Luch 1901 - Children's Watch " Karlson"

My very first Ebay purchase! A Luch (Lutsch) 17 Jewel Calibre 1901 children's watch. The Luch factory is located in Minsk Belarus.

Factory Website

The character on the watch face is Karlson who is featured in a beloved children's cartoon popular back in the USSR days.

Karlson Video with English subtitles.

I'm saving this one for my 3 year old daughter for when she begins to learn how to tell time.

The case back is snap on and has an integrated spacer built into the back. The small size of the movement is impressive to me - we expect electronics to be small these days but seeing something mechanical that small and precise is always amazing.

New Straps

I haven't added any new watches to my collection in some time, but I have purchased some new straps to go with two of my most worn pieces.

I picked up a Hirsch carbon fibre stap with white stitching to replace the steel bracelet on my Vostok N1 Rocket. It's got a nice heft too it and the white stitching compliments the black and white dial. Though not a selling feature for me, the strap is marked as 100m water resistant.

For my Poljot I wanted something a little retro to compliment the Aviator look of the watch. I picked up this nice little strap from RM Nilsen's store on Ebay. It has two snaps for securing the strap to the spring bars, which makes it a good buy for a watch with fixed bars or if you wanted to change it around on easily on other watches.

Vostok Video

Vostok White Radio Room

Some pictures at the one year anniversary of the production of this custom watch, produced for Russian watch enthusiasts inhabiting two well known watch forums.

Other Owners

Origin of the Species

A YouTube video explanation of the markings.

3 Soviet 2 O'Clock Crowns

Three of my favourite Kommanderskies with the crown at a comfortable 2 O Clock tonight.

Vostok Amphibia Ministry

Wow, haven't posted in almost a year. A young child can do that to you I guess....

Today I was playing around with the settings on my camera (Nikon D40x with a Nikkor 18-55 lens) and came up with a couple of shots I'm happy to share. Without the light box or tripod they came out quite nicely.

I've had the watch for over a year but it wasn't getting a lot of wrist time. I switched the folded metal bracelet that came with the watch to this much more comfortable mesh bracelet I bought on EBay, and it's been my regular watch for about two weeks now.

Collecting Mechanical Watches

This passage mirrors many of my own thoughts on mechanical watches:

"Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.
Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss
watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake
of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're
pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely
because they require tending.
And vintage mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of
the pre-digital age. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny
functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious
moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are,
in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond,
Tamagotchi-like, to "love," in the form, usually, of the expensive
ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors
or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly
restored from virtually any stage of ruin."

William Gibson
Science fiction author


Read the whole thing here: "My Obsession"