Every so often I get a fake in...

But I think this is the first faked Speedmaster Pro I've had, so I wanted to share.









I wasn't sent any photos of the watch prior to it being shipped to me for service, and the photos I was sent after it had been shipped you could not see any details really. When it came in it looked off, but I didn't look into it further and stuck it on my shelf and got back to work - in hindsight I should have looked at it more closely when it arrived. So as the watch came up in my queue and I sat down to take it all apart, first thing I noted was that the tension ring was gloss black instead of matte black - it had been painted by hand:



Supposed to be a 69:



Movement is a mess. Mix of parts and finishes on the various bridges:



The 861 stamp on the main plate doesn't look right:



Here's what it should look like:



Clearly someone has machined away whatever the original marking was, and stamped 861 on the plate - I guess they didn't have a stamp of an Omega symbol, because that wasn't applied:



Most of the movement seemed to be white originally (so rhodium or nickel plated) but it had been plated over to look somewhat copper coloured, and all that plating was flaking off:



Of course all sorts of other details about the movement were off:



So what about the rest - dial looks odd and no applied logo or T's, so is it a service dial or later dial:



The sub-dials are raised in the center - MWO doesn't seem to address this aspect of the sub-dials, but I've serviced hundreds of Speedmasters, and certainly don't recall seeing this before, as all I have in the shop now and all I recall seeing the sub-dials slope down and the flat portion is not raised like this:



Crown might be genuine, but could be one of those adapted crowns that were for sale a while back:



Enlargement ring (movement spacer) has been filed in places, so that's unusual:



Case back I am unsure of, but comparing it to the other 69 I have in the shop, the slots for the opening tools are longer than they should be, so I'm not 100% sure on this:



The case frame is certainly not real - fit of the pushers leaves a bit to be desired:



DON bezel is pretty ugly:





Pushers should be screwed into this case, and there are no threads in the holes for them:



Even the way the case tube is mounted looks completely wrong - they normally protrude into the case and are soldered there, where this one is no where deep enough:



Certainly more wrong with this then there is right. The customer was not aware of this I'm sure, and they took the news very well all things considered - the watch was acquired in a trade for a non-watch related item, and it's not clear that the person on the other end of the trade knew it was fake either. Of course I don't work on any sort of fake, so after documenting the watch and sending the owner photos, I sent it right back unrepaired.

Clearly someone is going to some effort to fake these, so please be careful out there and do your due diligence. Many here would see that this watch is not right immediately, but for the newer guys you really need to do your homework before jumping in. If nothing else this confirms that there are a pile of fake parts out there...

Cheers, Al

Fascinating post, the "DON" bezel looks like the ones found on the California Special fakes we see on eBay every month or two so I wonder if that's what this is. Fortunately I don't think they'll be able to fake a 321 as well as they could an 861

Wow. It would be fairly easy to be taken in by this if all you had was poor photos.
Thanks Al for posting this up.

In countries where labor costs are minimal the room for profit is much more attractive especially considering the rapid rise in value of originals.

Interesting, thanks for sharing Al. Looks like it could be a butcheted lemania/tissot movement, with fake dial, bezel and case but genuine case back?

The owner stated that the watch was traded with someone who had acquired in somewhere in Europe while in the military. Other than that, I can't say much about the origin.

They did put a lot of work into this, and in some very odd ways. For example if you look at the photo above where I point out how poorly the pusher is fitted to the case, you can also see some issues with something as simple as the case back gasket and the groove for it. The groove for the O-ring is actually not the right width, so the proper O-ring would not fit in this groove as it would be too wide. The gasket that's there is sort of flattened, and often old gaskets look like this before they turn to black goop, but this is rather new material that is a rectangular cross section instead of being round like an O-ring usually is. The groove for the O-ring is deeper than it is wide, so they could not simply install a smaller cross section O-ring, because that would fall down into the groove too far. So even making a gasket that fit into the very narrow groove was a custom job on this watch. The more time I spent looking at it, the stranger this whole thing was...

Flaking plating is a problem that keeps on giving. I've had watches where the plating flaking off would get into the jewels and down into the pivots, and stop the watch eventually. To even salvage the movement for something would mean a lot of work removing all the coloured plating to allow the watch to even function properly. It was a real mess.

Cheers, Al