14 April 2014

Swatch Irony Chrono - Freezing Rain

Here is my latest eBay find - a vintage Swatch watch from their Spring/summer 2000 collection, which means that this watch is more than 13 years old. Wonder what I was doing then?


Anyway, this is from the Swatch Irony Chrono series and the model is called Freezing Rain (YCS4006AG). It was priced at £120.42 when it came out. I found out that it is quite hard to find now  but I bought it dirt cheap and I am too ashamed to mention the price here.

Did I say "dirt cheap" - I am not sure where the seller found it but it was covered with muck and it took me a lot of elbow grease plus soap and water to get rid of the dirt stuck in the various crevices.  The watch also had some bad scratches on the plastic crystal and did not work when I received it.

The watch case as well as the wrist band is made of aluminium and very light weight at only 62 gms. The watch case has a width of 40mm and is 12.5mm thick.

It is powered by a quartz ETA movement with a date at the 4 o clock position on the dial.

A change of batteries revealed that the watch did work but there was some problem with the chronograph function - it did start and stop but could not be reset (back to 0). I wanted to open up the case but discovered a major drawback of Swatch watches - opening up Swatch watches is a major project involving breaking the crystal and the crown as well. Quite annoying but I guess I would have to live with the malfunctioning chronograph.

I used Polywatch scratch remover to polish off the scratches on the crystal and apart from some tiny pit marks which are bit too deep, the crystal looks great.




I am quite impressed with the quality of images as well - they were taken using my Nokia Lumia 900 using the Macro mode.

4 comments:

nxtiak said...

One of my favorite watches I own.
Unfortunately I lost the extra watch band links and It's very tight on me. I'm trying to find replacement band/links for it.

Anonymous said...

I have the same watch. You can re-zero the chrono second hand by pulling the crown out to position one and pressing the chrono button beneath the crown. The second hand will move one step with each press. If you hold the button down it move continuously.

Anonymous said...

I have a similar model of the Swatch Irony Chrono and have the same problem with chronograph not resetting. I think it's because the lower button is not functioning (it won't do split time or zero the sweep hand when resetting). If there is a fix I would love to hear it.

Dilip Mutum said...

Hi Anon, I am not sure how but I finally found a way to reset the watch. I have to press the lower button hard for a few secs and the sweep hand automatically resets. I do not have to pull the crown out as suggested by the previous commentator.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin