Horological Meandering

HSTE
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A crowd of 70ies Jumbos, all steel, black dial only

I love those ultra-thin (except IWC Ingenieur 1832), super-deluxe, experimental design (at the time), rare full steel Jumbo watches from the 70ies. It is particularly the classy "steel case - steel bracelet - black dial" combination that I like but I have to say that it took me a while to get these guys all together to the same table.

Now quite often (actually, upon checking: not that often) you see the picture with "the 4 Jumbos" i.e. Audemars Piguet 5402, Vacheron Constantin 222, Patek Philippe Nautilus 3700 and IWC Ingenieur 1832 together; this is certainly the case until it was figured out that the VC222 is NOT a Genta design. I have a different view of grouping them together and hence to add one more to the crowd: they are called Jumbo not because of their over-all size - the ones using the JLC base engine were actually super-thin - but because of the diameter. So to me, the IWC Yacht Club II is definitely part of those 70ies luxury Jumbo all steel watches. Regarding the Yacht Club: mind that most of them were produced with Quartz engines. There was a very small early batch using an automatic movement on the JLC Basis.

Pictured are:

• Audemars Piguet / Royal Oak "Jumbo" / Ref 5402ST / A-8xx / with the AP2121 (JLC920) from 1973. Only 2000 A-Series produced
• Vacheron Constantin / 222 "Jumbo" / Ref 44018-411 / with the VC1121 (JLC920) from 1977. Only 500 in steel-only produced
• Patek Philippe / Nautilus "Jumbo" / Ref 3700 / with the PP28-255 (JLC920) from 1979. Only 3600 of the 3700-001 and 1500 of the 3700-011 believed to be produced
• IWC / Yacht Club II Automatic / Ref 3212 / with the IWC3254 (JLC889) from November 22, 1978. Only 300 to 400 steel-automatic believed to be produced
• IWC / Ingenieur "Jumbo" / Ref 1832 / with the IWC8541ES from April 30, 1979. Only 534 in steel-only produced

Enjoy