{"id":13166,"date":"2021-07-20T05:34:18","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T12:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=13166"},"modified":"2021-07-20T05:34:18","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T12:34:18","slug":"pandas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/07\/20\/pandas\/","title":{"rendered":"Pandas!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Oh, I had the bucks.\u00a0 The Army didn’t pay us much, but we didn’t have expenses, either, so $76 was eminently doable.\u00a0\u00a0In fact, I bought Seiko stainless steel chronographs from the Base Exchange for my Dad and my grandfather, too.\u00a0 Their watches were only $67, but the Panda had the day and the date on the face, and three timing features:\u00a0 Seconds on the main watch face, minutes on the lower subdial, and hours on the upper subdial.\u00a0 It was a beautiful thing and it was all mechanical.\u00a0 I wore it for about 10 years, and then when Ebay started to get popular I auctioned it away.\u00a0 I was quite pleased with the results.\u00a0 The watch that originally set me back $76 went for just north of $200 on Ebay 30 years ago.\u00a0 Today, though, that same watch brings around $2000. I sold too soon. Go figure.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.\u00a0 It is also an all mechanical watch Breitling<\/a> calls the “Premier.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’d call it a Panda, and I’d sure like to own one.\u00a0 But the Breitling<\/a> MSRP is a lofty $8500.\u00a0 They are just over $6,000 on Amazon, but that’s still way above my pay grade.<\/p>\n

In poking around on the Internet looking at the Breitlings, I learned that they offer several versions of their Premier.\u00a0 One is a model that pays tribute to the Norton<\/a> motorcycle, which has different colors, old school numbers on the face, and a band that, frankly, looks cheap to me.\u00a0 \u00a0The colors don’t really work for me, either, but maybe that’s because I want my Panda to look like a panda.\u00a0 If I wanted a Norton motorcycle, I’d buy a Norton.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Seiko<\/a> is back on the Panda wagon, too, as is Citizen<\/a> and perhaps others with modern versions of this classic watch design.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with electric watches (in fact, their accuracy is astounding), but I’m a mechanical guy.\u00a0 I own a few solar watches and several battery-powered watches.\u00a0 I like them all.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\n

Sign up here for a free ExNotes subscription!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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 … Continue reading “Pandas!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,64,507],"tags":[2055,250,2057,2056,2053,314,2054,1368],"class_list":["post-13166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feel-good-stuff","category-gear","category-watch","tag-2055","tag-breitling","tag-breitling-norton","tag-breitling-premier","tag-citizen","tag-norton","tag-panda","tag-seiko"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/Breitling900.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13166"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13967,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13166\/revisions\/13967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}