mrneddles wrote:conjurer wrote: when it was the "It" watch, the one to have on all the fora.
I bought into the "It" watch with the oceaniare. Found it uncomfortable as hell and the second hand sweep moved like a drunk hobo staggering down a dirty alley.
Yes, I owned one, too. Apart from the comfort thing, which to me wasn't too bad (a ringing endorsement!) the 6bps sweep of the seconds hand on mine was OK. It came with a Claro 888, the same movement that Lior used in many of his cheaper Swiss Legend autos. The Claro has a pretty checkered past; some companies (like Edouard Lauzieres) uses it, but it's heavily modified. Many WIS's consider the Claro (made by George J. Von Berg) to be nothing more than a Chinese movement that's slapped together in Switzerland.
Interestingly, a couple of years ago I attempted to do some research into the Claro company, and was stymied by the fact that it's all very secretive--back then, Claro didn't even have a website--and there was a lot of internet chatter that Claro wasn't even located in Switzerland. Then, there was more chatter last year that Claro had closed their doors and gone out of business. I discussed this with an industry insider who was in the know, and he informed me that Claro had taken an absurdly large order from a large company for movements, and the client had renigged on the contract, which forced Claro into bankruptcy. Since then, Claro was brought back to life by an influx of cash from several of the smaller companies they did business with.
In terms of the Oceanaire, the last I heard about it from Zodiac was either last year or the year before, I forget which, where they were updating the line with new dials and whatnot, but I never saw them for sale anywhere except on Zodie's website. I think that Fossil, which owns Zodiac, doesn't really know how to market the brand.
