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Re: An Interesting Autavia
In Response To: An Interesting Autavia ()

I'll confess my first impression was that it wasn't original; the replaced bezel kind of obfuscates the Autavia case so I couldn't place it, the dial furniture screams 404 and the dial seems too small for the case with a ring of bare metal showing. The second hand is distinctly ropey and the register hands look a little thin. But David persisted and I thought I'd look a little deeper.

I remembered Paul had shown an Autavia dial with integrated tachy scale, but my memory had it with contemporary Autavia dial furniture, not the 404-alike arabics and triangle markers of this version. Shows that memory isn't always to be relied upon!

And I looked at early 2446s on OTD, the size of dial to case was still niggling at me. Lo and behold, that same ring of bright water. Sorry, I mean metal. And more pronounced on the second execution of the screw-back case too, which is what I'm tending to think we're dealing with in this example. For dating reasons, as well as that dial placement - the 404 continues alongside the early Autavias but production appears to stop with the Carrera's introduction in 1964. Autavias seem to go to stick hands around the same time, from the Dauphine originals. Whether 404 dials were repurposed as Autavias or the dial was designed for stylistic continuity once production stopped is unclear at nearly 50 years remove, but it does seem to be a very small run from somewhere around Carrera launch time. Would still be nice to find more examples, especially if shown in literature.

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