About Watch Breaker

I'm Eddie. I buy vintage Omega watches to break them down for parts, and along the way I got tired of a question nobody on the internet would answer straight: what movement is this, and what is it actually worth? This site is my answer, with the working shown.

BackgroundForty-five years of mechanical work before watches. Retired, and now spending it on the one machine small enough to fit on a desk.

The businessA breaker's yard for vintage Omega: donor movements, dials, hands and cases, sold on eBay as watchbreaker. Identification is the other half.

The referenceOmega's own spare-parts catalogues — the GF 620 series and the factory technical guides — digitised into a database of 177 calibres and 4,000 part numbers.

Why a parts breaker

A dealer sees the outside of a watch. A collector sees a few dozen of one model. Someone who breaks Omegas for parts sees the inside of everything that comes through — the good, the married, the redialed and the ruined — because the only way to know what a movement is worth in parts is to know exactly which calibre it is and which other calibres its parts fit. That knowledge is what the serial lookup, the model guides and the $25 report are built on. I'm not selling you my eye; I'm selling you the catalogue, applied to your photos.

The catalogues

In 2015 Omega's parent stopped supplying spare parts to independent watchmakers, which made donor movements the only permanent source of parts for a vintage Omega — and made the old factory parts catalogues the only map of what fits what. I collect those catalogues and I've spent this year photographing and transcribing them, page by page, into a structured database: every part number, every calibre it fits, every dimension the catalogue gives. That database answers the questions on this site. It also catches the catalogues' own mistakes, of which there are more than you'd think, and I say so.

What I'm honest about

I identify watches; I don't repair them for customers. I'm learning the repair side myself, on camera, on the YouTube channel — pocket watches first, then cheap donors, then my own Seamaster — and I'd rather you watch me get it wrong in public than pretend otherwise. I don't take custody of anyone's watch: everything is from photographs, and the report says what photographs can't show. And every finding in a report carries a grade, so you can tell a fact I've checked against the catalogue from an opinion I've formed from a picture. The grades are explained here.

What the site does not claim. It is not Omega, not an authentication service of record, and not an appraiser. It is one person with the primary sources and a method published in full, so you can check the work.

Got an Omega you're not sure about? Five photos and the weight to id@watchbreaker.com, subject "What is it?" — a free verdict, normally within a day. What to send and what comes back. And while they last, the first ten written reports are free.

Watch Breaker is an independent identification specialist and parts dealer and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Omega SA or the Swatch Group. Omega is a trademark of Omega SA. Terms.