Steinhart OVR

Zagato

Recently bought my Godson an OVR for his birthday (16) which is this weekend. Thought it would be nice watch to get him as it should be pretty bulletproof, and has a reasonable movement, might pique his interest in watches, etc...

It looks great (appreciate it is really a homage), and solidly built.
Anyway, since it arrived, there are 2 small issues bugging me about it. First is that it says that the crystal is acrylic on the back of the watch, which used to be the case for the OVRs up until I think May of this year when they switched to Sapphire, and certainly it was described as Sapphire when I was ordering it, I don't know if it has the wrong caseback or whether it's new old stock (which certainly isn't what I was told I was getting). I'm not going to try and scratch it to see. It's not a huge issue, it's just I thought it was going to have Sapphire crystal.

The second thing is that I stuck it on my winder to see how accurate it is, and it's running about +20sec/day. Now I don't expect it to keep time like a quartz, but I would have thought that is quite fast, I had thought 10-15s/day would be the upper limit for this movement. I also recently got an Aristo with the same movement and after wearing it for a week it is +2sec (which I'm pretty pleased about :D)
It seems to be pretty precise, and probably just needs to be regulated a bit tighter I guess. It wouldn't bother me as much if it was going to be mine, but I'd prefer if my Godson didn't get the impression that mechanical watches aren't very good at keeping time.

Anyways, I thought I would throw this up here before I contact Steinhart (I believe their before sales care is more impressive than after sales), to see if anyone had any thoughts on what I should do. I don't mind giving it to him late, if I thought Steinhart were going to take it back and sort it out, but I don't really fancy spending more money having it regulated.

Anjobe

There are different grades of the ETA 2824-2 movement, and while +20s/day is at the upper end of the expected rate it is within the limit for the lower grades of the movement. There is a page on Wikipedia with some more information. In my experience the daily rate is a bit hit or miss when you buy an automatic watch, watch manufacturers obviously don't make much of an effort regulating them because that is very time consuming, unless they are putting the movement through COSC and charging the premium that brings! You also have to bear in mind that the rate can vary widely for an unregulated watch in different situations/positions. I have a watch with an ETA 2836-2 that stays around +2s/day on the wrist, but is about +20s/day if it is left face up.

Don't know about the crystal. Some might consider that acrylic is superior for a sports type watch as it is shatter proof. Sapphire is highly scratch resistant but can shatter, and while it is possible to polish out scratches on an acrylic crystal replacing a shattered sapphire crystal is an expensive repair. Having said that acrylic is not what was advertised or paid for so that probably needs to be queried with Steinhart.

Zagato

Cheers Anjobe, that's exactly what I was looking for, basically I should send Steinhart an email expressing my dissatisfaction about their misrepresentation of the product, I know other people who got OVRs over the last 2 months got sapphire crystal alright (over at watchuseek), on the movement front, I'm possibly just the wrong side of average -and that's just the these things roll sometimes :rolleyes: