At the beginning of April, before the long Easter weekend break, I'd successfully made contact with a Spanish seller on the classified site Wallapop.es. They turned out to be an employee of a B&M jewellery outlet in Vic (near Barcelona) who were once Seiko and Orient retailers. This artist's impression of their old storefront comes from
their website:
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A search using a combination of
Maps123.net and Google Street View reveals a truer picture:
- Fabregó-Rellotgeria-GoogleStreetView-2014.jpg (190.48 KiB) Viewed 10107 times
From being a specialist watch retailer and Seiko authorised dealer back in 1988, to becoming the rather nondescript looking jewellery outlet it is today.
- Fabregó-Joiers-GoogleStreetView-2015.jpg (189.47 KiB) Viewed 10107 times
But I digress.
Initially, I purchased a NOS J38907-80 and J39907-50 from them, which they'd advertised on Wallapop. Details of those can be found in
another recent thread in this forum section. They then informed me that they'd found another 3 NOS Racer J39's in their warehouse and would let me know the details on the Tuesday, after the long Easter weekend !
I've already written up details of the two black dialed Racer J39's in
a subsequent post in the aforementioned thread. I've deliberately kept schtum about the third one, which had a white dial, to form the subject basis of this separate thread. Please accept my apologies, if it's become a bit long winded in the process, but I'm getting to the point.
When the seller gave me the J39 model numbers, they didn't actually read them (in full) off the watches' case-backs, but from their paper hang tags, for example J39907B, J39024B and J39027B (where the B suffix signifies a black dial). The one that intrigued me was J39004W - being one of the gaps in my spreadsheet database (and having a white dial). Being hitherto unknown, I was secretly hoping it would be another previously unseen case model. Transpires it wasn't.
As became immediately obvious as soon as I saw the photos emailed me by the Spanish seller. It appears to be exactly the same watch case as the Orient and Racer J39002-70, with the same arabic number J392-0027-A01 dial, fitted with the same two-tone bracelet as Don's J38003-70 !
So the variant I'd thought about creating, using that, did exist.
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The seller didn't initially include a photo of the case-back, so naturally I asked for one, which she immediately supplied:
- rsz_racer-orient-j39004-70-stainless-gold-whiteface-img_4490.jpg (202.81 KiB) Viewed 10152 times
The case-back is most definitely stamped J39004-70 (rather than J39002-70), which seems slightly incongruous when the primary difference is one comes on a leather strap and the other has a bracelet fitted. Evidently yet another vagary in Orient Watch Co.'s model number allocation.
I couldn't quite discern the bracelet part number from that photo, but I had a pretty good idea what it was. So I emailed Don and asked him to check his J38003-70. Transpired he'd sold it to a friend a while back.
So I asked him to forward my question. Overnight, he came back with the right answer: AK0106 - which, having rotated the seller's photo, zoomed in and squinted hard, is what I thought it possibly might be.
So, without waiting for it to arrive, hopefully next week, I've already updated the prior T.B.D. row on my spreadsheet.
- Orient-J39-Spreadsheet-08-04-2021-Extract.png (20.4 KiB) Viewed 10144 times