JLC Hometime, a case of non-buyers remorse finally solved
Sun, 20 January 2013 18:24
Wikipedia defines buyer's remorse as follows:
"Buyer's remorse is the sense of regret after having made a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of an expensive item such as a car or house. It may stem from fear of making the wrong choice, guilt over extravagance, or a suspicion of having been overly influenced by the seller."
Now I feel fortunate to say that I have not yet suffered from buyer's remorse with respect to watches, which is surely to some extent owed to the large amount of information available on timezone.
However, timezone so far has not been able to prevent feelings of non-buyer's remorse ;-)
There are always a lot of watches on my wish-list, and while there is usually a clear order of nice-to-have's and must-have's, the must-have's are not always on the top of the list. And so it has already happened several times in the past that when a must-have watch finally made it to the top of the list, to my disappointment I found out that it has been discontinued in the mean time.
In some of these cases, I was still able to find one after a while (a particular GO Senator and a IWC Ingenieur 3227 are examples), in other cases I was not able to get the watch any more (a JLC Reverso Memory falls into that category).
Now one of the watches which had spent a really long time on my wish-list was the JLC Hometime, in particular the old model with the asymmetric dial. I like watches with GMT functionality in general, and the JLC with the day/night indicator and the additional hour hand which can be hidden under the main hour hand if not used is a great interpretation of this type of complication. It is also much better in my opinion than the newer model with the symmetric dial layout.
When I put together my SOTC post last year, I finally decided to pull the trigger on the Hometime. I knew an AD which had one of the old models a while ago, but it turned out that the watch was already sold. At that time, I already thought that I would have to go grey market, but then I received a PM from a friendly forumite (if you read this post, thanks again for the tip) who had read my SOTC post and who pointed me to another AD that indeed was able to get me the watch (reasonably priced, condition like new, complete with box/papers and 23 months of warranty left).
Now to the watch itself. It is really a wonderful piece. The size is a bit larger than my other JLCs from the Master line (a MUT and an old Geographic), but still perfectly wearable for a dressy watch. Some of the details I like in particular are: the poetic interpretation of the day/night indicator with the sun and moon; the sun ray texture of the dial; a somewhat larger than usual size of the date display; the mix of appplied numerals/indexes with the lume dots; the balance bridge instead of a balance cock.
The strap is also very nice and the color fits the watch very well. It came with a double folding buckle. I usually prefer simple tang buckles, since they tend to sit more comfortable on my wrist, so I might get this changed, but functionally there is nothing to complain about the folding buckle.
The seconds hand and the reference/home time hand are blue. They are not heat-blued or chemically blued, but instead they are lacquered. There has been a bit of a discussion around the usage of different techniques by JLC for blue hands. While I have to say that in principle I prefer heat-blued hands (like on my Reverso), it does not bother me at all with the Hometime. It's actually nice to have two JLCs that use those two different methods of blueing hands. I would however be curious to know why JLC is using both methods (manufacturing costs seems hard to believe to me, given the fact that I have two Stowa watches with gorgeous heat-blued hands which cost only a fraction of the JLCs).
Now, before I get to the pictures, a few words about the functionality. The Hometime is a true GMT watch. For me, this means the ability to display two separate time zones, where the local time can be changed without stopping the watch. In the case of the JLC, this is done by pulling the crown out to first position, which allows the reference hour hand to be incremented/decremented in hour-steps while the seconds/minutes keep running. another mandatory feature is that the date is linked to the local time. This is also how the Hometime behaves, i.e. when passing midnight with the reference hour hand forward/backward, the moves the date forward/backward. And finally, the home/GMT time either has to have a 24h display, or it has to be linked to a day/night indicator. With the old version of the Hometime, you'll find a day/night indicator via a hand that sports a sun/moon at each end and rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours inside of a 180 degree/12h subdial (the new version has a 24h hand below the 12 o'clock position).
To sum it up, while this might not be the most prestigious or most expensive purchase of recent years, it still represents one of the most substantial additions to my collection, since I feel that the watch really represents the JLC DNA in a perfect way.
And here the pictures (first few are from the AD, the rest are some quick cell phone pics).
- Bodo