Category: Watch

Product Review: Casio GD400 G-Shock Watch

I own a bunch of watches.  They’re not rich man watches; they are the indulgence of a guy with practical tastes and a flair for useful and inexpensive tools.  My all-time favorite watch, hands down, is the Casio G-Shock GD400 series, with a personal preference for the olive green one.  I’ll get to that in a second (hahahaha…a time pun).

I first bought a similar Casio in turquoise and orange, almost as an impulse buy.  I had purchased a set of shoes from Nike or Adidas or somebody in turquoise and orange, and then (probably because I had searched for them online) I started seeing pop up ads for the Casio.

I know it’s weird.   I mean, what kind of a motorcycle guy buys a watch to match his shoes?  (You don’t need to answer that.) The watch arrived a few days later and I liked it.  I was in and out of CSC a lot when I bought the watch and the shoes (we were getting ready for a CSC Baja ride), and I caught a bit of flack for being a fashion plate.  That’s how it goes sometimes when you’re a famous and well-dressed blogger.

I liked the watch, and I loved its phenomenal accuracy.  I went to www.Time.gov (that’s the official US government time), and the Casio was running exactly even with the government website over the span of a month.  That’s really good.

The Casio has a bunch of features I never really use and some I use a lot.  It’s got a stopwatch, a timer, and an alarm.  It’s got a calendar and it shows the day of the week.  You can have it show regular time or military time. You can set it so that if you flick your wrist, the backlight comes on. And you can press the G button and the thing lights up.  I use the Casio as a flashlight three or four times every night…you older guys will know what that’s all about.  And by pressing the buttons mounted on the case side you can find the time in just about any time zone in the world.  That comes in handy on many of my overseas secret missions.

I wore the watch for several years, and then on another CSC Baja trip the battery went south on me.  The battery had the good manners to do this in Guerrero Negro, where there are a few stores.  I asked the guy who took us to see the whales on that trip which store would have a battery and he pointed one out on our way to the docks.   After seeing the whales and having a couple of fish tacos at Tony’s, I rode my RX3 to the place the guide had mentioned.  Nope, they didn’t sell watch batteries, but the farmacia two doors down did.  Okay, so I went to the farmacia two doors down.  Nope, they didn’t have watch batteries, but another farmacia two doors on the other side of the first store did.

Then things got interesting.   They had the battery, but the lady behind the counter told me I had to open the watch and change the battery myself.  The watch has these tiny little screws and I was wearing my contact lenses, which gives me great far field vision but lousy near field vision.   She gave me a little box of tiny screwdrivers, but I couldn’t see the screws very well and I tried to explain my predicament to the very nice lady, but she didn’t speak English.  So, I took my right contact out (they’re one-day disposables, so it wasn’t a big deal) and I basically did a roadside repair.

The watch lit up as soon as the battery went in, but the rear cover is orientation sensitive and I got it wrong.  The watch crystal fogged within an hour, and by the end of the day, the watch called time out (hahahaha …another time pun).  The time out, unfortunately, was permanent.  When I returned to So Cal, I took it to the guy who normally sells (and installs) watch batteries for me, but it was too late.  The watch was toast.

I missed having that watch on my wrist, and I tried to buy it again.   But it turns out that Casio changes the colors frequently on this particular model. Not only had the turquoise and orange version been discontinued, but now it was collectible.  I had paid $72 for mine, but by this time used ones were going for close to $400 on Ebay.

A week or two later, another secret mission, and I found myself killing time (wow, a third time pun!) in a mall in New Jersey, and I saw the OD green version of the GD400 Casio.  The sales guy and I went back and forth a little, and $92 later (tax included), the watch you see in the big photo at the top of this blog left with me.  Like I said, it’s just about the perfect watch and I wear it nearly all the time.

More good news?  I liked that turquoise and orange G-Shock watch, too, so I called Casio’s US importer and asked them if they could repair it.  I had to spend another $60, but that’s okay.  There’s only one thing that’s better than one Casio GD-400 G-Shock, and that’s two of them.  The GD400 model comes in a variety of other colors, too, and they typically go for around $100 on the Internet.   Trust me on this…if you want a good watch for every day bouncing around, you can’t go wrong with a G-Shock Casio.

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A 1%er Moon Watch

In line with our editorial policy featuring luxury goods with outlandish prices, a few weeks ago we posted a blog on the Longines perpetual moon phase automatic watch.  That’s an item with what is euphemistically referred to as “prestige” pricing, which most folks would simply call overpricing (you know, like most motorcycle dealers’ freight and setup fees).  The Longines is a lofty $3550, although our blog post pointed out you could find them for less if you poked around on the Internet.  I did, and my best price so far was a scant $2250, which is still way too rich for my blood.  Hell, you could buy a used Sportster for that kind of money.

Now, don’t get me wrong…if you want to buy the Longines watch, by all means we think you should.  In fact, we think you should buy it through this Amazon Longines link, because then Gresh and I would get a cut.   I have no idea how much (we’ve never helped to sell anything that pricey through our Amazon affiliates program), but it would be cool to find out.

Terry, the Prince of Tides.

But that’s not the point of this blog.  If you read that earlier Longines blog and the comments that you, or esteemed readership, posted to it, you will see that none other than our good buddy Terry commented that he might consider the watch if it also showed the tides.

The tides.

Hmmm.  That tickled a long-dormant neuron buried among the other neurons between my ears.  They’re mostly focused on Weatherbys, Royal Enfields, SIGs, RCBS reloading gear, Baja, Michelle Pfeiffer, and God only knows what else is swimming around in there.  The tides.  I vaguely remembered seeing something about a watch that does, indeed, show the tides, so I went on Amazon, looked, and what do you know:  The Casio moon phase and tides digital watch you see at the top of this blog appeared.  Wowee!

What got my attention immediately was the price:  $22.50.  Could it be? A Casio watch that actually does way more than the Longines watch, but sells for a scant $22.50?   That’s exactly one percent of the lowest discounted price I could find for the Longines watch!  $22.50!

Hey, I couldn’t resist.  I’m wearing my new Casio moon phase and tides watch as I type this blog.  $22.50, and because I’m an Amazon Prime member, I didn’t even have to pay for shipping!  Go Bezos!

There are just so many things that are cool about this Casio watch I almost don’t know where to begin.   Yep, it shows you the tides.  That waveform in the lower left quadrant of the watch face has a darkened section that shows you were the tide is at that instant.  It goes through a complete cycle every 24 hours, just like the real tides do.   And there’s the moon phase.  That’s the little circle in the lower right quadrant (it darkens in arcs to show you what the moon is doing that day).   All this for $22.50.  And the Casio has a dual time feature…you can set a different time zone and switch to it instantly, although this feature is kind of weird…the “other” time is whatever you want it to be, not some exact number of hours different from where you are.  It kind of reminded of a Chinese hotel we stayed in once where they had a bunch of clocks on the back wall showing different times at other locations in the world, but nobody had maintained them and they were comically different.

Ah, but I digress…back to the Casio.  It has a stopwatch and a countdown feature.  I can set it to military time or a normal 12-hour time.  It has an alarm clock.  And a backlight, so I can use it to find my way to the bathroom at night without waking up my wife or tripping on the way there.  And (get this) it has a 10-year battery!  Did I mention it goes for only $22.50?

More good news:  As you have already seen in the photo a few paragraphs up, you can get the same Casio watch in blue, and the blue Casio goes for only $20.48.  I’m tempted to buy one, but hey, I’m not made out of money.

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Longines Perpetual Moon Phase Calendar Watch

I know.  You’re probably wondering:  What’s with the watches?  We want motorcycle stuff!  Or gun stuff.  Maybe even reviews of 50-year-old air compressors.  But watches?

Hey, I like watches.  Give us a day or two.  We’ll post another motorcycle blog.  I promise.

So, about that watch you see above.

Overall, it’s hard to imagine a more useless feature on a watch than a phase of the moon indicator, and a watch without luminescent hands or a backlight would ordinarily make a timepiece a nonstarter for me.  Throw in a $3550 list price, and it would all but kill the deal.  This Longines checks all those deal-killing boxes, but wow, it’s stunning and I want one.

The store where I saw the watch was fittingly in the high rent district (the Stanford Shopping Center, in the shadow of Silicon Valley and the big bucks that reside in that region).  The price was pegged at MSRP, but the dealer came down quickly and without my asking.   Not all the way to Internet levels (where these Longines watches can be had for around $2400), but an impressive drop nonetheless.  It’s still not low enough for me (even the Internet prices are too rich for my blood).

The Longines perpetual moon phase watch can be had in either a 40mm or 42mm version with either a stainless steel or leather band.  I like the look of both and I think the leather looks better, but I’d probably go for the steel bracelet.  They just hold up better.  But that’s if I was going to buy one, and I am not.

In the watch moon phase indicator business, there’s basically two types.  One essentially just shows daytime and nightime (the moon dial shows the moon at night and the sun during the day, like on my Orient, a very classy and much less expensive mechanical watch).  The other shows the actual phase of the moon, as is the case on this Longines.  It takes a full month to progress through the moon’s phases, just like the real moon does.  I mean, you never know.  There might come a time when I need to know how much of the moon is showing and I wouldn’t want to actually look out the window or check my iPhone.  This watch is designed for just that situation.

The Longines watch is complex, but I like it.  The date is told by what looks to be the second hand (the days of the month are arranged around the watch’s periphery), the big second hand is part of the stopwatch feature, and the perpetual thing means you don’t need to adjust the day or date for months with 30 versus 31 days.  The watch just mechanically figures it all out by itself.  The watch doesn’t compensate for leap years and you have to reset the thing every year at the end of every February, so I guess Longines‘ definition of perpetual is one year.  It’s still pretty cool, though, and for a completely mechanical thing it’s very advanced.  If you really want to pour cold water on any feelings you might have for this watch, you can watch Longines’ YouTube video on how to set it.  It makes doing Ducati desmo valve adjustments look easy (I have no plans to buy a Ducati, either).

You really don’t buy a watch like this for telling time, though.  And you don’t buy it because you just can’t exist without knowing what the moon is doing.  You buy it for the same reason people buy CVO Harleys, GS BMWs, and Ducatis.  It’s bling. There’s no way I’m going to shell out something north of $2K for a wristwatch, although I am tempted.

At its heart the Longines is really a dress watch, and I no longer travel in circles where a dress watch is necessary.  If I was a yuppie again I might go for it, but my yuppying days are a distant dot in the rear view mirror.  Still, the Longines watch is beautiful.  And it would be nice to know what the moon is doing.  You know, without actually having to step outside and look at it.

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Bond. Titanium Bond.

A watch is a personal and emotional purchase, much like a motorcycle or a rifle.   By definition, whatever you choose is perfect and the best; what anyone else chooses is not and is somehow indicative of a deep-seated character flaw.  I get that.

Having said that, I never got the attraction of an Omega wristwatch.  I know some folks love them and if you wear an Omega, more power to you.  It’s just not me, which is why I found the attractive young lady pushing the latest Omega at me amusing.

Omega, you see, never misses a marketing opportunity, and their latest product placement achievement is the new Bond movie, No Time To Die.  In it, 007 wears a titanium Omega Seamaster. The high end watch store in Palo Alto had a couple of the titanium Bond Omegas in stock, and the young sales lady was attempting what could only be described as a hard sell.  She was new to these shores, I think, and evidently convinced that if James Bond wore a titanium Omega, every man in America would want one as well.

“Bond wears,” she kept repeating, as if that was all it would take to get me to plunk down $9800 for an Omega (it would actually take a lot more, like maybe a $9700 discount).  Before I realized it, she had unbuckled my Casio Marlin (the best deal in a dive watch ever and one I wear frequently), and she had the titanium Bond on my wrist.  She would have made a good pickpocket.

“Bond wears,” she said again.

I wondered if she realized Bond is a fictional character.

The titanium Seamaster was light, almost like a plastic watch.  I could barely detect its presence.  I didn’t care for the look of the mesh bracelet, but damn, that thing was a feather.

“NATO Bond,” she said, pushing another titanium Bond Seamaster at me, this one with a cloth NATO band.  NATO watchbands…that’s another fad I never fell for.  They look cheap.  I was in the US Army and the only special watchbands I ever saw were the velcro bands paratroopers wear (they tear away if your watch gets caught on the door when exiting an aircraft…you lose your watch but you get to keep your arm, which isn’t a bad deal if you think about it).  I’m pretty sure guys in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t actually wear NATO bands, but what do I know?

I like the look of a dive watch and I own a couple of them.  My tastes run toward high quality and low cost, so my personal favorites are the Casio Marlin (a watch I’ve written about before) and a Seiko Batman I bought at Costco a few years ago.  The Marlin was $39, it keeps superb time, it looks good, and it works well (it’s the watch I wore when I rode through Colombia).  The Marlin did just fine in the Andes’ torrential rains.  I’ve never tried the Marlin in the deep blue sea, though.  I’m not a diver and I really don’t know how well it would work as a dive watch.  I’m not a fictional British secret agent, either, so unlike Daniel Craig I don’t need the titanium Bond watch.  If I need external inspiration, I’ll take it elsewhere. Bill Gates wears a Casio Marlin and even though he doesn’t have a blog or a motorcycle, he’s real and he seems to have done okay.  But I don’t need to emulate other people.  I just wear watches I find appealing.

I asked the young sales lady where she was from and she said Cupertino.  No, originally, I asked.  “China,” she said.  I asked where and she told me (it was a city in Hebei Province), I told her I had been there, and we chatted about the ride Gresh and I did across China.  She told me I had been to more places in China than she had.  I wore a Timex on that ride, I told her, like Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the Chinese guys called me Dàshū, which means “big uncle,” so it sort of fit).  She laughed, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know what I was talking about. Sometimes that makes for the best conversations.

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Pandas!

That Seiko watch you see on the right, known informally as “The Panda” in watch collector circles, is perhaps the best watch I’ve ever owned.  I bought it at the Kunsan AFB Base Exchange when I was a young Army dude in 1975 for the princely sum of $76, which was a bit of a stretch for me.  Oh, I had the bucks.  The Army didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t have expenses, either, so $76 was eminently doable.  In fact, I bought Seiko stainless steel chronographs from the Base Exchange for my Dad and my grandfather, too.  Their watches were only $67, but the Panda had the day and the date on the face, and three timing features:  Seconds on the main watch face, minutes on the lower subdial, and hours on the upper subdial.  It was a beautiful thing and it was all mechanical.  I wore it for about 10 years, and then when Ebay started to get popular I auctioned it away.  I was quite pleased with the results.  The watch that originally set me back $76 went for just north of $200 on Ebay 30 years ago.  Today, though, that same watch brings around $2000. I sold too soon. Go figure.

Anyway, being the watch junkie that I am, I was more than a little intrigued by a very similar watch now being offered by Breitling.  It is also an all mechanical watch Breitling calls the “Premier.”

I’d call it a Panda, and I’d sure like to own one.  But the Breitling MSRP is a lofty $8500.  They are just over $6,000 on Amazon, but that’s still way above my pay grade.

In poking around on the Internet looking at the Breitlings, I learned that they offer several versions of their Premier.  One is a model that pays tribute to the Norton motorcycle, which has different colors, old school numbers on the face, and a band that, frankly, looks cheap to me.   The colors don’t really work for me, either, but maybe that’s because I want my Panda to look like a panda.  If I wanted a Norton motorcycle, I’d buy a Norton.

Seiko is back on the Panda wagon, too, as is Citizen and perhaps others with modern versions of this classic watch design.  Their prices are way more reasonable, too, being in the $200 to $300 range. But the new Seiko and Citizen Pandas are solar-powered quartz watches.

There’s nothing wrong with electric watches (in fact, their accuracy is astounding), but I’m a mechanical guy.  I own a few solar watches and several battery-powered watches.  I like them all.  But there’s a certain cachet (a fancy word for cool) associated with a mechanical watch, even if you give up a little accuracy. I would like to wear that Breitling just to pretend I’m still a yuppie, but it’s not gonna happen.

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Citizen Nighthawk GMT

Another favorite watch and one I highly recommend:  The Citizen Nighthawk GMT watch.  I bought mine maybe 25 years ago when this model was first offered as an exclusive through Macy’s.  Today you can find them for sale through many different outlets (sometimes below $300).  One of the best spots is Amazon.

At 43mm it’s a big watch, but unlike a lot of big watches, it wears well on my wrist and doesn’t seem to want to roll around.  The Nighthawk has a lot of features, some of which I use on a regular basis and others that I use infrequently.  I like them whether I use them or not.  Watches are grown-up boy’s toys, and this one answers the mail for me.  There’s the standard date display at 3:00, there’s the slide rule (explained in an earlier blog on my first-gen Citizen Blue Angels watch), there’s the GMT feature (more on that in a second), there’s the Eco-Drive engine, and there’s a lume to this thing that just doesn’t quit.

That photo above?  I shot it with my iPhone in the dark a night or two ago, and other than cropping, it’s not been tweaked in PhotoShop.  The lume really is that bright and legible at night.  You can’t read by it, but you almost can.  It’s the brightest lume I’ve ever seen on a watch.  It’s so bright I sometimes wonder what it might be doing to me.  Wearing this watch might be the equivalent of living in Chernobyl for a month.

The GMT feature (GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time) is one that allows you to simultanously see the time in two time zones.   This is one I use when I’m traveling (especially overseas).  Unlike other GMT watches, the Citizen’s approach is to offer another hand and a dial printed on the watch face.  It’s that half-circle deal you see with red and white lettering on the inner left half of the dial.  The way this works is when you are in, say, China, you unscrew the watch stem, click it halfway out, and advance the hour hand so it shows the time in China (it’s usually a 13-hour difference).  To see the time back home, you use the that inner half-moon dial and the home watch hand.  The home watch hand is the small hand (with a red aircraft on one end and a white aircraft on the other end), and it continues to show the time back in California.  You read the p.m. time on the red scale with the red airplane, and the a.m. time on the white scale scale with the white airplane.  It’s all very clever.

Citizen has had this watch available in one form or another for a couple of decades now.  Mine is the original version, and it’s the one I probably wear most often.  The Eco-Drive feature works, and it works well with just about any kind of light.  When I’m not wearing this watch, it sits on a shelf in my office, and the artificial light in there is enough to keep it percolating.  I set the watch to the time.gov NIST site, and months later, it is still accurate to the second with the official US government time.

The most recent versions of this watch are a black-faced version with an OD green leather band, or an all black version with a black leather band.  I saw the OD green version in a Macy’s up north this past week, and it’s a good looking piece.

Here’s the blacked out version.

Citizen’s had a lot of mileage with their Blue Angels themed watches, and that treatment has been applied to their GMT in stainless steel and leather band versions.

The two Blue Angels versions immediately above are not in current production, but they are still available.  I like this watch so much I’m tempted to buy the Blue Angels version, too, but that would be excessive even for a watch guy like me.

In general, I prefer a steel band watch to a leather band.  I like the look of the leather band better, but leather bands wear out or get dirty within a year or two.  Then you can’t always find an exact replacement for the original leather band.  I tend to wear a watch 24-7 (including in the shower), so a leather band is not the way I typically go with a watch.

Oh, one other advantage to these watches:  I sometimes forget to take my Citizen Nighthawk off going through airport security, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t trigger the metal detector.

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A good Citizen: The Blue Angels watch

My first-edition Citizen Blue Angels watch, the one you see above, is one of my favorites.  There’s a lot going on in what the watch displays, including the time of day in three time zones (local, any other location in the world, and Greenwich Mean Time).  The Citizen has a stop watch, a countdown timer, a calendar, and the ability to set up to three alarms.  It also has a 24-hour clock. Those two LCD displays at the bottom of the watch face?  I haven’t figured those out yet.  I guess I could read the Owner’s Manual.  Some day, maybe.  And that complicated bezel?  That’s a slide rule.  I’ll explain it in a bit.

I travel overseas frequently (or at least I used to, before this Covid 19 business hit), and knowing what time it is wherever I am and what time it is at home is a feature I like.  The watch has a digital display for every time zone and the analog hands display the local time.  Or, you can reverse the displays.  Press two buttons simultaneously, and the displays switch (what was displayed digitally displays on the analog hands, and vice versa).  It’s a cool feature and it’s fun watching the hour hand sweep around to a new time zone.

One feature I use a lot is the stop watch.   It’s handy when I’m cooking, which I like to do.

Ravioli alfredo, with mushrooms, timed to perfection by the Blue Angels.  Three minutes on the boil for the ravioli provides the al dente texture I prefer.

The slide rule is cool, too.  It’s the complex blue bezel with all the numbers and graduations.  Go back 50 years and every engineer on the planet had and used a slide rule (we had pocket protectors, too, but that’s a story for another blog).  My engineering class was the last one that used slide rules.  Calculators had just been invented, and in the early 1970s a basic Hewlett Packard or Texas Instruments calculator sold for something north of $600.  That was a lot of money, and I remember thinking that calculators would never catch on.  Who needs a $600 calculator when you have a slide rule?

A few years ago we road tested the early CSC 150 Mustangs, and we hired a couple of my Cal Poly engineering students (guys who weighed 130 pounds soaking wet) to ride the things.  We wanted to check fuel economy, and flyweight riders would register the best possible miles per gallon.  At our first fuel stop we noted miles and fuel.  I used my Citizen’s slide rule bezel and calculated the fuel economy while our young engineers were still fumbling with their cell phone calculators.  One of them asked how I knew so quickly, and when I told them I used a slide rule, I had their attention.  These two young engineers had never seen a slide rule, much less one built into a watch bezel.  I showed them how the slide rule worked, and they had a lesson right there at the gas pump from their old engineering professor.

Steve (CSC’s CEO), Peter, and Joel by a historic bridge in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills. The verdict was in and my Citizen watch made it official: 98.3 miles per gallon.
Citizen Blue Angels slide rules can be amazingly accurate.  The outer bezel is the numerator, and the inner bezel is the denominator. We went 116 miles and used 1.18 gallons of fuel, so the calculation for mpg is 116 miles/1.18 gallons, or 98.3 mpg (as represented by the two arrows on the right).  You read the answer on the outer bezel over the 10 on the inner bezel (as represented by the two arrows on the left).  It’s 98.3.  Easy, isn’t it?

Citizen Blue Angels styling themes have been applied to several iterations and styles of their Blue Angels series since I bought my watch.  There have been titanium versions, solar powered versions, leather strap versions, GMT versions, radio-synched-time versions, and more.  I checked the Citizen official US website as I wrote this blog and they show nine different models in the Blue Angels watch collection.  That’s not counting models that have been discontinued (like mine).

Citizen Blue Angels

I don’t need or want one of the newer Blue Angels watches.  Mine is the original version and I like it.  Like most quartz-movement watches, it’s scary accurate.  Yeah, it takes a battery, but a battery seems to last about three years and I can live with that (spending $3.25 every thousand days for a new battery is doable).  I think I spent about $275 for my Blue Angels watch when I bought it 20 years ago.  That was in the pre-Amazonic era (which came after the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods), when dinosaurs like me ruled the planet.  New Blue Angels Citizen watches today range from the high $300s to just under a thousand bucks.  They seem to last forever, so your money will be well spent.

The funny part, I guess, is that the real Blue Angels, the guys (and gals) who fly F-18s for the US Navy and the US Marines, don’t wear Citizen Blue Angel watches, and I don’t know if they ever did.  In researching this topic, I found that the Blue Angels’ official watch is an IWC (they go for a cool $10,900), but I don’t care.  I like my Citizen.

The IWC Blue Angels watch. Got a spare $10,900?  And just look at it: For that kind of money, you’re not even getting a slide rule.

I’m not sure what the relationship is between the Blue Angels and the Citizen company these days.  I tried to find out with several search phrases on Google, but I came up empty.  My guess is that the Navy allows Citizen to use the name for a fee, but that’s just a guess on my part.

Citizen also offered a Thunderbirds version of my watch, something they no longer do (the Thunderbirds are the US Air Force flight demonstration team).  The Thunderbirds watch is an even rarer animal.  I don’t think the colors work as well as the Blue Angels watch (they look better on an F-16), but hey, different strokes for different folks.

A used Citizen Thunderbirds watch that sold in Singapore a couple of years ago for 50 Singaporean dollars (about $40 US). Nice, but not as nice as the Blue Angels version.

I used to have a bunch of cool Blue Angels photos I shot at the Reno Air Races (photos of the real Blue Angels flight team in action), but I guess I deleted them (I looked, but I could not find any).  I had posted the photos way back when on the old MotoFoto site, and a law firm sent me a registered letter reminding me that my ticket to the Reno Air Races included a prohibition against displaying any photos from the event.  It must have been a slow day for the lawyers.  I imagine with Instagram and Facebook that would never fly today.  If you ever had an opportunity to see a Blue Angels or Thunderbirds flight demonstration, you should go.  I’ve seen both, and they are impressive.

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Watch this…

My name is Joe and I’m a watchaholic.

It started for me when I was a kid and my parents bought me a Timex, and it’s never subsided.   I can’t walk by a watch store or jewelry counter without stopping.  Watch technology has jumped through several advances in my lifetime, and I’ve enjoyed them all.  I like digital and I like analog watches, and I like that different watches work best for different applications (it gives me an excuse for buying one that, you know, I might need).  I like the idea that I can order a watch from overseas that’s not marketed here in the US, and I like a lot of the watches that are marketed here.  I travel overseas on a fairly regular basis, so I’m a sucker for a good-looking GMT watch (they’re the ones that allow you to see the time in two or three different places in the world simultaneously).  I’ll do another blog about the GMTs at a later date.   The focus of today’s blog is ride-specific watches.  I tend to think of watches by major motorcycle adventures, and there are three I want to mention today.

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The first one I’ll mention is the green-faced, military-styled Seiko I wore on the Western America Adventure Ride.  It’s a quartz watch and it’s not a model that was imported by Seiko’s US distributor (which doesn’t mean much these days; I ordered it new from a Hong Kong-based Ebay store and it was here in two days).  But I like the fact that I’ve never seen anybody else wearing this model.

I bought the Seiko on an Ebay auction about 15 years ago, and I think I got it for something like $52 brand new.  I like the style, I like its relative light weight, and I like the size (it’s the right size, not ridiculously-large like many watches today).  The Seiko is impervious to wet weather and it has served me well.   Just for grins, I tried to find it again on the Internet, and I only found one that was used in an Ebay auction, and it had already been bid up to over double what I paid for mine new.  You might be wondering about the compass directions on the Seiko’s bezel.  There’s a method of using those, the watch hands, and the sun to identify which way is north.  I don’t need that feature, I don’t use it, and I’d have to read the directions to learn it again, but it’s cool to know it’s there.  It’s kind of an Indiana Jones thing, I guess.

Next up is the safety-fluorescent-green Timex Ironman I wore on the ride across China.  I’d seen one at a Target department store and for reasons it would probably take a behavioral psychologist to explain, I decided it was one I had to have on the China ride. Gresh arrived in California a few days before we left for the China adventure, and we spent a good chunk of our pre-departure time running around to several different stores trying to find that watch.  Maybe I thought it would match my riding jacket.  Maybe I thought it would be good because you can light up the face at night (a feature that is very useful for finding your way to the latrine at night).  Like I said…who knows?  The Timex did a good job for me.   It was bitter cold up on the Tibetan Plateau, hot in the Gobi Desert, hot and humid everywhere else, and it rained so hard at times I swore I saw a guy leading animals two-by-two into a Chinese ark.  My Ironman is still going strong on the original battery.  Those Ironman watch batteries seem to last forever.

The last one is a Casio Marlin diver’s watch.  It has to be one of the best watch deals ever.  I’m  not a diver, and there are really no features (beyond telling time, luminescent hands, a rotating bezel, and a waterproof case) that I need, but I just like the thing.   You can get a brand new Casio Marlin for a scosh under $50, and folks, that’s a smoking good deal.

It rained like hell half the time we rode in Colombia, and the Casio never let me down.  I vividly remember waiting for the ferry to arrive in Magangué for our cruise down the Magdelana River to Mompos when a Colombian boy came over to see what we were all about.  He fixated on my Casio as we waited in sweltering heat under the shade of a very small tree.  He finally touched the watch and simply said “good.”   You know, I needed that watch on the trip (it was the only one I had with me), but if I had a spare, I would have given it to him.  I still wear the Casio regularly.  It’s just a good, basic, comfortable, and easy to read watch.  It’s a favorite.

Watches, saws, generators, and more…it’s all on our ExhaustNotes Reviews page!

Product Review: Casio Carbon Core G-Shock

Good buddy King Kong in Luo Yang, central China.  Kong is a hard-riding moto maestro who wears a G-Shock wristwatch. Based on his advice, so do I.

Up until last few years, I ignored the Casio G-Shock watches. I didn’t think they were particularly good looking, and I didn’t need a watch that was protected against high g forces any more than I needed a summer cold. Then something happened. I met King Kong.  Seriously.  King Kong on a motorcycle.  Kong rode with us on the Western America Adventure Ride here in the US and he’s done several rides (some solo) across China.  On my ride across China, my good buddy King Kong wore a G-Shock and he loved the thing.

Kong’s Casio was living a tough life. The fact that Kong liked the G-Shock got my attention, and a short time later I purchased my first one. Then came another, and now, a third.

This third one is the Carbon Core Guard GA2000, which is a mouthful. It was a gift to me from my sister Eileen, which made it even more special.  It is even more resistant to shock than a regular Casio G watch as a result of its carbon fiber reinforced structure and a new design monolithic band, which further encapsulates the movement. Okay, I get it, but the regular G-Shock timepieces are already pretty tough. The added protection might be meaningless from my personal survivability perspective, considering that if it gets subjected to g forces it’s going to happen while I’m wearing it, and the old design would probably survive those kind of shocks better than yours truly. My guess is that if this one ever gets close to feeling shock levels that threaten its existence I would be toast, and if that’s the case, hey, who cares if the watch is still ticking?  No, the features that endear this one to me are much more practical, and truth be told, I don’t fully understand all of them yet. There’s more to the show than I can talk about, but I can talk about the ones that matter to me.

For starters, the Casio Carbon Core GA 2000 is a good-looking watch. I like the colors and the style, I like the analog hands and digital display, and I like the skeletonized minute and hour hands.  The yellow accents on a black watch work for me. I just think it looks good. If yellow doesn’t float your boat, though, Casio offers this watch in several other color themes.

The folks who tell you size doesn’t matter?  Don’t listen to them.  I need to be able to read the thing, and with a watch this size, that’s no problem.    The G-Shock is a big watch, but it’s not too big.

Next up is the world time capability. I travel overseas from time to time and it’s nice to be able to check the current time in Singapore or Chongqing by clicking a button on my watch without having to try to remember the time difference. To me, this is an important feature.

This G-Shock has timer and stopwatch features. These were important to me when I was a jogger and a serious bicycle rider; today, not so much.  For you younger guys, if you need these capabilities, they’re there.  My watch is also equipped with an alarm feature.  I’m sort of retired now and it doesn’t matter when I get up in the morning, but old habits die hard and I’m usually making coffee by 5:00 a.m. every day.  I don’t need an alarm to tell me to get up at that time; I just do.  For you poor guys who still work for a living, if you need an alarm, you get it with this watch.

This G-Shock is comfortable and it’s waterproof. I wear a watch 24/7, and this one is so comfortable I forget I have it on.  I wear my watch in the shower just because I don’t want to bother with taking it off. Sometimes on a motorcycle I get caught in the rain.  None of that’s a problem for this watch; it’s good to go underwater at depths way deeper than I ever will find myself.

There’s another feature that’s a very big deal to me, and that’s the light. This watch doesn’t have luminous hands, but it has a light that let’s you see the time in the dark. That light is good enough that when I need to get up in the middle of the night (you older guys will understand what I’m talking about), it’s sufficient to illuminate the path to el cuarto de baño.  (It’s funny how what’s important changes when you get older.)

Oh, and one more thing:  My watch keeps perfect time.  I checked it against the www.time.gov website (the official US timekeeping site) when I got the watch, and I checked it again several weeks later.   It’s perfect.  Right to the second.

The Casio Carbon Core Guard watch carries an MSRP of $130, but the street price is usually under a hundred bucks, and that’s a good deal.

Another cool watch…

Here’s another blog I posted a couple of years ago on the CSC blog, and this one is about a watch. Yeah, I make no excuses…I’m a watch guy. This one is one of my favorites.

Okay, it’s time for another watch story, and this one goes like this:  40+ years ago when I was a young Army officer in Korea, some of my guys purchased Japanese Orient watches (Orient was the brand name; it had nothing to do with our location in Asia).  That was in the mid-1970s, I was just a young pup, and those were the good old days when you could buy a Rolex at the Post Exchange for $300.

Rolex, Schmolex.  Who in their right mind, I remember thinking back then, would spend $300 for a watch?   $300 for a Rolex.  Ah, if I only knew.   But that’s a tangential story.   Back to the main attraction…

Anyway, I never heard of the Orient brand again until somebody posted a photo of a really cool Orient diver’s watch on the ADVRider.com “Shiny Things” thread.  That lit up a long-lost memory neuron or two and I looked for Orient watches on Google. I didn’t want another diver’s watch, but I saw a really cool Orient watch on the OrientUSA website.  It was a moonwatch (not like the Bulova Apollo 15 watch I posted about a week or so ago, but a watch that had a complication showing whether it was day or night).  I know, the whole thing is kind of silly…I mean, other than the guy who sang Love Potion No. 9, who doesn’t know if it’s day or night?  It was a men’s dress watch in rose gold (that’s a kind of pink-looking gold) with a brown leather alligator band.  (At least, I think it’s alligator.  Maybe it’s crocodile.  Never could tell those two lizards apart, except if you see one later it’s most likely an alligator, and if you don’t see one again for a while, well, it’s probably a crocodile.  Or so I’ve been told.)

I liked the looks of the Orient Moon Watch.  A lot.  I sent an email to Orient, they responded to my question and included a discount code in case I decided to order a watch.  One thing led to another, and my new Orient arrived via UPS a few days later. I really like it.  It’s a self-winding mechanical watch (as a mechanical engineer, that appeals greatly to me), like I said above it’s rose gold (which I like a lot), and it’s just cool. It’s beautiful, actually.  When I shot the above photo, it told me the sun was out (it’s wasn’t, because it had been raining bigly out here, but you get the idea).

So the Orient watch proved to be a great buy.  It’s very accurate, and it’s completely mechanical.  No batteries, no solar gizmos, no hookup to an iPhone, and it works the way it is supposed to.  A year or two ago on one of the CSC Baja trips, one of the guys on that ride (good buddy Patrick) made a point of showing me his self-winding mechanical Orient watch, which he purchased after I wrote about mine on the CSC blog.  I guess the old adage is true…if you have a great product (and I think Orient does), the word gets around.

Good buddy Patrick, a fellow Orient watch guy, in Guerrero Negro on the Baja 2017 ride.

So that’s it for now.  I’ve got to hit up Orient for my commission on Patrick’s watch, and I’m ready for the sunshine.   Yesterday was supposed to be the last day of our So Cal rainstorm saga, and I’m hoping that’s going to be the case.  I want to get out and ride.  My motorcycles have been sitting in the garage for too long.  It’s time to get some motorcycle stuff back up on the ExNotes blog!