Longines Heritage Skin Diver 300m 64 Hour Power Reserve 42mm Swiss Automatic

$1,895.00

Out of stock

Categories: ,

We take trades against any of our watches!!! We also buy watch packages!!

Great vintage watch homages have come to be one of the expected highlights of my trip to the Longines booth at Baselworld each year, and 2018 was not a disappointment in this regard.

 
I was shown this watch during a meeting with Longines executives and told that it would not officially launch with the first wave of 2018 products. It would become available in late 2018, they said. As you can see, it’s a really great-looking tribute to a historically important Longines, the Longines Nautilus Skin Diver – the first dive watch from Longines, in fact. It’s a watch that I’d personally like to spend some more time with in the future outside of the less than ideal context of a trade show booth. 
 
It seems pretty obvious, but one of aspect of this watch’s design that should not be overlooked is its size. This is a large timepiece, and it feels large on the wrist. This is, in and of itself, not a bad thing. Wrist presence is a quality one tends to expect and even want from tool watches in general. But, on trying it on in Basel, the Skin Diver felt large for its 42mm diameter and 13.75mm height. I chalk this up to the way the lugs extend a good distance from the case, causing it to float somewhat uneasily on my seven-inch wrist. (The lug-to-lug length is 52.55mm.) I think that this design would have benefitted from a smaller diameter. An incremental reduction to 40mm diameter would have been great. (Incidentally, 40mm was the size of the original Nautilus Skin Diver.)
 
On the back, you’ll see an embossed image of a diver with a spear with the words “The Longines Skin Diver Watch.” The unidirectional bezel is very easy to turn thanks to the deep crenelations along its edge. This bezel is made of PVD-coated steel that has been executed to recall the original plastic one found on the late ’50s original.
 
The Skin Diver’s water resistance is an estimable 300 meters, thanks in part to a crown that screws down. Ever since I heard dive watch expert and HODINKEE contributor Jason Heaton observe that a screw-down crown really is one of the most important features for a dive watch, it’s been something I’ve kept in the back of my mind when evaluating purpose-built timepieces for diving. Sure, with proper gaskets and tolerances, the screw down function isn’t necessary for water resistance per se, but it certainly cannot hurt. After all, if the crown is screwed in, there’s zero chance of it catching on the fabric of your wet suit or other gear and flooding the case. Even if the vast majority of consumers will stop short of testing the limits of this watch’s max depth rating, there is a comfort in knowing that a watch exceeds the ISO standard for diving.

The Skin Diver’s dial is one place where it really excels. Look at the pillowy lume plots for the cardinal hours  and hour markers. It conveys all the richness of a well kept vintage watch from the late-’50s to early ’60s. A similarly thick application of faux-aged lume fills the arrow-shaped hour and minute hands, which traverse a dial that has a course, anti-reflective property to it. This is one of the darker applications of faux-aged lume that I have seen on a model that nods to a brand’s heritage, Longines or otherwise. The Longines logo is at 12 o’clock, and the world “Automatic” is spelled out in script text at the six o’clock position.

The movement inside is the L888. From this movement, the Skin Diver derives displays for the hours, for the minutes, and for the seconds, with an impressive power reserve of 65 hours. The movement runs at the somewhat unusual rate of 25,200 vph (or 3.5 Hz).

Overall, the Longines Heritage Skin Diver is a great-looking contemporary dive watch with more than ample water resistance that revives an important design from from the Longines archives. It manages to do this while incorporating enough modern features to excite watch collectors and SCUBA enthusiasts of today. 

 

Super Nice & Virtually brand new Longines Heritage Skin Diver! Incredible 300m depth rating and features Swiss Automatic movement with 64 hour power reserve and under Longines Factory warranty until 2022! Incredible Diver that pays tribute to the 1960’s! And honestly, don’t you wish we were back in the 1960’s?!

BRAND: Longines

MODEL: Heritage Skin Diver

CONDITION – Pre-Owned – Virtually Brand New with Longines warranty until July 2022!

CASE – Stainless Steel

MOVEMENT – Swiss AUTOMATIC 

DIAL – Awesome Black Dial with vintage markers

CASE BACK – Solid with inscription

BEZEL – Rotating Divers Bezel 

CROWN – SCREW DOWN

CRYSTAL – Sapphire

LUGS – 22mm

WATER RESISTANCE – 300m

STRAP – 2 – Original Longines brown calf leather strap with signed steel buckle & additional Black Tropical rubber dive strap with steel buckle

DIMENSIONS – Case 42mm

BOX/PAPERS – 100% Complete oversized Longines Wooden Box Set! – Everything Included in pictures!

 

 

Let us know what you have in your collection!! I consider all watches in trade! Please upload pictures.

and include details of your trades through my Trade/Buy tab at the top of my homepage.