great story . . . great photos.

would it be OK to add photos and story to the BW section of OnTheDash??

Thanks,

Jeff

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

: In my last post regarding this watch, I told
: you that I was lucky enough to receive an
: original leather case with star disk as a
: gift from a very kind German gentleman that
: frequents the forum I moderate.
: One of the other things it was missing is the
: original dial with the "Sternzeit
: reguliert" print. I was expecting a
: long and difficult search to find one.
: However another German gentleman collector
: that prefers to remain anonymous offered to
: help me. And the day before yesterday the
: package from Germany arrived. Not only was I
: very lucky to buy a Sternzeit without
: knowing it, I've been greatly helped twice
: already now to make the package complete.

:

: Today I went to my watchmaker, with the Heuer
: and the Sternzeit dial. I also took Konrad
: Knirim's excellent book "Military
: Timepieces" to show the watchmakers
: (there's five working together in this shop)
: the history of this particular model.
: An interesting discussion followed. One of the
: things I wanted to have them do, is regulate
: the watch to sidereal time
: ("Sternzeit"). A star day is only
: 23hr 56m 3.5sec. At home I had already done
: the calculations. The movement in this Heuer
: is the Valjoux 230 fly back chronograph that
: normally runs at 18000 bpm. If you want it
: to go around the dial twice in 23hr 56m
: 3.5sec, it should run at 18050bpm. So I
: asked the gentleman helping me if he could
: regulate it to run at that frequency. This
: was obviously a somewhat out of the ordinary
: question, and even with the help of Konrad's
: book, he could not be convinced that it made
: any sense to do that. In his opinion, if you
: make it run faster, you should also modify
: the dial, to indicate 23:56:3.5 instead of
: 24 (or 12) on top. I'm afraid that Germany
: lost a little respect as a top industrial
: nation in this particular watchmakers shop .
: The Heuer went on the timing device anyhow, and
: it proved to run exactly at 18000bpm as
: expected. Somewhere during it's service life
: (or maybe even after that) the dial was
: changed to a regular one, and the timing
: adjusted to run like a normal watch. Rather
: quickly the adjustment was made to 18050bpm,
: so its running on sidereal time again now.
: Just like in the service, to avoid mistakes,
: I then had the dial changed. One of the
: other watchmakers (a big Speedmaster fan,
: and very knowledgeable on that subject)
: enjoyed the Heuer greatly, and changed the
: dial there and then. The movement looked
: perfect, and ran perfect, so a service would
: have been a waist of time and money.
: Here's the result.

: