In Which Our Hero Buys A Watch So He Can Have An Excuse To Buy A Watch Strap Made From A Dead Horse
You know, I've tried to avoid hodinkee.com. Primarily because I'm about forty-two percent certain that I'm a brain in a jar somewhere and this so-called "universe" is an elaborate Matrix-style joke on me. The whole idea of Hodinkee is suspicious. Why else would John Mayer, my favorite modern musician, start writing for a watch website, proclaim his love of IWC, then turn around and specifically disrespect the IWC Ingenieur Titanium AMG, the watch that I won by beating Tommy Kendall around a (very small, cone-lined imitation of a) racetrack in 2006? Surely they're screwing with me here.
Too many coincidences. Was it the same cat? You get the idea. And now, Hodinkee has decided to sell watch straps made of Horween #8 cordovan. Unlikely, right? What are the chances that the website where John Mayer dissed my watch would be selling straps made of my favorite shoe material?
And yet... they're doing it. I found the strap totally by accident; I was Googling "shell cordovan watch strap horween 8". As one does. It only took a minute, girl, to fall in love with this strap.
Problem was that I didn't have a watch for it. The Hodinkee site shows the strap on an IWC Pilot.
I bought an IWC Pilot back in 2006. However, it's currently on, shall we say, long-term loan, and that's a story for another day. I don't think I'll ever get it back. Not sure I want it back. Now, I could buy myself a new IWC Pilot and then put the strap on it, but the price of Pilots has gone through the ceiling lately. A Spitfire UTC like the one I no longer have can't be had for less than three grand used. Like beat to piss used. Like, the ads say "IWC Spitfire UTC, 2001 model, scratched crystal, damaged lugs, no strap, recovered from car fire, faint aroma of human flesh, $3,099 FIRM." I think there's a guy in Taiwan who has one for $2,650, and how could it be anything but a fake?
So although Jomadeals is currently selling the brown dial Saint-Expery for just over nine grand --- a fabulous deal, for me or for John Mayer --- I had to put aside the fantasy of a cordovan-strapped IWC. I'd need to buy a watch for the strap, as ridiculous as that sounds.
The Hodinkee padded cordovan strap is only available in 20mm or 22mm widths. So I needed a watch with those lug widths. Automatic movement, if possible. Not made in China. Not much more expensive than the strap. It took some doing, but I found one.
Enter the Japan-made variant of the Seiko 5 Sports. Available with an olive strap and face for under $150, shipped right to my door. Bad ass, right? I could have had the Chinese variant for $109, and I'm sure it works the same, but I have other Japanese Seikos and I wanted to have a Japanese watch if I couldn't get a Swiss one. An additional $6.95 secured me the watch tool.
I'll explain how this is done for future generations. You use the u-shaped notch in the watch tool to push the spring-loaded pin in the strap out of the lug.
Put the pin in the cordovan strap, then use the other end of the tool to compress the pin enough to get it into the lug so it can pop into place. Protip: you can scratch the watch doing this, so work from the back, yo.
It's just that easy! Now I have a cordovan-strapped watch. It matches my shoes and my belt. There are still people in this world who believe that's important. I'm kind of one of them, sometimes.
The workmanship of the strap is absolutely up to par. I can't wait to wear my new watch to my new job, about which more later, some other time. But not right away. For the near future, I'll keep wearing my Ingenieur. Just in case I run into John Mayer. Just in case the people running the Matrix for me let that happen. Are you listening, brain-in-box maintenance staff?