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Thread: Watches on Everest

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    Watches on Everest

    Note

    This Library thread combines three threads that have been merged and edited. The original threads are these:

    http://www.intlwatchleague.com/showt...y-about-Borgel
    http://www.intlwatchleague.com/showt...6-Eric-Shipton
    http://www.intlwatchleague.com/showt...verest-in-1953!


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    The Borgel I bought the other day has arrived and it's not quite what I expected.

    As is my habit, I've been pretty opportunistic, picking up bits of Borgel case and screw mechanism whenever I saw them and also picking up the standard military issue Borgel which. I thought, was identical in all but dial to the Mallory Borgel. Every other bit of Borgel I've picked up has been 32mm and I just assumed that this was the standard Borgel size, whether the case was round or cushion shaped.

    But is isn't. Here's Hemmleb's picture of Mallory's Borgel:



    When I bought this latest Borgel, I assumed that I was just getting the dial exactly right, but it turns out that the Mallory Borgel is significantly larger!



    Where the standard issue military Borgel is 32mm, the Mallory Borgel is 35mm (39mm including the crown) and a full 10mm deep.and thus, as they say, wears large. It's also significantly heavier in the hand and makes the military variation look and feel positively gracile. It's a significantly more robust watch. The only dimension that is smaller, and significantly smaller, is the 12mm lug width, compared to the more contemporary 15mm of the military version.

    As is so often the case, once realisation dawns, the signs are all there in the ergonomics of the subdial, but hindsight is always 20/20. The bottom line is that while there are plenty of Borgels out there, it looks like the majority are smaller and thus the Mallory variation starts to look like quite a rare heavy duty version, rather than a mere dial variation.

    So far, I've compared two Borgels, but the size and presence of the Mallory version is better emphasised by comparison with a later contender:



    In fact, it bears comparison with the third Everest watch, from Smiths - sadly, I have put it somewhere 'safe' (that isn't the safe!) and I'm damned if I can find it, so here's a comparison shot that demonstrates a similar difference between the heavy duty and commercial versions of the Smiths - neither are quite right and the consensus is that the closest version is actually a Benson. Personally i don't agree as I think that the absence of the words 'Smiths Deluxe' on the dial rather misses the point. . :



    Ironically, Rolex also offered two varient sizes, with the Lambert expedition getting 34 mm Oysters where the '53 expedition got 36mm. Neither, of course were Explorer dialled, making the closest currently available watch to the most common watch (that failed to conquer Everest) in the fifties at least, the Air King. Rolex offer plenty of silver dialled and date free watches from the period, but the precise dial used by the Hunt expedition is, as far as I can discover, actually a Tudor dial that Rolex transplanted; at least, I can't find a Rolex version of the dial that isn't one of the originals gifted to the RGS in '53.

    Just to finish off, a gratuitous shot of a long suffering cat:



    who got bored with my messing around at the bottom of the garden and unwisely curled up in the long grass.
    .
    Last edited by tribe125; Sep 14, 2018 at 05:24 PM.

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