I have recently engaged in modding a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and thought I might share my thoughts and experience here with you all. It might be a good starting point to express my thoughts on the Fifty Fathoms first. It sheds no light on the subject of modding a Fifty Fathoms rep, but I hope it finds some resonance and raises a smile among those who will be minded read this account.
I regard the Fifty Fathoms as the stealth bomber of the haute horology world: mean, purposeful and flying under the radar or at least with a foot print so small it is readily misinterpreted for something else. While the name Blancpain holds no mystery to anyone here, in the wider world (other than the entrance hall at Baselworld that is) it is widely unknown. Not for this watch the healthy recognition accorded Rolex, Omega, or even Panerai. Yet, as one YouTube wag pointed out, this is the luxury dive watch for those who regard a Submariner as their daily beater. Here in Blighty a gen watch will part you with well over £10k of your money. A nearly obscene amount for a dive watch, whatever its provenance might be.
Worse still, the Chinese have tirelessly demonstrated their skill in fabricating impressively close replicas of these watches that is the stuff of legend. Seriously, they are blood good at it! Granted, if you rock up to Baselworld with this rep on your wrist you will have some Herculean-sized balls and should anticipate being exposed for the wanton charlatan you are and be ritually flogged, butt naked, in the exhibition foyer (ok, that parts does not seem soooo intolerable). Nonetheless, at pretty well all other venues and occasions you are running in full watch stealth mode (most people are still going to be left racking their minds for the heroic cultural reference that is ‘’white bread’’).
Don’t get me wrong: I love the styling and purposeful stance of this watch. It also wears well even for those with smaller wrists and it is a genuinely high quality piece. As I indicated earlier, its public recognition is nearly non-existent outside of the most committed of watch lovers. The name probably does nothing to help in this regard. Does it speak of heroic or purposeful deeds of times past? Hell no, for the average punter in the street, stretching back to their basic school grounding in French, we have the alluring name of Blancpain. Really, White Bread…was Lemon Sponge taken? I have a wealthy friend who sports a fantastic Chelsea Bun with in-house raisins, too.
Seriously, they have named a watch after some less than awe-inspiring basic groceries! Stand in a hall with five hundred average non-watch geek people and you will be lucky if there is the slightest spark of recognition from more than one of them. Yes, it’s a striking watch, even beautiful in a toolish manner, but on all but the closest of examinations many will assume you are wearing one of those pumped-up fashion watches of the early 00s: a G-shock or maybe a Diesel, not that you have the equivalent of moderately decent family car hanging off your wrist.
So, here for us rests an opportunity. While I am not of the mind-set to attempt to pass a rep off for a genuine, it is very unlikely the question will ever arise as so very few people will have the slightest idea what they are looking at. Hence my earlier reference to this being the stealth bomber of the watch world. How many of you have ever seen a gen in the wild, so to speak? I put my hand up and admit that I have never seen one that was not on a YouTube video!
Anyway, enough of my inane musings on the subject of Blancpain. Let’s get to the modding part of this piece before you all lose the will to live.
So, the watch itself was a recent M2M purchase. This is a ZF factory with the black dial and RG case finish. It was in near new condition when I purchased it, so fundamentally in excellent condition. The case, bezel and crystal were a perfect start point. The lug bars fully functional (not always the case), and the rep sail cloth straps were is unworn or close to unworn condition. The price was attractive and allowed some scope to take this rep in a direction I rarely consider prudent, namely to swap out the Asian movement for something a little more impressive.
The watch keeps quite reasonable time in the real-world, worn sense, but placed on a timegrapher it becomes clear that this Asian movement is all over the place the mechanism was swinging wildly between +15 and plus 180 seconds per day with an amplitude of just 170 degrees and a beat error of 0.3 milliseconds. Nothing here I want to keep!
The rep straps are, as is so often the case with reps, an obvious area of cost cutting and nothing I feel the need to retain. Alas, an authentic BP FF cloth sail strap is well beyond the price of justifiable unless you happen to have a gen BP. I also discovered that the rather beautiful BluShark NATO in rich black with tan coloured edging will simply not fit through the space between the lug bar and the case. At 1.4mm the NATO is simply too thick, which breaks my heart as I feel this strap would look great on this watch.
An alternative here would be the classic Bond NATO that I have. I think this, too, would work well with the FF. Bond would probably have had a Fifty Fathoms if his civil service employers were not so tight or had blown the budget on that bloody DB5 that’s hardly the obvious choice for undercover work!
I dismantled the watch and elected to use an ultra-sound cleaner to clean the case. The plated finishing limits my cleaning options as anything too aggressive will simply ruin the finish. The case was reinvigorated. As indicated earlier: the crystal and, critically, the sapphire bezel are in perfect condition, so I feel that I am making real progress.
These lug bars are a known issue on these watches and I have used some blue Locktite on the threads to ensure that my life will not be reduced to a misery of peering at the carpet on my hands and knees in the future.
Some cautionary notes for anyone considering this swap themselves:
- The screws on the cover plate are bloody tiny and the ZF movement cover plate has a quite aggressive dome making it difficult to approach the three screw holes around its outer edge. This is less of an issue with the Noob version as its cover plate is shallower (I have a blue dial Noob v2 which I am also planning to covert to an ETA/Sellita movement).
- The date dial is actually an extension dial glued to the original date ring to extended it to the correct radius. I opted to remove this and glue it to the date disk of my new movement. This is tricky as the alignment has to be carefully checked so that the day displays correct within the dial window. Use a slow setting glue (such as general purpose PVA) and keep the glue to the inner part of the extension ring or you will be rubbing glue on the movement mounting ring.
- The hands are best removed with levers rather than a Presto hand puller. Use a plastic bag over the hands to catch them as they release. They will take a flyer otherwise. I would favour levers as the hour hand has quite a large hub and therefore presses very close to the surface of the dial giving very little space to work a presto style hand puller into a good position. This is critical as the hands are not very robust and (particularly the second hand) can be damaged beyond repair by heaving handed extraction.
- The level and high of the hands when replaced is critical and I actually ended up de-casing the mechanism twice because I felt the hands look to be at the wrong height when I flipped the case over and looked through the crystal at my handy work. There is only a slight doom on the crystal so if the hands are sitting too high it sticks out like a sore thumb. This is not helped by the fact that the hands don’t really have a distinctive notch into which they sit, so there is an element of suck-it-and-see.
- Take time to check the stem play when securing the movement back into the case. Poor alignment here will lead to real problems with both winding and the screw down crown. Check twice and tighten once might be a good rule of thumb.
To the matter of the movement, my choice was an opportune purchase of a brand new and genuine Sellita SW220-1 in its decorated Top Grade variant. Again, this came available at a good price with the appropriate white on black date wheel complication already in situ. The only element of the movement that needed to be borrowed from the Asian 2836 was the rotor weight. Everything else will be stock Sellita. The swap over is straightforward and requires no mechanical changes to the Swiss movement. The 26 jewel Sellita movement, while not absolutely identical to the ETA/Asian 2836, has only been changed at levels which are not affected by a straight transplant such as this.
Having said that the transplant was straight forward it should be pointed out that the screws securing the movement and its cover plate are bloody small. I mean really, really small when you have hands the size of mine. I found, in the end, that a dab of Rodico on my screwdrivers allowed me to complete the tasking of relocating said screws back into their respective threads. Also, the hands are very thin and fragile, and the applied indices are not secured too well, so care must be taken when removing the hand set so as to not remove half the watch face at the same time.
The seller of the movement even had the Chronoscope print out for the movement showing that, even though not a COSC grade movement, this was well adjusted even when tested in six position. The readings are all perfectly acceptable to my mind, and with a mean Delta of less than five seconds per day over all positions and a beat error of no more than 0.2, this movement will likely prove exceptionally accurate in day to day use. Some people have mixed feeling about Sellita (being a Swiss clone of ETA), but I have owned multiple Oris with both the SW-200 and 220 movements and they were rock solid, kept great time and had a feeling of genuine quality when wound by hand. No ugly click spring noise or rotor sounding like two flies fighting inside a Coke can.
As to the final result: well, I am pleased. It looks, feels and performs like a genuinely high quality watch. I love the design of the Fifty Fathoms. I cannot, and would not, spend the sums required to own the genuine piece, but I appreciate that it is a glorious watch and this is a close as I will come to the genuine article. Both the ZF and Noob factory (I also own a blue dial/brush finished Noob) replicas of this watch are outstanding pieces. They may have flaws, but they are small and almost no one outside of an authorised dealer (or the rep forums) would have the slightest idea what or where to look for them.
Now I am going to go swing it in Morrisons, cause you’all know that’s exactly where someone with a five-figure wrist watch hangs out (fuck that South of France/Monaco bullshit anyways).
