amount of pics, info, and links over time. It’s an ever growing resource, but a solid place to brush up on a decent amount of skin diver stuff. 

Lately I’ve been all about the Monnin 844 case. As a friend has described it, like a sub and a turtle had a baby 😄

So we’ll say somewhere in between circular and tonneau 😉