First time round, without knowledge of the serial number, I was prepared to give these hands the benefit of the doubt.

It's not the only 2456 Carrera I've seen with dauphine hands; though the correct hands are the ones shown in the picture below -

- I was willing to entertain the possibility of a transitional model between the gold pre-Carrera (that shares its 2456 reference, incidentally) and early Carrera 2456s, using the gold dauphine hands from the earlier watch. A serial number that high pretty much rules that out. I have the above photo filed by the way, but can't remember where from any more, else I would attribute it to the owner - apologies.

And that's a clumsy relume. One of the distinctive traits of these early Carreras with single stick markers is how the lume was applied. The lume should actually peep out from under the marker (i.e. part of the radius of the lume dot is actually hidden under the marker). Now, going to the trouble of removing all the markers to relume a watch rarely seems to happen, so it's pretty easy to tell when one of these has been relumed. If you look carefully at the 1 and 2 o'clock markers on the watch being discussed, you can see the remains of the original lume including where it was under the marker.

Jeff, I agree with you on the "Swiss" - not easy to apply over the ridges of the sub-dial, we do seem to see some variations in this script on a lot of watches, but one thing we are looking for is for the letters to all be much the same size. On this watch, the initial S seems to me to be much larger.

There are a couple of tool marks on the case from both opening the back and changing straps. Minor things, yes, and a watch can still be NOS with those, I suppose, but slight demerits towards achieving that top price. And on the subject of changing straps, why on earth squeeze on a strap that seems to be a couple of mm too big for the lugs?! That's a big asking price and presenting the watch to its best advantage surely entails having it on a correctly-sized strap?

At heart, it's a lovely watch but one with a couple of question marks. I'll be watching to see what it achieves at auction with interest.