(Pictures below)
Hey Guys,
I am passionate about a lot of things, especially, as you might already know, about music (if you like, check out some of my filmmusic-compositions or pop-songs).
But today I will show you a nice 72' watch called the "Buler Astromaster". It looks pretty much the same as the very valuable "AP Royal Oak", but, as with copies of Rolex and Omega, this one probably even came out a little before the bigger sister turned out in the markets. So it's even possible that AP took the design from the buler or at least was inspired by it. Another possibility might be, that independently from each other, both targeted at similar consuments when designing and finally enrolling it on the markets.
Never the less the buler only costs about 1 % of the AP, which is caused especially by the different quality both watches are made of. So even if the design is similar, the AP uses much higher quality materials and -of course- has much better specifications.
But the Buler Astromaster is no bad watch though. It uses a switzerland-made movement called Baumgartner 582, which is a so called "Stiftankerwerk" as they say in switzerland - those are quite precise and also very robust.
More information about it, you can get here, if you like, because even for watch enthusiasts such movements are not very well known, I think:
http://www.uhrwerksarchiv.de/movements/movements-b/movements-b-baumgartner/334-baumgartner-582.html
Although it's not that popular as the AP, the Buler Astromaster has a growing fanbase. Even today the design looks very up to date. And back to the 70ies it was a very exotic thing to buy such, so they are (although not very rare at the time) highly sought after and hard to get in a good condition. Another reason for that is, that the movement is - relating to it's construction - very hard to service. So most of the watches that are broken won't be repaired by their owners because it's not very cost-efficient relating to the final value of the watch.
So the market for good used watches is small and good ones easily can reach up to 200 dollars, even if the watch originally was launched in a coffee roastery (tchibo) which has no good reputaion for selling quality watches as you might understand.
But in this case it is in fact a nice quality made (of course not highend) watch, which is nice to have.
So yesterday I went on an antique market and the watch catched my eye, laying in a box with other mostly broken watches. I just liked the design and instantly did some research about it. It was very dirty, but worked fine and even had the original bracelet. So I bid the guy that was selling it 15 bucks. Even broken examples are normally much more expensive. I could not trust my ears, he told me it's ok and I took the watch and went home, the luckiest man on earth. After a bit of polishing the watch was looking very nice. It runs on my wrist since then which is about 24 hours now, and it's absolutely precisely showing time. I am enjoying it every time I am looking at it and can not await people to ask me what time it is.
So I wanted to share the enjoyment I have with this watch and if you like it too, you might comment, upvote, or even subscribe to my channel. Thank you!
