This morning, Adrian and myself went for the Uhrenmesse in Cologne. This time ( as we were early ) it was not too crowdy and we could take our time to look into all the boxes in search of hidden treasures. Watchfairs like this are places were you can find interesting items, but as we saw today, one has to be alert.
As an example of this ; there was a Mark IX for sale, Adrian and I took a good look at it and we can say that nothing was correct on that watch, nor the dial, nor the hands, nor the bezel, not even the case... But the seller claimed that it was genuine ( and asked 15.000 euros for it ) ( MF I hope and believe I don't break any forum rules here ) A few meters further, there was a gentlemen selling a steel Jubilee, a "special" one, a watch that was made by the development team at Schaffhausen and thus hadn't the limitation number on it... Yes, watch fairs can be a lot of fun...
On the other hand, we saw some wonderful pieces as there were ; a Jumbo Ingenieur ( the antimagnetic one, not the new ), a ref 666, an Aquatimer ref 812, a Wempe Pilot Perpetual, a Portuguese Perpetual in platinum, a nice ref. 325 Portugieser, priced reasonably but without papers, a very nice pocketwatch cal. 29, 8 Da Vinci perpetuals in steel and in gold, a few Porsche Designs, 5 or 6 mark XII. Also a lot of Portuguese, chrono and automatic, some new Ingenieurs, two with the ceramic bezel, an Amalfi too, an Ocean 2000 Bund, auto and quartz,a lot of cal 89...
Also there were unfortunaly also more mariages than you can see on a hot day in Vegas.
Prices were not always exagerated so it was hard not to buy (must keep my money in the pocket for another one )