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Matching Papers to Your Watch


When looking for any kind of papers, especially guarantee papers, DO NOT expect to find an 'exact match' to the year of your watch. If you take the following scenarios into account, you will probably conclude it may be a lot of wasted time.

Unless a watch was originally shipped with punched papers, the dealer who sold the watch would have married the watch with the papers that were considered appropriate for the time. As an example, if a watch was manufactured in 1960, but it did not sell until a few years later, it would be possible that the paperwork for that watch would not be dated from the year of manufacture and may be closer to the date of sale. In this example 1963, the papers could be from 1961, 1962 or 1963 in this example!

I have seen original owner watches that were sold 10 or more years after their manufacture and the paperwork that the buyer received reflected this. I would hazard to say that the 'most correct' paperwork for sport watch models would be a year or more AFTER the manufacture date to account for shipping and sale period!

Sometimes guarantee papers themselves are stamped with date codes that that are some years after the printed codes on the back of the papers. 

Conversely, when blank papers were left over from prior years, a dealer could have used them on watches in his current inventory. Therefore, watches with a manufacture dates that come after the date codes found on the papers with which they were sold can also be valid.

Based on these scenarios, it is pretty clear that matching papers or other ephemera to your watch is not an exact science, especially when it comes to date codes. I recommend that collectors look for papers to match their watch within a reasonable range of production. I do not recommend trying to find papers that match the exact same year of manufacture as your watch. If you find any papers appropriate for your reference model, it is really something special and you should be very happy!

If you have specific questions,
please feel free to email your query to r.smith1680@gmail.com

Footnote on similar experience with casebacks...
The same dilemmas described above can exist with the manufacture codes on the inside of Rolex casebacks. I have seen where a Milguass with a case serial number dating it to the early 1980s had an original caseback from the 1960s! It seems that casebacks like papers were left over from prior years, especially on less popular models.

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