my collection philosophy is to try not to buy any more.

a significant amount of the watches i own are not ones i purchased myself, but watches that originally belonged to my father, my brother and i think one of them was my great grandfathers watch.

i don’t want to buy any more because i don’t need any more, i see something that i like, i buy it, and i end up not wearing it after a while, then i see something new that i like, and the cycle continues.

i think anyone can pull off smaller watches, the problem is that you can’t pull them off wearing casual modern clothing, i think modern shoes (brightly coloured, thick soles) especially do not work with smaller watches, if you wear simple clothing, casual but smarter than average, you can easily pull a smaller watch off.

take a look at these photos, all of them are wearing small watches, but they don’t look out of place;

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you just need to wear clothes that are not obviously modern, and the same advice in reverse would apply if you were trying to pull a vintage suit or some other type of vintage clothing off: don’t wear a massive modern steel watch, or anything too busy. it just wouldn’t look right.

that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.

The posts asking whether their watches are genuine or asking what kind of watches they are aren’t that bad.

The amount of posts with a wrist shot and a simple comment about how much they like the watch vastly outnumber the amount of people who come here looking for help, and I’d argue that the only real value that the wrist shot posts provide is making me aware of watches I didn’t know about, which isn’t many as most people have pretty basic tastes so you see a lot of the same watches on here. I think the “is this fake” posts are actually more interesting as I’m almost hoping it’s real just to see an interesting, rare, old watch.

a vostok amphibia would be perfect in my opinion.

they’re incredibly cheap

you can get models that look dressier, but they’re still tough

they’re automatic / mechanical

they’re very durable

the movement is in house and the design is unique among dive watches, the soviets who invented it had to work with what they had, they couldn’t use swiss designs because the soviets didn’t want to pay royalties and so they had to engineer it well. the acrylic instead of glass is cheap, but it’s also necessary to make it as waterproof as it is; it flattens as it experiences pressure, pushing it in and getting more waterproof. even the case back is different, instead of a standard screw back, it has a ring that screws in while the case back itself just sits under the ring, so that it doesn’t ruin the gasket when returning from extreme pressure.