The Complete Buyer's Guide to Mechanical Watches

Previously published in a shorter form as Watches Worth the Money: The Complete Guide. This Calibre & Cost edition is rewritten and expanded: 146 pages, 20 numbered technical plates, 10 value cards, true-scale field tools, corrected data and new chapters.

Two watches can cost the same and give you twice as much watch for the money, or half. This book shows you how to tell them apart.

It is the reference volume of the Calibre & Cost series, built on three tools you can use on any watch, in any shop or listing:

• The Cost Stack: where the money in a watch really goes, from the movement and the case to distribution, marketing and margin.
• The Two-Price Rule: why every watch has a list, a street and a used price, and what the gaps between them tell you.
• The Verification Ladder: how much of a seller's description you can prove from photos, from a question, or only with the watch in hand.

Then it takes the watch apart. How an automatic movement works, from mainspring to escapement and balance. The dozen calibres found in most affordable mechanical watches, what hacking and hand-winding mean, and what to expect on a timegrapher app. Sapphire, mineral and acrylic crystals, case finishing, lume and bracelets. What water-resistance ratings really allow, and what the DIVER'S marking of ISO 6425 means on a dial.

It tours the market: the large Japanese and Swiss makers of affordable mechanical watches, microbrands and how to tell them from drop-shippers, and every category, from divers and field watches to dress watches, chronographs, GMTs and pilot's watches. It explains buying new, grey-market and used, with checklists for every rung of verification, twenty worked buying decisions, and how to keep a watch healthy with a phone timing app and an inexpensive demagnetizer.

What makes it different: value cards that put a watch on one page in the same format across the whole series; numbered technical plates; and field tools printed at true scale, including a case-size template and a lug-to-lug ruler to check fit before you buy.

Please note: this book contains no photographs and no generated images. Every illustration is a drawing made for the book, and each value card gives the reference so you can look up photographs of the exact model.

For buyers who want to spend well on an automatic or hand-wound watch, and for collectors who want to know why one watch is worth its price and another is not.