A bit lazzy about my blog!

Maintaining a blog is not so easy as matter of fact! I regularly get some comments about the fact that this site looks not so updated and this is legid!

So, why I looked so busy since January 2006? There are different reasons, but the main was that learned a bit of watchmaking and this consumed most of my free time.

Everything of course started from my interest to watches and photography. Photography because smal watch parts, movement are fascinating to observe, so tiny manufactured parts of steel, brass wheels, jewels...

Lyon, France has a very impressive regular flea-market place ("les Puces du Canal") where I found my first vintage boxes of parts. These parts came from retired watchmakers and usually concern mechanical popular watches before the "quartz" wave that replaced them in the mass production.

Not strangely, they are mostly French (!)...French watches industry is nowadays mostly eclipsed on the international level by the Swiss industry, but is still very active for services like the Breitling after-market service in Besançon), parts, distribution. The most famous French brand in the 50-60's are Lip and Yema, but there were a lot of manufacturers in France and so diverse watches were sold under very diverse brands, more or less obscure but most of the time of very high quality, sometime assembled by local watchmaker or jeweler.

After my discovery of the Russian preserved horology, I discovered some of those obscure French watches and even brought back to life some of them and I did the same with my first watch offered to me in 1969 was I was 11...

I was also lazzy about this blog, because I posted most of this adventure on the Watchussek fora, but the archives are lost at the present time due to the database crash!...