The Under £200ish Watch and occasional Opera Thread! Vol2
Discussion
mickyc79 said:
MrWideFit said:
That's what i want my AE1200 to look like! Whats the MOD kit called and where did you get it? Did you buy the filter seperately? https://vario.sg/products/oiled-leather-russet-bro...
The case from SKXMods and is the polished version
https://skxmod.com/products/gen-2-polished-version...
And the filter is actually two seperate ones from Etsy cut up to be able to have the orange “analogue” section and blue to pink fade
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1451955218/casio-a...
Definitely have a shop around on places like AliExpress for filters, straps and metal cases if budget conscious as there are much cheaper alternatives, i just chose the case as it is the one everyone raves about quality wise
seiben said:
I keep seeing AE1200s, both standard and mods, and I'm intrigued. I've never had a Casio but I rather fancy adding one to the 'collection' (hah). Are they any good to live with? Anything I should look out for on the second-hand market?
The batteries last forever, they are easy to adjust to loads of different time zones which require one button to cycle between, the stopwatch and timer work as they should and the time and date is easy to adjust and is very legible,Admittedly i would have no idea about second hand market as brand new they will set you back about £30 with some offers at time for as low as £25
They have a million and one ways to style them to with strap adapters being easily available to get away from the 18mm straps, they even earned the nickname “Casio Royale” referencing them back to the Seiko G757 worn by James Bond in Octopussy
They are great
Haddock82 said:
Back onto watches.... 
(Although talking of vintage bicycles, I did used to have a lovely Puch road bike that was cool)
I have bought something that shouldn't be in thread budget but nabbed it for a steal on eBay.
I'm currently in Bali, so have asked for it to be delivered to a neighbour!
If it's genuine and in good condition I'll have hopefully bagged another bargain to sit alongside my £190 Tissot Couturier and £180 Hamilton Jazzmaster....
Back from hols today and picked up the watch from my neighbour who kindly took the delivery in. (Although talking of vintage bicycles, I did used to have a lovely Puch road bike that was cool) I have bought something that shouldn't be in thread budget but nabbed it for a steal on eBay.
I'm currently in Bali, so have asked for it to be delivered to a neighbour!
If it's genuine and in good condition I'll have hopefully bagged another bargain to sit alongside my £190 Tissot Couturier and £180 Hamilton Jazzmaster....
Less talking more watching...(Is that a phrase?!)
We have for the princely sum of £126 (including delivery)
A vintage Rado Golden Horse circa 1970s
At least that's what I think it is date wise
The seller had very little information on the listing
I was dubious if it were genuine as no box or papers, but have opened it up and looks like a genuine movement and certainly our AI model friends have looked at these photos and seems confident it's a good un.
I like how the Rado logo moves depending on the angle of the watch (the red logo under the 12 o'clock marker)
Edited by Haddock82 on Saturday 9th May 15:48
That looks in great condition with plenty of patina to look genuine. Lovely watch. I very nearly bought a similar Rado and a first edition Seiko Superior from one seller in Japan, but they were both far too knackered. Shame because the first Superior is a proper collector jobbie.
Looking on t'internet, Rado started using the 8 digit serial number in 1972-73 and starting 44 would see it within that decade, the movement 2836-1 matches with that.
The Anchor swinging at the top is a good sign it's genuine too.
Looking on t'internet, Rado started using the 8 digit serial number in 1972-73 and starting 44 would see it within that decade, the movement 2836-1 matches with that.
The Anchor swinging at the top is a good sign it's genuine too.
Edited by 732NM on Saturday 9th May 16:16
Haddock82
Absolutely fabulous, amazing that it is in thread budget congratulations.
The number of times that I have come close to buying the re-issue is untrue both new and then pre-owned once all sold out, as seen here:
https://www.rado.com/golden-horse.html
Stunning watch especially in two tone.
When the timing is right one of those Rado's will be in my watch box, hope you have many happy hours wearing that.
As an aside not only CW are at Southampton as Bobberoo noted BUT Baltic as well, gosh my credit card is trembling, a 36mm Twelve AND a 37mm Hermatique under the same roof at the same time with me let out of my barn, what could possibly go wrong?
Absolutely fabulous, amazing that it is in thread budget congratulations.
The number of times that I have come close to buying the re-issue is untrue both new and then pre-owned once all sold out, as seen here:
https://www.rado.com/golden-horse.html
Stunning watch especially in two tone.
When the timing is right one of those Rado's will be in my watch box, hope you have many happy hours wearing that.
As an aside not only CW are at Southampton as Bobberoo noted BUT Baltic as well, gosh my credit card is trembling, a 36mm Twelve AND a 37mm Hermatique under the same roof at the same time with me let out of my barn, what could possibly go wrong?
Llentil the llama said:
As an aside not only CW are at Southampton as Bobberoo noted BUT Baltic as well, gosh my credit card is trembling, a 36mm Twelve AND a 37mm Hermatique under the same roof at the same time with me let out of my barn, what could possibly go wrong?
For reasons unknown our show didn’t tour to Southampton this time, a real shame. The Mayflower Theatre is an absolute gem and it’s been a privilege to sing there. From the little I have seen of the place I’m unsure if I can say the same about the rest of the city, but there you go.
One show left of this tour, on Friday in Milton Keynes. It’s a decent show if any threadists fancy it. A bit like Pirates of the Caribbean, just s
ttier. Mr. Haddock, your Rado is lovely & I concur with the machines, it is absolutely original. It's in really nice condition for it's age.
Time for an update on the Skunk This may be the longest post in the history of the £200ish thread. For those not interested, I 'umbly 'upologise.
At the end of the last, erm, episode (?) I'd reached a bit of a milestone, it was time to fit the crown and pinion drive to the chassis. The vertical position of the C&P sets the camber of the rear wheel and its forwards/backwards position sets the toe. So this has to be precise.
I started by levelling the car:
With the car level, I'll need to put the rear axle in place, with the swingarm resting on it and push the axle through the C&P. I'll then need to move the C&P about until the toe and camber are correct. That's a lot of weight on the C&P whilst I try to make some tiny adjustments.
So I got a handful of odd looking bits:
And made these:
For anyone unfamiliar those are turnbuckles. They have a right handed screw on one end and a left handed screw on the other. By turning the bits in the middle I can shorten or lengthen the arms holding the C&P in position. They're beefy enough to take the weight and allow me to make the adjustments of position. If you look closely you'll see a bit of tube clamped under the C&P that's also helping to hold stuff in situ.
This'll give you an idea of how much weight there is to hold up whilst adjusting the position of the C&P.
Next problem, how to measure the to and camber?
Take one piece of scrap ally angle, make one big hole with a hole saw and two 12mm holes.
Bolt the ally angle on where a wheel would normally be.
Buy a digital inclinometer from AliExpress, with a built in laser.
Hell yes! This post has Skunks with frikin' lasers on them!! [puts little finger in corner of mouth]
With the laser sitting on the ally it will project a line like this.
I just need to mark the centre of the car at the front and rear of the chassis, then get the laser line to hit both marks. When it does, the toe will be correct.
At the rear, a piece of paper tape with a biro mark is all that's needed.
At the front, I clamped a set square to the chassis. There's a bit of tape on the back with another biro line marking the centre.
With a bit of tweaking, moving the C&P as far forwards as it initially wanted to go, I achieved this:
That line is 40mm away from where it should be at the top & 39mm at the bottom. So I measured the distance (front to back) between the two centre line markers, it came out to 1865mm. I had a really good maths teacher, if he's still around he'll be in his 90's now. Thanks Mr. Pyartt, I do still remember SohCahToa
I make it 1.23 degrees of toe. Better than expected, not good enough.
It turned out that the C&P wouldn't move further forwards because there wasn't room for the prop that fed it. And there wasn't room for the prop that fed it because (yet) another bit of Skunk was bent.
No cutting and welding needed here, I just inserted a meter length 30mm square steel bar and levered in the direction shown until the bit marked in yellow was perpendicular to the base of the car. This gave me about 15mm more that I could slide the C&P forwards.
And woah! The laser was hitting the it's marks at the front and rear. Actually the laser line was a bit wide and fuzzy at the front, but I'd say the error was under 4mm, making the toe around 0.1 degrees!
That.
Will.
Do!
So, having got everything in place I swung the ally angle bolted to the wheel hub to the vertical and checked camber. I didn't take a photo but it was around 0.5 degrees, Again, plenty good enough, especially on a trike.
Back in that last photo you'll see that I checked that the prop feeding the C&P was running true and I marked up the oversize C&P mount to be trimmed. This had been deliberately made deeper front to back so that I could slide it around and then cut off the unwanted excess. Like so:
With the C&P mount cut to size, both it and the torque tube were welded in place.
Next up, make middle mount for the rear swingarm axle.
And of course weld it into place.
This was the bit of the car that was the most bent. Previously it was built from 20mm tube, that's 30mm square tube going back in. Which means I needed to step it a bit where the swingarm sits.
Add some triangulation to the top. Previously there wasn't any. Notice that my new piece of metal doesn't fit? That's deliberate. Sadly welding the centre mount pulled everything out of line very slightly. The middle mount is ever so slightly out of line with the other mount and the C&P, making it a right sod to get the axle through. By not having an exact fit I'm hoping the welding process will pull everything back into line.
Sadly it didn't work. Well it did, a bit, but the fit wasn't perfect, so I cut the end off the mount. I also welded in some triangular bracing below this middle mount. As before this is 20mm tube. Unlike before, I've skinned both sides of the triangle to add strength.
That's it for now. I only have that clamp to put back on and the handbrake calliper bracket to fabricate and fit.
It's actually all done, I just don't have photos.
The welding is completed, although I may try to add one more strengthening mount for the rear axle.
Time for an update on the Skunk This may be the longest post in the history of the £200ish thread. For those not interested, I 'umbly 'upologise.
At the end of the last, erm, episode (?) I'd reached a bit of a milestone, it was time to fit the crown and pinion drive to the chassis. The vertical position of the C&P sets the camber of the rear wheel and its forwards/backwards position sets the toe. So this has to be precise.
I started by levelling the car:
With the car level, I'll need to put the rear axle in place, with the swingarm resting on it and push the axle through the C&P. I'll then need to move the C&P about until the toe and camber are correct. That's a lot of weight on the C&P whilst I try to make some tiny adjustments.
So I got a handful of odd looking bits:
And made these:
For anyone unfamiliar those are turnbuckles. They have a right handed screw on one end and a left handed screw on the other. By turning the bits in the middle I can shorten or lengthen the arms holding the C&P in position. They're beefy enough to take the weight and allow me to make the adjustments of position. If you look closely you'll see a bit of tube clamped under the C&P that's also helping to hold stuff in situ.
This'll give you an idea of how much weight there is to hold up whilst adjusting the position of the C&P.
Next problem, how to measure the to and camber?
Take one piece of scrap ally angle, make one big hole with a hole saw and two 12mm holes.
Bolt the ally angle on where a wheel would normally be.
Buy a digital inclinometer from AliExpress, with a built in laser.
Hell yes! This post has Skunks with frikin' lasers on them!! [puts little finger in corner of mouth]
With the laser sitting on the ally it will project a line like this.
I just need to mark the centre of the car at the front and rear of the chassis, then get the laser line to hit both marks. When it does, the toe will be correct.
At the rear, a piece of paper tape with a biro mark is all that's needed.
At the front, I clamped a set square to the chassis. There's a bit of tape on the back with another biro line marking the centre.
With a bit of tweaking, moving the C&P as far forwards as it initially wanted to go, I achieved this:
That line is 40mm away from where it should be at the top & 39mm at the bottom. So I measured the distance (front to back) between the two centre line markers, it came out to 1865mm. I had a really good maths teacher, if he's still around he'll be in his 90's now. Thanks Mr. Pyartt, I do still remember SohCahToa
I make it 1.23 degrees of toe. Better than expected, not good enough.
It turned out that the C&P wouldn't move further forwards because there wasn't room for the prop that fed it. And there wasn't room for the prop that fed it because (yet) another bit of Skunk was bent.
No cutting and welding needed here, I just inserted a meter length 30mm square steel bar and levered in the direction shown until the bit marked in yellow was perpendicular to the base of the car. This gave me about 15mm more that I could slide the C&P forwards.
And woah! The laser was hitting the it's marks at the front and rear. Actually the laser line was a bit wide and fuzzy at the front, but I'd say the error was under 4mm, making the toe around 0.1 degrees!
That.
Will.
Do!
So, having got everything in place I swung the ally angle bolted to the wheel hub to the vertical and checked camber. I didn't take a photo but it was around 0.5 degrees, Again, plenty good enough, especially on a trike.
Back in that last photo you'll see that I checked that the prop feeding the C&P was running true and I marked up the oversize C&P mount to be trimmed. This had been deliberately made deeper front to back so that I could slide it around and then cut off the unwanted excess. Like so:
With the C&P mount cut to size, both it and the torque tube were welded in place.
Next up, make middle mount for the rear swingarm axle.
And of course weld it into place.
This was the bit of the car that was the most bent. Previously it was built from 20mm tube, that's 30mm square tube going back in. Which means I needed to step it a bit where the swingarm sits.
Add some triangulation to the top. Previously there wasn't any. Notice that my new piece of metal doesn't fit? That's deliberate. Sadly welding the centre mount pulled everything out of line very slightly. The middle mount is ever so slightly out of line with the other mount and the C&P, making it a right sod to get the axle through. By not having an exact fit I'm hoping the welding process will pull everything back into line.
Sadly it didn't work. Well it did, a bit, but the fit wasn't perfect, so I cut the end off the mount. I also welded in some triangular bracing below this middle mount. As before this is 20mm tube. Unlike before, I've skinned both sides of the triangle to add strength.
That's it for now. I only have that clamp to put back on and the handbrake calliper bracket to fabricate and fit.
It's actually all done, I just don't have photos.
The welding is completed, although I may try to add one more strengthening mount for the rear axle.
seiben said:
I keep seeing AE1200s, both standard and mods, and I'm intrigued. I've never had a Casio but I rather fancy adding one to the 'collection' (hah). Are they any good to live with? Anything I should look out for on the second-hand market?
Here’s mine it’s got the fully polished stainless SXK Mod kit, adds some heft to it, decent stainless bracelet & milled on the fly adjustable clasp. The normal ‘stainless’ ae1200 feels pretty cheap tbh and the bracelet is horrible. But the watch is brilliant over all.craigthecoupe said:
This has got to be,without doubt, the best: £200ish watch, opera, skunk rebuild, cheap road bikes, bargain autojumble rally computers, thread on the internet, bar none!
I absolutely love visiting this thread!
Cheers to all who contribute.
Reminds me of old school PH. Best thread on the forum I think.I absolutely love visiting this thread!
Cheers to all who contribute.
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