I recently completed servicing this stunning Glycine Airman from 1960. This watch belongs to fellow Instagram’er @furcafe who also happens to be an exceptionally talented photographer. The original Glycine Airman is no ordinary watch. Designed by pilots with some very unique features, its first distinguishing characteristic is that it is a true 24 hour watch. What that means is that the hour hand only rotates around the dial once every 24 hours, not twice as in ordinary watches. The original hour hand has a long tail on it so you can read it as a normal watch. Next, it has a hack stop which was quite an aggressive design for Glycine and became the bane of the existence of many watchmakers servicing these watches. As shown in the second picture, there is a wire that sticks-up through the dial when the crown is pulled-out. This stops the watch at exactly the top 24 hour mark by blocking and unblocking the seconds hand. As you can imagine, this apparatus is very difficult for a watchmaker to work with— the wire is as thin a piece of wire as you can imagine. Handling the hack stop parts and getting the wire through the dial is no small feat. This would explain why so many of these Glycine Airman’s no longer have a functional hack stop as they were broken during past servicing. Now for this particular watch, it is a superb example as you can see in the pictures. The Felsa calibre 692 inside is a very underrated movement. Felsa was the thought leader for automatic watches within the Ebauches SA group and for good reason. You work on this movement, you experience superb design and execution. This watch came-out of the ClockSavant servicing spa running very close to COSC performance across all 6 measured positions, I couldn’t have hoped for better results from this watch.
