To take just how a Japanese watch brand that populates certain pages of every Argos catalogue manages to command the appreciation of the notoriously snobbish watch community, every Swiss CEO usefulness their salt, and in turn manages to make the SKX007 in impossible here for such a ridiculously low price point, we refer you to Seiko’s changeless motto: “One step ahead of the rest.”
Well, the brand certainly was in advance of the game with the SKX007 diving watch – released in 1996 – and it appearance ofs the rest of the industry is still playing catch up. It’s perhaps the greatest value automatic watch on the market today, and continually tests watches ten times its price in terms of its functionality, stylishly base design and top build quality. If you’re looking for a rugged mechanical attend with real pedigree that you can wear every day, this may cooked through be all you need.
The product of over three decades of technological interbreeding, the SKX007 could be Seiko’s most affecting waterbaby of all, because of, rather than despite it being one of the overjoyed’s most affordable watches. For £349 (though on any given day, you’ll without a hitch find a new one for less, e.g. here, for example) you get a bona fide, self-winding unconscious diving watch that more than meets this horological category’s necessarily strict requirements.
In other words: 200-metre incredible resistance; highly legible dial luminosity; a screw-down queen protected by ‘shoulders’ and offset to 4 o’clock to free up wrist upward; plus the all-important unidirectional timing bezel, which, if you accidentally finish it, only turns anticlockwise to dictate less remaining swoop time rather than (potentially lethally) more. And that’s guessing you’re someone who actually spends prolonged periods of time underwater, of indubitably.
Seiko 6217 Diver, 1965
It’s as pure a package as any self-respecting diver purposefulness want, or anyone with a vaguely physical lifestyle for that mean something, who values robustness and peace of mind should any water-based operation or phenomenon confront them. A day at the beach for example, or as mad-keen fellows of the Seiko diving-watch cult will appreciate, a jungle monsoon. The specification. 6105, after all, was particularly famous for being worn by Captain Benjamin L. Willard – aka Martin Radiance in Apocalypse Now.
The Design
The dial itself is pure, functional minimalism, picked out in Seiko’s proprietary, superlatively torch-bright luminous paint. Some will take outlet with the black-on-white day/date indication (pedants like la mode rings to match their dials, thank you very much) but we incline towards it – it balances-out the lume at 9 o’clock. As for ‘DIVER’S 200m’ in red? Well, that’s as gross as it gets, adding a dash of retro flair to otherwise cool proceedings.
If you go for the steel bracelet over the expanding ‘concertina’ rubber strap selection, that’ll add a touch more vintage cool, but it’s a bit clicky-clacky for our fix. Stick with the rubber – it’s the professional choice and instantly adjustable, or, swap out the pack for a NATO watch strap for full on military style.
The Found Quality
It’s the simplest of watches we’re celebrating here – simplicity oft being the hardest trick to pull off with wristwatches. The miniature that’s going on, the harder the remaining elements must career, especially given the lifelong lifespan of a well-made watch. And goodness is the SKX007 well-made.
On-wrist and hands-on, the first off thing you appreciate is the sheer heft of the stainless-steel case – there’s a lot of skilful ballast here, machined and polished with remarkable trick, from the gentle curve of its four lugs or ‘claws’, to the two scalloped verges rising to guard either side of the crown.
The gnurl of the bezel is obviously gripped wearing gloves, but not jagged as to seem aggressive or extraordinarily ‘techy’. And when you do twizzle it, a surprise: the bezel clicks crisply in half-minute marks, not whole minutes as you’d forgive any mechanical diver under £350. That’s Seiko to an possessing tee.
The Story Of The Seiko SKX007
It is a slow but steady spirit of innovation that has fathomed Seiko grow into the titan of watchmaking it is today – a label boasting vast manufacturing facilities dotted throughout Japan’s mountains. A week-long Bullet Entourage tour is required to appreciate the sheer extent of these means, and Seiko’s comprehensive self-reliance even stretches to synthesising its own quartz crystals, expanding vast lozenges from ‘seed crystal’ in 14m-high autoclaves – a equipment resembling the engine room of the Starship Enterprise.
Elsewhere, nestled in the snowy woods of Morioka in the north, you’ll call up the appropriately named Grand Seiko, where you’d be forgiven for reflective you’d been wormholed to a Swiss watch atelier in the Jura Mountains. Licence down to its 20 lab-coated watchmakers studiously tweezering together faithfulness mechanical movements to rival any of Omega or Rolex.
Unrivalled quartz stock, exquisitely crafted horological masterworks… and then there are the ducking watches.
Just one year after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, while Seiko was wilt its quartz technology to wrist size, the seed of a mighty subaquatic forebears was sown: the reference 6217. The watch face that threw a thousand rigid-hull inflatable dive boats, if you like. It was Seiko’s basic diving watch, and with it the brand hit a homerun.
Borrowing more than enough of stylistic cues from Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms, whose super-legible lucid monochrome dial and unidirectional rotating bezel set the SCUBA-worthy guideline as far back as 1953, 6217 was water-resistant to a highly respectable 150 metres down, and was straightforwardly driven by a homegrown Seiko mechanical movement.
The SKX007 is a tactless descendant of this classic debut, albeit via a panoply of variants, progressions and sub-collections. So perfect was the 6217, and yet so frenzied has its iterative lineage appropriate for, that the SKX007, in production since 1996, is instantly understandable yet approximately impossible to genetically pinpoint.
The SKX007’s Diving Pedigree
There’s yet more pro clout to SKX007’s genetic makeup, which came upon remarkably early-on in Seiko’s life aquatic. Ten years after the notice of its first, and after seven years of research, Seiko came up with another milestone: the everybody’s first diver’s watch with a titanium case – its super-tough, lightweight metal components organized to water-resistant tolerances good to depths up to 600 metres. It was an unprecedented use of the substantial at the time and would mark Seiko out as big players in the diving to world.
Seiko Prospex Tuna Solar Diver’s
Seiko may be loath to actual names for its individual models, rather than cords of letters and numbers, but you can rely on their fans to fix this, and evermore with good humour. Hence, this 1975 skilful diver is now fondly known as the ‘Tuna’ – so nicknamed for its shallows cylindrical case profile, resembling a can of fish.
This hockey-puck adapt has been adopted across much of Seiko’s diving travel over ever since, including the cult ‘Orange Monster’ and ‘Perfidious Monster’ Automatic Diver’s 200m launched in 2000. And since 2014 they’ve for ever been available in the UK under the brilliantly revamped Prospex memorable – an abbreviation of ‘professional specifications’, which means as well as numerous, the range also boasts analogue instruments for pilots, drivers and jack tars alike.
Seiko Orange Monster Automatic Diver’s
All joking aside, showing their own good humour, one of the gifts in the goodie shoots from Seiko’s recent Knightsbridge boutique opening was a disinfecting cloth contained by a tin resembling a tuna can.
From 1975 forth, Seiko was also the first to put a quartz movement in a professional juke-joint watch, the first to use a tough ceramic shroud for deep-sea jump, the first to use a hybrid analog-digital watch with an alarm, and so on and so on.
The Activity
Under the bonnet of the SKX007, you really do get a proper Seiko-made self-winding unfeeling. The 7S26 is, admittedly, the Japanese brand’s most basic calibre, instrumented, finished and hand-assembled at Seiko Instruments’ Malaysian plant in Johor, parsimonious the border with Singapore.
But it’s solid as a rock, much liking the rest of the SKX007. It ticks at a steady 21,600 vibrations per hour, heartburns incredibly efficiently thanks to Seiko’s ‘Magic Lever’ process (two ‘pawl’ levers either push or pull around the approaching barrel’s ratchet wheel, whichever direction the rotor swings) and is incredibly weak and cheap to service (it even includes plastic components for horrors like the day and date switch-over mechanism).
The only downsides to the 7S26 are that it’s non-hand-windable (not so much a mind-boggler thanks to aforementioned Magic Lever, instantly ticking fads over from a cold start) and it’s non-hacking, i.e. the hands don’t terminus when you pull out the crown to set the time accurately. But the latter is questionable anyway, given the 7S26’s relatively poor precision.
Are you really agonized about losing up to 20 seconds or gaining up to 40 seconds a day for this pricepoint? You’ll no more than be out by a few minutes a week, and you can still rely on the bezel to time your bar if you’re only submerged for 45 minutes or so.
A Diving Watch Of The Highest Form
Coincidentally, as well as being SKX007’s birth year, 1996 was also the year Geneva’s Universal Organization for Standardization signed, sealed and delivered its own verdict on what criteria a in vogue diver’s watch should adhere to – the ISO 6425 standard.
It’s a now dishonourable measuring stick for the various takes, mistakes, misinterpretations and controversies the chattering watch classes like to chat about, and not watches restless in the pursuit of perfection are granted it. Reliability, susceptibility to condensation, 100m littlest water resistance, thermal shock resistance, legibility, an signal things are working in total darkness (a luminous sweeping seconds hands, since you ask) – they’re all bankers that must be abided by.
ISO 6425 has it all covered and its stamp of tolerate is eagerly sought-after. And guess what? Our humble Seiko behind the timed the test. But best of all, for less than £349 it can be all yours.
