Although it's a bit dressy and for that reason sadly doesn't get worn very often, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for that little 7A34 / 7A38 Franken. I've sometimes thought about building another. It wouldn't be difficult. About a year after I bought that 7A34-7019 salesman's sample case, I bought another, in September 2012, which thankfully this time came with a full bracelet (less clasp) from the same US eBay seller
49ronnie (a.k.a. the late Ron Canda R.I.P.). Back in those days, Ron must have had shelves full of Seiko salesman's sample cases in his St. Louis jewellery store's stockroom, because he was constantly listing them on eBay, usually for very reasonable prices, too.
In fact, I could build another 7A34 / 7A38 Franken exactly like that one, because I still have an unused 609L dial and hands from another 7A38-6109 sample case (again purchased from Ron, more than 10 years ago). But it would be a bit pointless having 2 identical Frankens I didn't wear.
Over the years, I've toyed with a couple ideas. The first, which I haven't entirely dismissed, was actually using it to restore a well-worn 7A34-7019, a real 'junker' that's no better than a 'parts watch', that has been gathering dust on my bench, for more years than I care to remember. The other was to try fitting the 7210 dial / movement from my second string example of stainless 7A38-7130 SAA092J, to see how it looked. Which is what I finally got around to doing this afternoon.
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Nailing it together was straightforward and literally a 10 minute job. The 7210 dial / movement and its matching cream plastic dial ring slotted straight into the 7A34-7019 watch case. Though having done so, I'm not entirely convinced that it 'works' as well as my 609L dialed Franken. It suffers from the same anomaly as my other creation in having 4 lines of 'text' on the dial, including the italic
Chronograph script, which needlessly duplicates the engraved capitals around the circumference of the bezel. I'm not sure if it's the raised appliqué (rather than printed) SEIKO logo which makes it look worse. Maybe it did need toning down, but the 7210 dial looks a bit bland compared to the 609L. I suppose, were I to decide to keep this configuration, I could 'bling it up' a bit by replacing the black sub-dial hands with gold plated ones.
The other annoying little niggle looks like a series of flaws in that slightly angled wrist shot. It's worse when viewing the watch directly head on. It's caused by light refraction. The 7A34-7019 has a shallow double-domed crystal, with a tiny polished bevel edge, that's intended to play more light on the dial. Instead, in this case, it's picking up and magnifying the slightly longer rectilinear minute marks of the 7210 dial. It's probably best explained by this side-by-side photo of the original 7A34-7019 and 7A38-6109 sample case dials that I took when I was planning my original Franken build:
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The round dot minute marks of the 609L dial may be bolder, but they're on a slightly smaller P.C.D., which keeps them far away enough from the crystal's polished bevel so as not to get picked up. Undoubtedly, I could very easily solve the 'refracted index' problem, by replacing the existing crystal with a plain flat generic, with no polished bevelled edge (like a Sternkreuz MSM). While I'm at it, I could probably find a plain gold-plated bezel (from another model) which would fit the 7A34 watch case and cancel out the duplicated 'Chronograph' anomaly, but frankly I can't be bothered.
It goes by the pet name 'El Caracortada' for obvious reasons. If you've not seen it before, its evolution / restoration / re-build whatever, is documented in 
But it is what I'm wearing as I type - and you know what ? The more I see of those beaten-up 
