Watch Service Horror Stories - Places to avoid

[bwalkerVintage]

Well someone asked me a question which intiated my typing up all this information, so I thought, "why not start a places to avoid thread" -

Please post up any stories you may have - maybe it will help out others.

I daily wear a GMT 1675 two-tone (TT) with a TT jubilee band that my grandmother gave me when my grandfather passed away. When I received it, it had the original matte brown dial (I guess it as original - had the T for tritium) and really faded brown bezel insert. I knew it needed to be serviced and unfortunately, I took one of my colleague's (who also has a Rolex) suggestions to get it serviced at the local San Diego Sak's 5th Ave. watch repair shop.

My grandfather did alot of sailing and the dial and hands had really bad sun exposure to the point of looking like little flakes were starting to or were going to start chipping off. The repairman suggested that I at least replace the hands, but somehow he slightly damaged the dial in the process (serious nightmare - needless to say I was really bummed). I was able to get an identical replacement dial on ebay that the repairman paid for and still have the original hands and dial (albeit slightly chipped). Because this was my first Rolex service experience, he must have been aware of how naive I was a charged me the full Rolex service price by saying that all Rolex repairshop had to charge the same as a RSC. lol - I fell for it.

To add insult to injury, the watch stopped after two years.

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Moral of this story - stay away from San Diego Sak's 5th Avenue if you value your Rolex
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However, there is a light at the end of this dismal story:

When the watch stopped, I decided to send it in to the Beverly Hills RSC to have it serviced and fully restored because at this point the dial tritium and hands superluminova really clashed IMO. It came back looking fantastic (and it is nice to be able to read the time at night now with the superluminova). I didn't know that they were going to replace the matte brown dial with the rootbeer dial, but I like it alot too. I had a great experience with BH RSC.

Now that have been wearing it for awhile in its new style, I think the browns go really well with the 18K gold and the watch looks great!


Pics below