: Thanks for your response to my question. Just curious. How can you
: tell? What is wrong, other than the re-done dial? Did Heuer not
: use the Landeron 187 in the '60's? I have found a couple of
: other examples, but the cases seem to differ.

As Jeff says, a lot of it is in the experience of having looked at these things for some time.

Also, as I wrote to someone recently, one of the things to look at in an unfamiliar watch is precedence. Are there features that are shared with other Heuer watches of the period? It can tell us a lot about a watch when we don't have a lot to go on.

We can go through the exercise quickly with this one if you like.

Let's start with the case. It's similar to, but not the same as, some Heuer cases from earlier in the 60s. At a point before the Landeron 48 had ever been amended with a date wheel to create the 187, in fact. At the time they were using this movement, Heuer had quite a tight and well defined model range. The Carrera, the Autavia, the Camaro and an economy series of watches. This watch wouldn't fit with any of those series, and we do see that Heuer aren't afraid of amalgating model ranges at this point, shoehorning the triple calendars into the Carrera range. The business proposition of introducing a new series probably wouldn't have got through in the late 60s, that proliferation came later in the 70s.

The dial has "Chronographe" and "Suisse" written on it. We can see from many other documented watches that Heuer use the English spellings "Chronograph" and "Swiss" or "Swiss made" when they include this information on a dial, with very few exceptions. The Heuer text looks too full in the shield too, though it's hard to tell without proper enlargements for the photos.

Lastly, and this one's a bit of a kicker, Heuer didn't actually use the Landeron 187. They used the Landeron 189. And sold pretty much every one they could get their hands on in Carrera Dato 45s. Again, why would they put an equivalent movement in a watch that they couldn't sell for as much as a Carrera? That bridge is not how the Landerons were signed by Heuer either; all these movements date from after 1964, so would be signed Heuer-Leonidas rather than Ed. Heuer & Co. That's a definitive anachronism right there.

So lots of warning signs on this one, with no real precedents for the features. I would be even more confident than Jeff's 95% that this is not an original Heuer, I'm afraid.