I have always love, love, loved the vintage Daytona's especially the exotic dial Paul Newmans. I was hanging on for a homage that Eddie Platt of Timefactors has/had in the pipeline but got fed up waiting sooooo....I built my own
Sourced a case on eBay that had the authentic asymmetric chronograph pushers and would accept a Valijoux 7753 movement that has the same subdial layout as the old Daytona's with the running seconds at 9 o'clock, chronograph minutes at 3 o'clock and chronograph hours at 6 o'clock. The centre seconds hand is for chronograph seconds.
The case back was way to fat to accept the auto wind movement so I got a original spec sterile (no markings) case back that makes the watch much slimmer
The Valijoux 7753 is a auto wind movement but can also be hand wound. The vintage Daytona's were hand wound only so I removed the auto wind module from the movement making it slimmer and hand wind only like the original
I wanted a sterile (no logo dial) but I had no luck whatever finding one, but there are plenty of fake ones, so I thought f*ck it! and bought this one with the hand set. Not very accurate for the model it imitates but that's fine by me. I had to fit new dial feet too as they were in the wrong location for the movement.
I got a genuine R olex crown/tube and plexi crystal.
There was a fair bit of messing about drilling and tapping the case to accept the crown tube, but sorted it eventually.
It took a fair while and a lot of head scratching and research to pull it off but I am over the moon with the result...my own Daytona...ish with a excellent hand wind movement that has a chronograph that operates just like the original!
