Incoming/Back to the Cheap Seats

How It Happened: After some days of semi-frantic online searching, I decided to give up on snagging my own copy of Seiko's surprisingly faithful-to-the-original 1968 5 Sports reissue (hopefully I'll catch a second run in a different colorway), and, admitting defeat, did what any self-respecting Seikoholic would do facing down such a situation: pour a glass and cruise eBay. Started by punching in "Seiko 5 7s36." A surprisingly short list of offerings comes up, most of them "interesting", but that's synonymous with "almost", and you know the old saying about horseshoes and hand-grenades. (Helpfully, I already have a dressy, 7s36-powered 5, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.)

30 minutes later, modify search to "7s26", and here we go: over 1500 entries, including a passel of Land Sharks (seriously…if Russel's latest video whetted your appetite, check 'em out here, quite the selection), some basic 5s from my distant past…and one big surprise to my eyes.

Even as I winnow-down my current collection (selling off three vintage Hamiltons, including a not-quite-working Valjoux 7733-based chronograph that could fetch a decent amount of cash if I cared to go to the trouble of a proper restoration, which I don't), there's a gap in my Seiko collection I've been trying to fill: just the right kind of white/silver-dialed watch, sub-40mm, that I could dress up-or-down, from wedding to backyard barbecue. Everything else I have is black, save for the 017 Alpinist and new 5 Sports GMT "Batman." I do have a late-60s LordMatic that looks gorgeous, but like a lot of those Seikos from the period, it came with that Achilles' heel of a Delrin-plastic part of the geartrain that became brittle with age and self-destructs, which in my case not only stopped the day-date Quickset dead in its tracks, but also eventually clogged up the rest of the movement. So, no more LMs for me, but I think I've found a dandy replacement, which hopefully graces my mailbox by Saturday.

Saw it last night, apparently posted a few hours before, and was tempted to mash Buy It Now right there and then, but decided to wait until this morning: if no one else snagged it by then, I'd go for it. No one did, and I did. Good thing too: when I did a subsequent casual search for that particular model, I was surprised at how little I'd paid for my example.

More pictures when it hits my porch. Meanwhile, here's one image from the 'Bay.