Wot A Lot Of S.58s

...all of them pretty grotty, and some with some regrettable part substitutions, but months and even a year goes by without a single example. And all from the dubious corners of the watch universe - Turkey, India, Argentina. Why are they all turning up now?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ZENITH-S-58...=&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-ZEN...=&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-ZEN...931546369?pt=Wristwatches&hash=item2578448501

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-ZEN...=&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

For you Omegaphiles, this is approximately the Zenith equivalent of the early Seamaster 300, attractive enough when it has not been left out in the rain for 50 years

What's the movement, and is it any good?

It was indeed introduced with the cal 120. Later in the production run, it was equipped with Zenith's bumper automatics, the cal 133.8 and 71, and later still, the first iterations of its rotor automatic, the 25x2 series. All of these are capable of chronometer accuracy (although no S.58s were rated as chronometers), and the bumpers were designed by Efrem Jobin, the talent behind the cal 135. The automatics were accommodated by making the dial convex as in the example I posted above. The early ones had no rotating bezel.

The idea behind the S.58 was ruggedness, and it was intended for military use, although to my knowledge it was never so adopted, despite all kinds of bunk one reads about on Ebay listings.