I had one of these movement cross my bench this morning in a brand new CF 36mm DJ. I didn't do a full service on the movement. The person who sent it to me just asked me to pressure test his new watch, so I only did a high level inspection as I was removing the movement from the case before the immersion test. Here's what I found.
Firstly it seems that Shanghai got rid of the idiotic decoration plate on the balance bridge (note the lack of seam -- blue arrow). And the paraflex shock setting does appear to be real (yellow arrow). I wonder if the paraflex shock springs will be interchangeable between DD and SH movements? And on the example I have the hairspring is mounted anti-clockwise (red arrow). EDIT: (I messed up the previous version of this and said the hairspring was clockwise, it's not, it's anti-clockwise. The picture below shows the correct orientation of the red arrow now).
When I removed the balance to get a look at it from the bottom, I noticed a few things. First, the balance end shake adjuster isn't functional. The golden screw doesn't turn a gear to adjust the end-shake knob (purple arrows). This is a disappointment and means that it'll be impossible to adjust end shake without shims (annoying), but also that this movement won't be compatible with gen balances. Also, note that the pallet fork (orange arrow) isn't the chronenergy skewed design. I suspect the pallet fork / balance / escape wheel is basically the same as we saw on the VR3235 although I don't know if the parts will be interchangeable.
Next up I removed the automatic works to get a look if Shanghai used the ring support jewel for the winding pinion. They didn't (black arrow). That's not a big deal since the VR3235 never had issues in this area and it doesn't have one. But it's a sign that corners were cut in the design.
Finally, looking at the train bridge there are two things to note: 1) there is no shock setting for the escape wheel like we see on the Dandong VS3235 (cyan arrow), and 2) the intermediate winding works appear to be 3135 style the same as the VR3235 (green arrow).
I can also confirm that the stem is a 3135 style stem, so I strongly suspect that we're basically looking at an updated VR3235 movement with a new balance complete. That's not a bad thing. I'm happy that Shanghai has ditched the fake hairspring stud and move the beat and rate adjusters to be more easily accessible. But this is not an equal to the Dandong VS3235 although now it is much harder to tell the two apart -- going forward the best way to tell these two apart is going to be the size of the crown winding works pinion hole in the train bridge (green arrow in my pics above and well described by
@KJ2020 above).
Given the small number of changes, I'm somewhat inclined to call this a VR3235 v2 since not much has changed. But If the VR3235 and this movement end up not having interchangeable parts, then that label might make things even more confusing.
p.s... can't vote yet, not educated enough!
