The tooliest tool watch! SBBN031 Marinemaster 300 'Tuna' joins the collection!

Years ago, I owned Seiko SBDN045 which is a 45mm Tuna style watch, totally blacked out, with a Batman style bezel and made as a limited edition with a company called Lowercase.

(Lowercase is a Japanese design and creative consulting firm that has worked with the likes of Nike, Disney, and Lego, to create marketing campaigns in Japan...)

I liked the watch on the whole, especially as it was the first Tuna style watch I'd ever owned, so it felt quite unique to me for that reason alone. Whenever I strapped it on, it was very different to all my other watches and that was quite cool. But a few things gnawed at me as time went by:

1) I've always felt wary of black PVD coatings. Having seen so many older PVD watches out there which are all chipped and worn, it seemed obvious to me that a chipped and worn PVD watch looks way worse than a chipped and beat up stainless steel watch which hides it more.

2) Knowing that bigger Tuna watches were out there, after awhile I started to feel that the 45mm SBDN045 felt a bit dinky on my 20cm wrist. This was compounded by the black colour and the way Tunas wear small anyway. The watch looked good but a little "cutesy" for a tool watch.

3) Following on from the previous point, the dial seemed absolutely tiny and almost hard to read. This is part of the whole "all Tunas wear small" vibe, too. Because, aside from the lack of lugs making the watch feel small, the size of the dial is designed to add to this overall illusion. Here it is, on my wrist:

So I threw the watch on eBay while it still looked new and got a buyer right away. No drama.

Over the years since then I'd flirted a little with the idea of getting a larger Tuna, but hadn't pulled the pin as I explored all sorts of other watch options instead and I've had a lot of fun along the way. To be honest, I didn't feel like I was missing out by not owning a Tuna. It didn't seem important to me.

With a watch cull recently taking me down to 4 watches (2 quartz and 2 automatic), however, and a bespoke automatic being made for me by a well-known European watchmaker as we speak coming in the near future, I got the itch to take that number back towards a nice balanced 6 in the watchbox.

And what better way to do it than with a Seiko of some kind, especially as I'm a big Seiko fan and literally had no Seiko watches in my watchbox any more? A really weird situation!

But what to get? There was Seiko SPB237 a few years back - a 'Willard' style watch with a beautiful textured dial, some genuinely tasteful fauxtina and super cool 'seichu' braided straps... that was pretty neat. I blame Tristano at the Urban Gentry the most for that one, as he circled back on it a couple of years after it came out and fell in love with it, himself.

And of course there's always been 62MAS style watches floating around that I've been pretty sweet on whenever I've seen them in videos and such... but never quite enough to decide on a model and chase it down into a purchase.

But no. For some reason (how do these things happen?), I was down the Tuna rabbit hole one evening on YouTube and some watch websites and thinking pretty wild stuff like, "Wow! I should get, like, some sort of classic quartz Tuna..."

I mean, what is more iconic... what is more Seiko... than a Tuna can style diver? I know they can be polarising, but if you like the look (and I do), they are such cool watches.

I was hooked on the idea which morphed into, "Don't be stupid. Even a semi beat-up model from the early 80s costs a pretty penny and will need a little work. Spend similar - or less - money and get something nice and new..."

Within another day or two that morphed into, "Oh no, the new Tunas - like SBBN045 - have Prospex branding, different hands, and have lost their domed crystal..."

And so I backtracked to the previous model - SBBN031 - which still has Marinemaster branding on the dial (trade off: there's a Prospex logo on the crown), has a handset I prefer to SBBN045 (even though SBBN045 is closer to the original handset), has a domed crystal (albeit a hardlex unit), and comes on a bracelet - unlike SBBN045 which costs more at retail and yet is only on rubber, something many reviewers have criticised it for, given the price being asked.

So... the search began. For something that was a JDM model and reasonably rare outside of Japan, most of my hits for used watches were coming out of there and although the Japanese are famous for looking after their possessions (you can walk into second hand stores in Japan and buy, say, a 1990s GameBoy that seems brand new), most of the Tunas seemed a bit beat up, and many of the prices were really quite out there. I think sellers have cottoned onto the fact collectors want the Marinemaster version of the Tuna, and have jacked the prices accordingly. Add an international courier, and local customs, and these prices were getting stupid.

I was getting better hits out of Japan on SBBN035 - a blacked out, PVD version of SBBN031 - but as one of my reasons for getting rid of SBDN045 back in the day was its PVD coating, it seemed ridiculous to go chasing a potential long term keeper in PVD instead of stainless steel, just to save a few hundred bucks. I knew I'd eventually become prone to not wearing it for fear of scratching it up - even if fans have given it the really cool nickname of 'the Ninja' and it does look superb in photos. Oh well.

Then, miracle of miracles, two really well looked after examples of SBBN031 turned up in Australia in the same week. One was with a seller asking around $1800 outright (call it US$1176) and the other starting an auction down low with a 'Buy It Now' of $1650 (call it $1078).

Both of these prices were really good as, towards the end of its run it seems that SBBN031 was going for about US$1200-$1300, so these prices were easily in line with that. There was certainly no major price gouging based on, "This is the last of the Marinemaster dial Tunas..." or anything.

I decided to bid on the latter watch (which, as you might know, switches off 'Buy It Now' once a bid is made), and although there were 25-plus watchers on the auction making me feel a bit anxious all week, it seemed in the end that only myself and one other person were bidding.

And, dear reader, I got it for $1325 (call it US$865), which I was OVER THE MOON about.

That price represents a hefty discount from where they were selling at from the end of the run; even a decent discount from when the watches could be found at a discount at retail, so I was truly happy and, cards on the table, I'd actually put in $1650 (US$1078) as my final bid, as I felt that was a fair price and if people wanted to bid that high, I was happy to go there. But it never came to that!

So, here we go with my own shots; this is my new watch on the bracelet it came on, and then on a zulu strap I had lying around. I think I want to wear it on a strap, but this won't be the one I use long term. It's too thick and stiff, but still gives me the feeling of what SBBN031 will be like on a strap, and even with this substandard strap I think it's going to be a winner. It looks amazing. It doesn't wear large at all, despite being a 48mm watch. I'm already in love with it. It's the tooliest tool watch that ever tooled.