That eBay dealer has the best cases you can get period for the cushion cased stuff!
he's got them in Stainless Steel, Ti, And polished PVD now too!
His stuff will be easier to get parts for as well since his cases are the 1:1 style cases there are loads of parts out there available that will fit them.
With IWI and his proprietary cases you SOL.
Also I did an expose on the IWI euro dive model design flaw on WUS a month or so ago.
I abbriged the story a bit for this post.
...
The stem is a little over half a millimeter off center towards the back of the watch! A quick investigation reveals something I should have caught late last year when I first looked at the watch my customer sent me! The ring grove cut in the case for the dial is 33mm wide and the dial is 37mm wide! As you can imagine I was stunned to find this out and embarrassed that I didn’t’ catch it sooner. The movement and dial on these watches is just jammed into the case with no thought to the consequences at all!
Half a millimeter might not seem like much but it is a substantial bind in the crown and stem and causes all kinds of premature wear which explains why the one I got from my customer had failed! The extra tension on the crown and crown tube had worn out the crown tube gasket and it had worked its way into the movement which is what finally brought it to a stop. The solution rather than figure out what was wrong apparently is to omit the crown tube gasket on the newer models as the replacement I got didn’t have a crown tube gasket at all!
It is important to note that the Euro Dive my customer sent me is at least a couple of years old and has the wrong sized dial in it and the one I bought from IWI in February 2007 still has the wrong sized dial in it!
In other words, this model is a time bomb and short of sending it to a watchmaker to have the dial resized to fit the case or not using it at all there is little you can do to keep it from going off.
I do not know if this design flaw is present in the Euro Dive GMT models as I haven’t handled one and since the GMT models have the new dial design it is possible that the GMT models don’t have the design flaw. It is also possible that the Euro Dive Blue dial model doesn’t have the design flaw either however the photos on the IWI website appear to show the blue dial model with the same problem as the black.
Here are some photos to illustrate the problem.
37mm dial:
33mm ring groove cut for the dial:
37mm Dial loosely installed to illustrate the visible gap that is present from the ring groove. Since the dial doesn't fit in the ring groove the whole assembly is sitting too far twords the back of the watch by the thickness of the dial. (the watch in the background has the dial resized already and fit properly in the case):
Properly sized dial installed and ready to go:
Last edited on Wed Apr 25th, 2007 12:28 pm by OldeCrow
|
