I hope this is not taken as a commerical for the hands Andy has up for auction...I'll likely bid on those myself so I'm inflicting a wound on myself. But I had already been mentally composing this post before Andy's offering appeared.

As I have taken in a number of project watches (various watchmakers) lately...many needing replacement hands...I started trying to find some. In many cases hands are missing or the ones on there clearly are not correct. So my first question...

Do we have good references describing the style of hands each watchmaker used for the various models/grades so I can determine what is correct??


Second hands always seem missing bent or wrong...they seem more expensive than illegal drugs...and unfortunately far less available. Every lot I buy on Ebay is 90% useless trash. But I'll begin with just one question to help me a little further down the road...

Long pipe/short pipe on second hands...is there any demarcation on what types/makes use the long pipes (I wound up with a bunch of long pipes and don't know what uses them)???

The price of matched sets seemed so high, but now as I try to make sense out of haystack of hands...I'm wondering (final question)

Am I going at this all wrong,,,advice on how I should approach "getting my hands on hands ??

yes Gary, I use the Riddle guide. Dial away, the man is a human watch encyclopedia.

About all I can contribute here is my ignorance. But, I've wondered the same thing. I have an old Lancaster missing hands, and have scoured the net trying to get educated about the proper hands to no avail.
Would be great to have some reference when shopping for hands, and to recognize the proper hands on a watch when you see it.

Watch hand lifetimes are like tires and sparkplugs of that period. They were replaced multiple times during the in-use life of the watch.

Some thoughts on this;

If you have a couple Elgin Parts cabinets with drawers full of hands, you will have little trouble with Elgins and for that matter most US-made watches that need a smart set of new hands.

Illinois is a big problem in the RR hands which all seemed to be Plum color steel in at least many 18s and all 16 size. I have been known to buy an Illinois just to get the hands.

Hands are still available from the distributors (ask your local watchmaker) and they "look good" but are never going to replace "originals".

I did sort my several "Haystacks" into categories by length and barrel size and those reside in a multiple choice plastic box full of about 40 marked plastic "boxlets" of sorted hands.

In general I do my best to fit hands to general use watches that are at least matching pairs, such has straight shaft vs "Breguet" shaft, Open or closed Diamond, Morning Glory, Cathedral, Kite, Etc.

As for Second hands I would speculate that 99.9% we find on the watch now are replacements, and if we are lucky they MIGHT be correct to the watch.

The "long pipe" second hands are strictly made for Swiss watches finished with piles of sub-dial wheel driven complications for stuff like dates, phases of the moon, months, weeks, saturnian periods and lord knows what else. So those second hands need a long pipe to reach down into the bowels of the dial plate where the second hand arbor is.

I have never bought "sets" of hands on eBay because it encourages people to "parts out" perfectly good and possibly original watches.

If Lindell was willing to rent out his time machine we could just go back and buy about 1,000,000 original hands, put them in a time capsule, come back and dig them up!