I've been enjoying every moment of my GMF wrapped 3186
looks fantastic! insert is good! enjoy that one!
I've been enjoying every moment of my GMF wrapped 3186
Congrats, it a beautie.
Protect your clasp ....
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Congrats, it a beautie.
Protect your clasp ....
Several other things I had noticed about yours that are worrh mentioning.
1) The 6 9 12 hour markers have diagonal tip cuts on the corners that give the illusion of rounded corners. Not as good as actual rounded corners but a definite step up from square corners like most rep dial markers have.
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2) The rehaut engraving is pretty much perfectly aligned. This has long been a fault of GMF Subs and GMTs. Look at this one between 35 - 45. It's a $1K fully wrapped GMF Bluesy that I rejected and replaced with 3 other reps. TD wasn't happy but sorry not having that on a $1K watch. R's at 34 and 39 instead of 35 and 40, X at 43 instead of 44, uneven spacing, etc.
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3) The 1's on the insert have better serifs. The serif tips are parallel to the 1 main body instead of diagonal. Small detail but nice to see that fixed. It's like the gen in that respect, and makes the numerals appear smoother with no odd angular element.
Compare to the diagonal serif tips here
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It is an SA3186 bro. And it is true that every factory using a true clone 3186 besides ARF was using the VR recently. So, either you got an early release V3 made when GMF was using only that movement, or perhaps they ran out of them and were just using VRs until they got more stock of the SA in. We can only speculate. BTW in addition to the beat corrector arm and regulator arm being reversed on the balance assembly, the SA has no paint on the red reversing gears teeth.
Anyway, it would be tough to reject this watch based on the movement not being a true clone because it is. Several members have this movement and haven't had issues with it.
Hazing
If I am looking at QC pictures I am looking to find reasons to buy the watch... I want to GL it. Most of my questions are to learn more about the reps and not to find flaws to reject it.
In this case, I explicitly ordered a VR3185 (if this is even possible in this business). I will read a little bit more into the different movements and check for the downsides of the SA3186. As far as I've read it's mostly about the click spring, which is less robust and it has a proprietary jump click, which provides hour jumping in the opposite direction.
16 emails later, after receiving first QC pics, showing a watch with a frisbee GMT hand , I could finally convince the TD to present a watch with a 3186 movement. New QC pics even show a VR 3186.
Yeah, I have the sa3186 in a V3 BLNR and it’s solid so far. It’s been doing really well. The functionality is good other than directionality of the grown but that’s nut important to me. I Know a lot of people are worried and all like “I don’t want to use the hour jumping feature so I never set the date with it” but I love the hour jumping feature on a gmt so I use it like I have nothing to worry about and it’s held up fine. It doesn’t feel fragile or weak in my opinion.
im off like +10sec a day though right now which kinda sucks. I’ll get to it eventually.
I will say I was surprised when GMF started using the vr movements so it wouldn’t surprise me if it went off. I think factories like GMF tend to have some/more variation with their parts a lot more than noob or ARF. ARF and noob spoil us. But as I said earlier when the vVR movement fir$t popped up in the V3 - I’d like to see more than one before assuming it’s a trend.
Also, I was talking to Li today and asking him about this movement and he refers to the SA as the VR. I know they call it different names than we do but it always throws me off. We talked about this very thing. The difference between his Vr and ours so this might be the cause of a miscommunication.
so the thing is, if you told Li you specifically wanted the VR... he might be calling this the VR and may have gone out of his way to get you this movement. But in my experience hes usually pretty reasonable.
Yeah and when I said he's pretty reasonable (if the above is what happened) I meant he's probably one of the more laid back tds and he's probably the one of assume most likely to say "well get what you want" instead of "you said you wanted a vr and this is a a vr. It's not my fault you called it something different". But not sure.Yes he is quite nice. My V3 came from him with the VR in it and I didn't ask for it. Maybe just luck or he didn't know himself.