And then there’s the lume… that perfect, acid orange tritium that collectors pray to find. Things are clearly aged, giving you a great patina, but nothing looks over worn, polished or replaced. What’s striking about it is that it’s one of the more rare panda versions, to start, and in exceptional condition. The one shown here is owned and soon to be for sale by our friends at 10:25 Vintage, who focus on more affordable vintage pieces.
They’re very cool pieces with a surprisingly modern size at 39mm, great build quality and a lot of style. If you’re not familiar with these semi-obscure, amusingly named chronos, go check out our Affordable Vintage article on them. Well… usually I have to, but this time I got to borrow one such watch, a beautifully aged panda-dial Croton Chronomaster Aviator Seadiver.
The watch was supplied to us by the original owner, a US Navy Pilot, who was given it for his 16th Birthday and it then spent much of its life in a safe as he was also given an Ed White Speedmaster when he was 22, that said the watch served him from 16 until he was 22.Sometimes I come across watches that fellow collectors own that are so gorgeous, they are hard to let go of. The watch is in stunning original condition, it has never been refinished and is just a perfect combination of vintage cool without showing excessive patina. This watch has the true pedigree of an explorers extremely high quality divers chronograph, further demonstrated by the manufactures choice of movement ,the highly regarded mechanical winding valjoux 23, one of the most famous chronograph movements of all time, it is cased in a 39 mm (excluding the crown) solid stainless steel screw back case. The various names were due to a legal battle with Movado over similar sounding names so Nivada had to change title and the simplest method was to add Grenchen -its home town or the name of its distributor Croton. Seen under the Name Nivada ,Nivada Grenchen and in this configuration Croton. This was proven by the fact that whilst Rolex was heading up Everest and Jaeger boarded the USS Nautilus nuclear submarine on its journey under the North Pole, Nivada made the watch that accompanied the expedition to explore the Antarctic in 1957. Nivada are a watch manufacturer who in their hey day rivalled Rolex ,Jaeger le Coultre and any other “top brand ” for adventurers watches.
This is a remarkable Croton Chronomaster manufactured by Nivada Grenchen for their USA market under the Croton brand.
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