ALL HAIL THE FRANKENWATCH I needed something with a "complication" to work on for class. So I managed to stumble across a Universal Geneve Senna 41 case with an Omega Seamaster movement and a generic-ass Otto Frei $12 dial. And I need to buy the parts to make the day function work and then I have a FrankenSenna for $500. I've got $900 worth of gemstones showing up tomorrow. stoked. Also the fucking dishwasher cacked out so I kicked its ass onto the porch and am replacing it with a GE muffukin' tomorrow.
Horology is hilarious. They aren't "gears" they're "wheels" and they aren't "axles" they're "pinions" primarily because we're all forced to use French terminology unless you're from Saxony in which case fuck you it's not a "pilot watch" it's a "flieger" pay double. If you sell your watches for less than $20k, the cutaway models are "skeletons." If you sell your watches for more than $20k, they're "squelettes." At a certain price point, it's a "chronograph monopouissoir rattrapante flyback" (that price point being fully-loaded Prius). At another price point, it's a "split seconds monopusher chronograph" - that price point being BMW 5-series because "monopusher" means "we made the movement ourselves fuck you." Meanwhile a "watchmaker" is someone who fixes watches, an "atelier" is someone who makes watches, but a manufacture is a protected Swiss term which means you make everything under one roof, except certain things, and especially if you're Swiss. We measure everything in mm, except when we don't, when we measure things in ligne, which are 12 to a pouce, which are 12 to a pied du roi, which we don't really care about because the only thing we use is ligne, which is extra hilarious because the Swiss didn't standardize on jack shit until a guy named Florentine Ariosto Jones bailed on the Hamilton Watch Company in Boston to go over to Switzerland because he figured the mountain savages with their cottages could be taught standardized industrial production and they were so mad about his progressive ways that they chased him off to German-speaking Switzerland where he founded IWC and all this happened - let me pause to clear my throat - - 80 years after the introduction of the Metric system. "Wheels within wheels" might be from Ezekiel, but it's from a 17th Century translation, at which point the clockmakers were already getting nutso. When someone wants to say something is "complicated" our basis comes from clocks. English is a whore of a language. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170111-how-irish-falconry-changed-languageThe mediaeval royal units of length were based on the toise and in particular the toise de l'Écritoire, the distance between the fingertips of the outstretched arms of a man which was introduced in 790 AD by Charlemagne. The toise had 6 pieds (feet) each of 326.6 mm (12.86 in). In 1668 the reference standard was found to have been deformed and it was replaced by the toise du Châtelet which, to accommodate the deformation of the earlier standard, was 11 mm (0.55%) shorter. In 1747 this toise was replaced by a new toise of near-identical length – the Toise du Pérou, custody of which was given to l'Académie des Sciences au Louvre.