(Crossposted to SCWF too)

As recently noted, I’m off new watch purchases for a bit. Since inconsistency is my core competency, I offer the following morsel from Ebay for your amusement. No benjamins were harmed in this effort, as total cost was around forty bucks.

GMT (sometimes called world time) is a really useful complication, especially when you’ve got friends and relatives in faraway timezones. It tends to be unusual and therefore more expensive, so I was delighted to find this Seiko on ebay: (click images for larger)

It’s a wooden-cased desk clock, about 7.5” square, with a 24-hour dial that rotates counterclockwise and a supercool red 747 second hand. Unlike most quartz, the second hand sweep is continuous and smooth, quite fun to watch. The 24h dial is also marked with day/night, GMT and date line. The hands are simple white batons, no lume anywhere. Interestingly, the map in the center is part of the city dial, and also rotates once per day. Here’s the back, where you can see the knob to set the 24h dial and model information:

And if you open the back, you’ll see an extremely unusual feature:

There’s a slider switch to stop the clock, which allows you to ‘hack’ the second hand and set it precisely. I’ve never seen that before on a desk clock!

Cheap thrills, baby. It was listed as a ham radio clock, which makes sense if you’re trying to reach internationally. It’s got a cool sorta seventies ‘Jet Age’ vibe to it and is probably conclusive proof that one man’s trash is another mans treasure.