Category: Watch

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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Click on the Citizen Blue Angels link to see more Citizen Blue Angels.

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.

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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.

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My self-winding Orient watch. It’s a classy dress piece, and it’s 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!

Marking Time

The real deal: Apollo 15 Astronaut Dave Scott’s Bulova, which sold for a cool $1.625 million at auction.

I’ve always been a watch guy. It probably started when my parents surprised me with a Timex when I was a kid. The thought of having my own wristwatch was heady stuff for a boy back on the east coast (or anywhere else, I imagine). To make a long story short, I’ve been a watch collector ever since. I don’t specialize, and many times I won’t keep a watch forever. If I like the way a watch looks and it’s not crazy expensive, I’ll wear it for a while, with the duration of “a while” usually determined by the time it takes for the next interesting thing to catch my eye.

I make no excuses: I like watches, and I always wonder about guys who don’t wear them. Not wearing a watch is a common thing with young guys today. When I taught in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, one of my topics focused on how to do well in an interview. My guidance was simple. Dress sharply, be early, look the interviewer right in the eye, speak up, don’t use the word “like” incessantly when you speak, and wear a watch. A lot of kids today don’t wear watches. If they have any interest in knowing what time it is, they look at their iPhone. That’s a no go, I’d tell my students. If you don’t wear a watch, the person interviewing you will conclude you have no sense of time-based urgency. It’s what I always concluded when someone showed up not wearing a watch.

Anyway, to get to the subject of this blog, I want to tell you about the Bulova moon watch. It’s a cool piece with an interesting story that goes like this: With the advent of the Apollo lunar exploration program (the NASA endeavor to put men on the moon), the US government decided we needed an official space watch. Omega won the competition with their Speedmaster watch, and for the next 14 missions, that’s what astronauts wore.

Here’s where it gets complicated and where the story gets Internet-fuzzy. Depending on which source you believe, Astronaut Dave Scott wore a Bulova watch on the Apollo 15 mission for one of the following reasons:

He wore the Bulova watch because his Omega broke.
He wore the Bulova watch because he felt like it.
He wore the Bulova watch because Bulova was trying to replace Omega as the official NASA watch.
He wore the watch because the US government, Bulova, or other parties wanted the official watch to be something made in America.

Whatever the reason (and you can find stories supporting each of the above floating around in that most authoritative of all sources, the Internet), Dave Scott wore the Bulova on the Apollo 15 mission, and Omega went from being “the only watch worn on the moon” to “the first watch worn on the moon.” It could not have gone over well at the Omega factory.

Dave Scott’s original Bulova, the one he wore on the moon, sold at auction a few years ago. The predicted auction price was $50,000. As predictions go, it wasn’t a very good one. When the gavel came down and the dust cleared, Scott’s Bulova sold for a cool $1.3 million. Throw in the auction commission and other fees, and you’re talking about a $1.625-million wristwatch. Wowee!

Bulova, today no longer an American watch company (they were bought by Citizen a few years ago) recognized a marketing opportunity when it fell into their laps, and they re-issued an internally updated version of Scott’s watch as the Bulova Moonwatch, complete with a 262 kHz Accutron movement. I have no idea what a 262 kHz movement is, except that the Bulova marketing hype tells me it means it’s super accurate.

The not-so-real deal, but a hell of a deal nonetheless: The Bulova replica Moonwatch, purchased for just under $300.  Yep, as I type this, I’m wearing my Bulova.

The increased accuracy really didn’t matter to me when I saw the watch (I’m retired now and I seldom need 262 kHz accuracy when I decide I feel like going somewhere), so that’s not what prompted me to pull the trigger. I just like the way it looks, I like the swirl of stories around the original Bulova moon watch, and my Dad wore a Bulova when I was a kid.

Oh, one other thing helped…a trick that has prompted me to pull the trigger on other discretionary purposes.  You know how the Internet spies on us, right?  I mean, folks complain all the time about looking at something on Amazon or whatever and then it starts showing up in their Facebook feed.   That’s not always a bad thing.  When I first looked at the Bulova Moonwatch it was a $600 bauble.   I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money, and I guess the spymasters/Internet marketeers figured that one out.  They and I knew it was a waiting game to see who would blink first.  Because I had looked for the watch on Amazon, I started getting emails from different retailers to buy the watch for less, and I let those roll in.  Delete, delete, delete, and then one day, an offer floated into my inbox for $299.  Hmmm.  Delete.  And sure enough, a day or two later and that $299 offer came with a coupon for $20 off and free shipping on my first order.  Ka ching!