Q&Q 1603

Description

“Premier Precision Ltd” - If you see this manufacturers' name, you can be sure, that you’ll get anything, but not a first class chronometer of observatory quality.

The Q&Q caliber 1603 shown here was made by the Citizen subsidiary company “Quality and Quantity” and is certainly the one of the most unusual and lowest quality ladies' watch movements of the nineties. Where exactly it was made could not be determined, as well, as the exact caliber number, which can at least be guessed from the printing on the dial: Parts of the movement are of japanese origin, the assembly took part in Korea and on the dial, there’s a third country mentioned: Taiwan. Maybe “Far East” would be the best location description.

The Q&Q 1603 uses a golden tone ring balance, which runs in plastic bearings. This balance drives a red lateral plastic anchor, which works with a red anchor wheel, made of plastic, too. The remaining parts of this jewel-less movement are fairly standard metal parts. On the dial side, there’s a plastic date ring and a date mechanism, which uses lots of plastic, too. The date switching mechanism is pretty smart: The date advances slowly between 22:30 and 24:00 o’clock, but when you turn the crown backwards, every 25 minutes, it advances by one.

Unfortunately, this movement is not constructed for longevity and so ceases to work after a few years, either because of lacking lubrication or because of work out plastic parts. And since the whole construction including the balance, is located below one single plate, only masochistic watch makers would try a service here.

Nevertheless, this movement allowed in the 1990ies the fabrication of really cheap mechanical watches, which could compete with cheap quartz watches, at least on the price.

The caliber 1603 was also used in so-called “digital-analog” watches of the lowest price class, which had the oddity of an inprecise mechanical analog time indication and a more precise, but function-lacking quartz-controlled digital time indication.

Technical data

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