Decade long hunt for my birth year watch, and my first complication!

[jw0n]

For nearly a decade (check my join date on TRF!), I have had romantic notions of embarking on the quest to find an appropriate birth year watch. At long last... I think I can put a stop to it. The year in question is 1984 -- from Rolex, I had always played with the idea of a Submariner, but it was a transitional year and did not quite seem to have enough "meaning". It was the same case for the GMT, Daytona, Datejust and Day Date. Many nice watches in that year, but nothing... important enough. In the Omega camp, the only model I would be interested in would be the Speedmaster and, again, not an important year for the speedy.

Over the last 18 months, I had been reading more about neo vintage watches and was interested in the offerings from AP, VC and PP. Specifically, their perpetual calendar watches; with AP introducing their QP in 1978, VC in 1983 and PP in 1985. In the dawning era of quartz watches, it felt like a rebellion to introduce ultra-thin, automatic perpetual calendars.

What initially attracted me to this watch was the extract of archives which dates it to 1984. This is an early "Swiss" only dial with a champagne dial. Later versions typically have a "sigma Swiss sigma", then "Automatic" text and towards the end of production, the addition of the Maltese cross. Also, with VC, the 1120QP (which is a JLC 920 ébauche with Depraz perpetual calendar module) displays a 48 month sub-dial that also tracks leap year (unlike the AP). This is the less conventional display of a perpetual calendar, but this difference also results in a slightly slimmer watch.

Of course, I was also attracted to the fact that production numbers were small; an estimated of just 2,300 perpetual calendar watches over 23 years (1983 to 2006) of production -- nearly 3x less than both AP and PP. My grail birth year watch is actually the VC 43032 (skeletonized version of the same watch, produced by VC from 1984) but with today's astronomical prices, I simply have to be realistic

Thank you for taking the time to read! It is nearly 2am here and I am still processing this... but I have a feeling I'll fall asleep soon with a smile on my face.