Three substitutions and an elimination

The ten stones were chosen for their histories, and the histories were checked carefully. What nobody checked, because it did not feel like a question about stones, was whether each one could be lawfully bought and shipped, and paid for at the size a dial actually needs. We went back and asked that question properly. Three of the ten changed, and the movement shortlist lost a candidate. This is the record of it.

Nº 01 was Gibeon. Namibia has treated meteorites as State property since its National Heritage Act of 2004, in force from 2005, and export without State consent is an offence there; controls in that territory in fact go back to 1979. Gibeon that left before those rules still circulates legally among dealers and museums, but we could not get material with provenance we would be willing to publish, and European law separately bars importing specimens removed from their country of origin unlawfully. So the dial is cut from Muonionalusta, found at Kitkiöjärvi in northern Sweden in 1906, the same chemical group as Gibeon, and the piece now carries that name instead. The Gibeon story stays on the page, because it is the reason the piece exists.

Nº 06 was Nishapur. The turquoise is Kingman, from Mineral Park in Arizona, and it always would have been: Iranian turquoise is difficult to bring into the United States, and more to the point, we could document an Arizonan mine and could not document an Iranian one. The naming rule in the gemstone trade is blunt and correct: a place name belongs to a stone only when the stone came out of the ground there. Keeping Nishapur on an Arizonan stone would have been a nice piece of writing and a false label. The history of Nishapur, which is genuinely the reason turquoise is called turquoise, keeps its place in the story.

Nº 10 is an opal doublet. Precious opal grows in seams thinner than a dial, so a solid disc wide enough and sound enough for this watch is scarce and priced out of all proportion to the face you would ever see. A doublet bonds that same colour bar to a dark backing which carries the load and deepens the fire. It is worth saying plainly that every hardstone dial is already a stone slice on a metal plate; this one has one layer more. We turned down goldstone for being glass and howlite for pretending to be turquoise, and neither judgement is in tension with a doublet, because the rule was always that the face has to be real and named. It is, and it is.

The Soprod P024 leaves the movement bench. The only Soprod document we can cite describes a date calibre with a three-position stem, and we could not confirm a current catalogue entry or a route to buy twelve. That is not the same as discontinued; it is simply something we cannot promise, and this page exists to record eliminations rather than quietly drop them. We also corrected ourselves on Sellita: the SW300-1 does have a factory no-date execution, the b, which we had wrongly written off. It stays on the bench beside the La Joux-Perret G101 and the Miyota 9039.

None of this is the fun part of building a watch. It is the part that decides whether the fun part is worth anything. Each affected piece now carries the correction in its own register, in the same size type as the story it qualifies, and the specification page says which figures come from a manufacturer and which will come from our own bench.