The manufactures the room reads, the checks that can be made on the wrist, and the ones that honestly need a watchmaker.
10 manufactures16 modelsFree · no account
A watch hides most of its evidence inside the case, and opening a case badly costs more than the question is worth. So these pages front-load what can be read without tools — how the seconds hand moves, whether the caseback is solid, how the bezel clicks, what the watch weighs — and say plainly which checks need a movement to be seen.
Every manufacture is different in where it hides its identity. Rolex fits no display backs at all. Omega, Patek Philippe and IWC will read their own archives for you. Cartier conceals its name inside a Roman numeral. Panerai's crown bridge is a mechanism rather than a shape. One generic checklist reads all of them badly.
The house authenticates nothing and charges for nothing. These pages teach the checks and say when a watch is worth a watchmaker's twenty minutes.
The order matters more than the list. Two checks settle most cases, and they are almost never the ones people reach for first.
An automatic movement beats several times a second and the hand appears to glide; a quartz movement ticks once. On a manufacture whose reference is mechanical, a ticking hand ends the discussion before anything else is checked.
Some houses never fit display backs and some always do. Case metal, movement mass and shielding components give a watch a specific weight, and a counterfeit that saves on any of them feels wrong in the hand immediately.
Omega, Patek Philippe and IWC will confirm a watch's production date and original configuration from their own records for a fee. That is real documentary evidence and it is available to the public — Rolex offers no equivalent.
The movement is the decisive evidence on any watch above a modest value, and reading it is a routine service-counter job. It costs a small fraction of the watch and it is the only way to defeat a good clone.
One page each, in the manufacture's own terms — its code system, its weighted checks, its models and what they do on the secondary market.
Lovenhall WatchThe checks tell you how it was made. The instrument tells you what it appears to be, and roughly what its kind fetches.