Monaco Legend Group will offer collectors a dream watch this spring, one made even better by a fascinating story. In fact, you could say the super clone watch traced some of the most important moments in American motorsports and aviation history from the late 1920s to the 1930s. The auction house, led by watch department chairman Davide Parmegiani, calls this one of the most important vintage 1:1 fake Patek Philippe watches to auction in recent memory, and I’m inclined to agree.
The split-second single button chronograph offered now at auction was specially ordered from cheap replica Patek Philippe by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American business magnate who founded the London-based Selfridges department store, while on a skiing trip in St. Moritz in the winter of 1928/1929. Selfridge had been drawn into the magnetic hero status of Sir Henry O’Neal de Hane Segrave, a massive celebrity in the era for his achievements in motorsports, especially speed records, and apparently ordered the watch with Segrave in mind. The Swiss made fake Patek Philippe was engraved on the back, commemorating their friendship.
The watch Selfridge ordered wasn’t an average chronograph. From 1923 to 1939, high quality fake Patek Philippe produced 11 known split-seconds single-button chronographs, two of which were made by Patek for (and signed by) Cartier. Unlike the serially produced ref. 1436 with two buttons, these watches seem to have been made entirely to order. There are 140 known examples of the ref. 1436 split-seconds chronograph (the model shares a dial and case design with the ref. 130 simple chronograph) made from 1938 to 1971, but these bespoke pieces are a whole different ballgame – the two shouldn’t be confused.
The custom split-seconds single-button super clone watches online uk have a Victorin Piguet ébauche and could be split into two camps: round and cushion-shaped watches. Of these, only five are cushion cases (one curious example is actually a left-hand model), and two are in the aaa quality replica Patek Philippe museum. The single-button design makes it incredibly rare – only Patek did this design on a split-seconds chronograph in the late ’20s. This might be the ultimate design of the era.
The Swiss movement replica Patek Philippe will be auctioned off during the Monaco Legend Group spring auctions on April 20-21. It comes with a Tortella & Sons “Deep Study” documentation book. The estimate is set at €500,000-1,000,000, which is a generous estimate to entice bidders. Past examples of round-cased single-button splits have sold for upwards of CHF 3,000,000. Realistically, €1.5 million or more would be a better starting price and would be a steal for a piece of history like this.
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