Mechanical watch – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

The Honda Cub is the most-produced motor vehicle of any kind in the history of the world. Not just motorcycles, but motor vehicles. Honda passed the 100 million Cub mark years ago; today they still offer a Cub in the form of the 125cc Super Cub. That 100 million figure doesn’t count all the knockoffs by Yamaha and the Chinese marques. It’s a staggering number for a staggering vehicular concept. So, if you’re a watch company and you want to produce a watch honoring a motorcycle…well, you know where this is going.

Seiko is the company, and this year they introduced a limited edition of the Honda Super Cub watch. These watches have been nearly impossible to get, so I was astounded when on Christmas photog duty at the mall I wandered into a watch store and what do you know, there it was. It was the only Seiko Super Cub watch I’ve seen and I knew I had to have it. It’s self-winding and to watch weirdos like me it doesn’t get any better than a mechanical self-winding watch. The ticket in was $400, I asked if there was any room in the price, the store manager said no, and I pulled the trigger anyway. I bought it for list price and that was still a good deal.

Seiko is offering a limited run of the Super Cub watch in two colors. I’ve not seen the black one in person, but that’s okay. I like the green and white one better.

The Seiko Honda Super Cub watch has several cool details, including a NATO band, a rear cover intended to evoke a tail light, and a stem that looks like a Cub fuel gage.

Two of your blog boys (that would be Gresh and yours truly) both owned Honda Cubs back in the day (Huber didn’t, but he has an excuse…he wasn’t born yet). I guess that made Gresh and I two of the nicest people you’d ever meet.

To my great surprise, I found a couple of photos of my Honda Cub buried in an old photo album. The image quality is not up to my current standards, but hey, I took these photos with a Minolta C110 camera in the 1960s. With those little 110 film cassettes, these 60-year-old pics ain’t half bad.

I bought the Cub for $50 (a dollar per cubic centimeter) from Zeb Moser (a buddy in New Jersey; RIP, Zeb), rode around on it a little bit, and then sold it for $70 thinking I’d done well. There’s no need to say it, but I will anyway: I wish I still had my Cub.

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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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