When Seiko ceased production of 7A38's in mid-1989, they'd already begun manufacturing its much cheaper successor - the 7T32. I think I'd be fairly safe in saying these had all new case designs and certainly nothing closely resembling any 7A38 model appeared initially. Later they came out with the titanium 7T42-7A10, which in effect used the case design of the JDM 7A38-7030 SJS018, but that's a notable exception.
Orient Watch Co. were (and still are) owned by Seiko-Epson corporation. Whereas they still manufactured their own mechanical watches, they were clearly dependent on their parent company for supply of quartz movements. Orient Watch Co. had been producing J38's and J39's since the mid 1980's and along with Spanish subsidiary RACER Relojes, continued into the early 90's. However, when supplies of J3920 movements dried up and they switched to the HFA00 7T32 movement, being 'a poor relation', presumably with a much lower model development budget, little effort had been made beforehand, tooling up new case designs for them.
Hence, apart from changes to the position of their crowns and pushers, the reason why many Orient HFA '7T32' case designs bear very close resemblances to their J39 predecessors. I'd observed this anomaly as far back as July 2013:
- Orient-7T32-CaseDesigns-Post-1.jpg (136 KiB) Viewed 6550 times
Ignoring my subsequent posts about the Orient / Racer BreitBling 7T32 clones (also based on J39 case designs), which I later developed an affinity for, I scrolled through that old forum thread and found this post from a year or so later:
- Orient-7T32-CaseDesigns-Post-2a.png (113.85 KiB) Viewed 6547 times
- Orient-7T32-HFA004-70-Okaziiro-June2012-2.jpg (61.38 KiB) Viewed 6546 times
- Orient-7T32-HFA004-70-Okaziiro-June2012-3.jpg (75.8 KiB) Viewed 6546 times
- Orient-7T32-CaseDesigns-Post-2b.png (12.66 KiB) Viewed 6547 times
Seeing that again raised another wry smile.
Particularly in the light of my recent posts on this forum on that subject.
