Seiko Serial Numbers

SeikoSerialNumbersHow to tell when your Seiko watch was made Part 2In my previous article on how to date your Seiko watch, I mentioned the nifty Jayhawks Production Date Calculator. In most cases it should return the correct date of manufacture. Fun Fact Anyone can determine the exact month and year their Seiko 6139 was made by looking at the serial number. The first digit of the serial number is the last. Handson review original photos from Baselworld 2017 of the Seiko Prospex Diver SLA017 Prospex Diver SPB05153 watch with price specs. The Typewriter Database is the largest collection of typewriter serial number information and typewriter photo galleries in the world. Find out when your typewriter. So, youve just purchased a used or new Seiko watch. Congratulations Have you ever wondered when your watch rolled off the assembly line at the factory Ibanez, Aibanzu is a Japanese guitar brand owned by Hoshino Gakki. Based in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, Hoshino Gakki were one of the first Japanese. Market pioneer established in 1954, Dyer Blair has been a pivotal player in the development and transformation of the local and regional capital markets through. A gallery of pictures and information about mechanical wristwatchespocket watches. B1.JPG' alt='Seiko Serial Numbers' title='Seiko Serial Numbers' />However, there are circumstances in which the calculator may give you inconclusive or erroneous results. Or no results at all. When that happens, I would resort to what I call dead reckoning or rough estimation. Dead reckoning is similar to navigating your way at sea by orientating yourself with the heavenly objects like the sun, moon and the stars. You wont be accounting for wind conditions and at best your estimate may be a few miles off your actual position. Thats when a GPS unit comes in handyManually estimating the production date of a Seiko involves the element of anachronism. What is anachronism Basically, it is the utilization of an event, a person, an object, language in a time when that event, person or object was not in existence. In other words, an anachronism is something that occurs out of its proper time. The chronological error of an anachronism can occur in either direction it can result from something from the past being represented as if it belonged in the present, like an archaism, or it can result from presenting something at a time before it actually appeared, occurred, or existed. And anachronism is the key to manually estimating the production date of your Seiko watch. An example would be saying that a digital LCD watch was produced back in 1. Kinetic watch in your drawer was purchased in 1. Or an e. Bay seller proclaiming a vintage Seiko 7. T5. 9 quartz chronograph as a brand new model from 2. In actuality, digital watches were only commercially available in the middle of the 1. Seiko Kinetics, originally branded as Auto Quartz and A. G. S Automatic Generation System only appeared at the end of the 1. As for the prized and short lived, rare 7. T5. 9 chronograph models, they were only made between 1. Putting it in another way, its like saying the i. Phone was already available in the 1. Microsoft Windows 7 users were running the operating system in 2. Eagle eyed movie buffs are quick to point out anachronisms in movies and you can read about them under the Goofs section for the movie title in the Internet Movie Database. OK, now that you basically know what an anachronism is, lets learn how to date your Seiko watch manually To perform a dead reckoning dating of a Seiko watch, the five things that you need to know are History of the caliber. Reference number chronology. Watch markings. Watch design. Signs of aging and wear. History of the caliber. Knowing when the caliber was first made and ended production would the first useful clue. Celtx Script Mac. Read Data From Serial Port Javascript For Loop. A very straightforward example is the 7. Serial Composition And Atonality George Perle Pdf. The 7. 00. 2 had a market life span of eight years and was shelved by mid 1. Therefore all 7. 00. The 7. 00. 2 based SDS0. K left and its successor model, the 7s. SKX1. 71. K right. Note that the 7. 00. Pics courtesy of Chronograph. Another good instance would be the famous 6. Seiko introduced these robust and workhorse calibers in 1. Neither calibers never made it to 1. Seiko ceased making 6. Why were they discontinued My guess is these calibers were getting more costly to manufacture and at the same time, Seiko wanted to push its quartz technology to the watch buying public. Maybe at the time they thought that mechanical chronographs were obsolete and quartz was the way to go. The discontinuation of the 6. Seiko automatic chronographs, much to the disappointment to Seiko mechanical watch fans. Currently, Seiko only offers automatic chronographs for its higher end lineups, such as the Brightz caliber 6s. Prospex Flightmaster caliber 6s. Rolls Royce of Seikos the magnificent Seiko Credor caliber 6s. An early 6. 13. 8 0. Oct 1. 97. 0 left and a late production 6. Apr 1. 97. 7 right. Note the waterproof marking on the earlier watchs caseback and water resistant on the other one. Complications in dating a Seiko watch will arise when production of the caliber hits 1. Generally, Seiko doesnt continue making the same caliber for longer than 8 years unless the caliber itself is profitable to manufacture or it came up with a replacement caliber. Take for example, the 7. T3. 2 alarm chronograph. It first debuted in 1. Therefore, if the a 7. T3. 2s serial number starts with 1. N, you could narrow it down between 1. It cannot be 1. 98. Neither can it be 2. This unfortunately leaves you with two possibilities either November 1. November 2. 00. 1. Obviously, this is not going to be very helpful because the correct year of production has to be either one of them but not both Try to enter the caliber and the serial number into the Production Date Calculator and it will assume that the watch is from November 1. So how do you determine which is the correct production yearWe take a step further by knowing the chronology of the watchs reference number. Reference number chronology. When faced with the above dilemma, the next logical choice would be to know the chronological order of the model. This is not easy to tell unless you have seen photos of models of the same caliber to serve as reference. Early Seiko 7. T3. SDW and followed by three digits while the last 7. T3. 2 models ended with SDWG with two trailing digits. The digits start from the lowest order to the highest order. When Seiko runs out of reference numbers, they would append a new alphabet starting with the letter A. In this example, a 7. T3. 2 model with the reference prefix SDW obviously predates one with a SDWA prefix. In the same manner, a model that has the prefix SDWF would be a much later model than a SDWB and so on. If you are able to determine that your mystery watch has a reference prefix e. SDWF, you can be sure that your watch is a late model 7. T3. 2. Therefore your watch would be a November 2. Three 7. T3. 2s arranged in chronological order. The SDW3. 79. P left predates the SDWA6. P middle while the latter in turn, predates the SDWC0. P right. Pics courtesy of Chronograph. The same model numbering convention holds true for other Seiko models. When the company dropped the 7. T3. 2 caliber in the early 2. T6. 2, it designated the first batch of 7. T6. 2s as the SNA series. As mentioned earlier, Seiko assigns a running prefix number for its new models until it runs out of numbers. Thereafter, it would append an additional character into the reference prefix, starting with the alphabet A, as in SNAA. Six years have passed since first SNA models rolled out the factory assembly lines and at the time of writing, the most recent models have the SNAB prefix. In a few months from now, youll find 7. T6. 2 models with reference letters starting with SNAC and perhaps, SNAD. This will continue until Seiko decides to discontinue the 7. T6. 2 caliber and replace it with a new one. Its replacement caliber will of course, have different reference letters. Two 7. T6. 2 alarm chronographs side by side An early Seiko Sportura SNA1. P left and a very recent model SNAB6. P right. Watch photos courtesy of Chronograph. Watch Markings. When the watchs reference number is unknown, there are certain visible clues that can help you zero in the watchs production year. The key is in the watch markings. For instance, in the 7. Seiko typically uses the word Seiko Quartz or SQ to denote that the watch is a quartz powered model. The 8. 0s was particularly Seikos golden age for their analog quartz models.