If you're a collector or investor in just about anything, you'd love it. If
your investment was worth 800 times, what you paid for it later,
think about it. If you bought a $600 watch and it was worth half a million dollars later,
or a $1,200 watch, that was worth a million, we're going to talk about something coming
right up. That is a potentially you have at your house, that's worth 800 times what it
is, the humble Hot Wheels division of the Mattel toy company. In the 1960s, you would be making
toy cars that were based on real cars, but finally in 1969, if you would allow your chief designer
to come up with a completely different car that didn't exist in real life. And this thing just
took the world by storm. I loved it when I was a kid, it was called the Twin Mill and it looked a
lot like a Corvette, except that it had an engine on each side of the hood behind the front wheel.
I had two engines and this thing just, must have tweaked the imaginations of little boys
and girls everywhere because they made about 12 million of this car because they made 12 million
of them. There's a good chance. You've got one at your house. And a pristine example in the package
can be worth up to $800 right now, which is roughly 800 times what it costs when it was
new. So that would be a phenomenal investment. And one of the things that made me think about this
was today's watch that we're highlighting and fresh from the showcase here at Swiss watch expo.
This watch is the Jaeger LeCoultre Duometre So it has two movements in the same watch, by the way,
they actually eventually made a real car based on the Twin Mill. I saw it at the Peterson
automotive museum in LA, and then it toured the country as part of the Hot Wheels tour.
So you might look it up the real thing exists now, but
you can have essentially a Twin Mill on your wrist with this watch. It is so cool. The dial of it
is just crazy. When you look at it, the function follows the, the form here, and I'm going to
go over what all these things do so that you can see it, but it is for sale on our website.
If you type in, just mouseover brands and click on Jaeger LeCoultre, I'm sure you're going to see it
if we've still got it in stock, but it's a fascinating watch that has a lot of, a lot of
kind of mystery, a lot of things to look at. One of the things that is most striking right off is
you look at it and you think how in the world do you even tell time on this thing?
So what's interesting is that the time is right up here in the top, right? It's in this sundial
at the 10 o'clock position, I'll change the time on it. So you can say, so there's the time and
we'll just set it there to roughly 10 till two so that you can see the hands,
the second hand for the watch as this big gold one. So they've separated out.
The time is gold. You can see the 12 3 6 9 here is applied 18 karat rose gold. And
the second hand in gold is the second hand for the timekeeping. Everything that's blue has to do
with the chronograph. So when you start, stop and reset, it's a Monnoposseur watch. So it only has
one pusher. We start right here and now the large secondhand here has started for the chronograph
here at the subdominant six. That's certainly one of the most striking things about this.
Watch, that thing looks like it's just going crazy. But what it's showing is the
sixth of a second. If you were to stop the chronograph again, with the same pusher
you started it with, it would show you which sixth of a second it was on. You can see the
secondhand for the timekeeping is still going, but the blue and for the chronograph has stopped.
And then when I push this again, the chronograph resets to zero. So it's a lot going on. You can
see the blue hands in this sub dial here at three that's, the hours and minutes for the chronograph.
So they keep everything separate by color. Blue is chronograph. Gold is timekeeping, and you might've
missed it. But one of the cool things about this dial is that it has this partial skeletonized
area where you can see part of the movement, but hidden within each of these cutouts is a power
reserve indicator, one for the chronograph and one for the timekeeping of the watch.
So it's a lot going on, but what's really neat when you wind the crown, you can see the
power reserve indicators go up, but if you see what's going on on the back
as I turned this, you can see these two barrels turning as it's building the power reserve,
and you can actually turn it both ways and it will build power reserve on both way. Both of the
barrels at the same time, they're even numbered. One says, of course in French hours and minutes,
and the other one says, chrono, what's amazing about this watch, as we said, is that it's, it's
got two movements in one. So there's one movement here that you've got the power in the,
in the barrel and then the gear train, and then it's running off of this balance. And then you've
got a second movement to run the chronograph that has its own barrel and its own gear train.
And it's running off that balance wheel too. So you ask yourself, why would they do this?
This is a complicated watch. What in the world is the purpose for this? The reason is almost
chronographs when you're running the chronograph, you're losing amplitude and power reserve off of
the main watch. So this way, by separating it out and having a separate movement for the chronograph
and a separate movement for the timekeeping, you maintain that full amplitude and the power reserve
in your timekeeping, even though you're running the chronograph, but that's the reason that they
do it. It's a caliber three 80, which is marked right here on the front, on the dial of the watch.
It's got about a 50 hour power reserve, which is indicated on this power reserve indicators.
The dial itself is really interesting. It's a silver green dial all over it.
Doesn't change the texture anywhere in the dial, but it's a step dial with four
different planes. So there's a lot of different steps to it. Um, really interesting visually.
The case itself is really great looking it's a 42 millimeter rose gold. The watch was
initially launched in 2007. This is the 2013 and forward version that has the cutouts in the dial
and a little bit different feature to the case
and the way they shaped the bezel and the way they shaped the lugs. But overall,
for the most part, the main difference in the 2013 and forward model is those cutouts and the dial.
When the when you're winding the watch, one of the nice things to know is that they included a slip
clutch system. So that even though it's a manual line movement, it's impossible to over wind it.
I think this watch would be a, a huge conversation piece.
You never going to see anything else like this out on someone else's wrist
out on the street, there's really not even another comparable watch from another company
that has the two movements in one like this separating the chronograph and the timekeeping,
at least I don't know of one. You can leave it in the comments if you know of a different one,
but there's really not even any competition from this watch out in there on the market
and considering how incredibly complicated it is, how just super special this movement is. The price
is just a, an absolute bargain. So check it out on our website. Give us a call.
We're happy to discuss this watch. We'd love to talk about the Duometre from Jaeger LeCoultre.