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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2232 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I bought a mechanical automatic watch from Temu for 26 euro. I am sucker for observing movements in action. I was pleasantly surprised by the polish and the clarity with which you see the mechanism working inside. What are yours - I am amazed at the bang for buck findings?

For $60 on Aliexpress 3-4 years ago, they asked for measurements, then cut, made and sent a rather nice and thick leather jacket which has protected me from an attempted stabbing and from a guy swinging a chain. After a few years, there are still no defects. I am shocked by the quality and was surprised to see Jackie Chan wearing it.

What's the jacket? Link?

My take is that we are going to see watches with similar levels of polish and accuracy as an omega watch selling for 1500 dollars from Chinese brands.

https://www.seagullwatchcompany.com/movements

You can buy a watch with even better accuracy than an omega for about thirty bucks.

Fancy watches are primarily a status symbol. Mechanical watches as a whole are basically obsolete anyway. So it doesn’t really matter that you can get one with roughly the same mechanism quality on Temu. The last time anyone bought a Rolex solely because they needed a good reliable watch was around 1968.

I am continuously amazed at how dirt cheap precision engineering has become. I am sucker for gears going brrr too. Even if I become Elon Musk rich I will never wear mechanical watch - wearing a rolex means you are a person that wears rolex, which is hardly a compliment - but damn if I won't be patron to some of the best horologists just to go berserk and see what can be done in purely mechanical way just for the lulz.

wearing a rolex means you are a person that wears rolex, which is hardly a compliment

That’s the way the Rolex brand is now. For a long time Rolex was what was called a “tool watch”. That is, just a good accurate watch that you would wear because you were in a profession where you needed to be precise about time. Che Guevara wore a Rolex when he was tramping through the jungle, because you don’t want to whiff an attack because your watch lost eight minutes and you sent the reserve element in at the wrong time. Divers would use them a lot too, because when you’re calaculating oxygen reserves you need to be accurate.

Over time that reputation for good quality gave Rolex some cachet, and it gradually morphed into the gaudy status symbol it is now.

I came across this extremely homo photo of Che and Fidel while trying to find out more about their Rolex habit.

https://blog.eastmanleather.com/photos/default/Young-Fidel-Castro-and-Che-Guevara-Hotel.jpg

I have been bemoaning the price increases for Seiko 5 watches for.... years. What was $50 is now close to $200. Heartbreaking.

All that said - link?

It's a total redditor answer but the Victorianox Fibrox knife is so good for around $50. I'm blown away with how affordable great guns are these days - S&W's M&P Pistol Line is extremely well regarded, will outlast the apocalypse, and can be had used for maybe $150, or a new PSA Dagger for $260 (!!!). A decent AR-15 is $400 new sometimes, and even the optics (that would have been more expensive than the rifle years ago) are cheap again.

I still think there's proverbial gold all over Harbor Freight as well.

Yeah Seiko has skyrocketed. As someone who likes a good-looking watch but couldn't care less about thousand-dollar mechanisms, it's unfortunate (although looking for alternatives gave me a much better sense of how OpenAI is planning to monetize shopping recommendations).

Some chinesium brand RUIGE, 2025 model

Like guns, musical instruments today are fantastic quality for the price. A new $300 Squier is better than a MIA Fender equivalent from the 90s, in my opinion. Manufacturers with less of a "lifestyle" position are even better.

CNC machining has been a real game changer.

What's the price/quality ratio of the big instruments? Baritone sax, tuba, string bass, etc. They're always so expensive.

The only one of those where I have an experience is double bass. You can get a Shen that's "good enough" for bluegrass and rockabilly for several thousand dollars. Historically, you'd be looking at a Kay or an Englehardt that was more expensive (inflation adjusted) and harder to find.

I can't speak on the broad quality of any of them because I am not a classically trained, professional musician who has had the opportunity to use a high quality, fully carved piece. I'm just a guy that likes to entertain in bars.

Yes and no. Any part that can be CnC'd can be essentially perfect provided it uses quality materials (which is very much not the norm when you get to 90% of MIC / MII / MIK guitars with eg. a Floyd Rose bridge). There's still a lot of hands on work required and much of this is crucial for really good playability. It doesn't matter if the neck itself has been built to exacting tolerances if the frets are uneven and your local guy charges $200 or more to fix that. And it's not that those far east OEM builders can't build a guitar with high quality manual work but when they're still essentially competing on price, the brands are very tempted to choose the cheaper package which means less hands on time which in turn means lower quality. I expect we'll see high end MIC / MIK brands emerge that are going to compete on name recognition and quality instead of low price.

Of course if the goal is just to surpass Gibson quality and consistency, well, any Squier probably already does that at a tenth or less of the price.

As a rule most guitarists are braindead idiots so you very rarely see them understand what quality control even means and how it's completely pointless to make statements about quality of some brand / line based on single specimens. Yes, that particular $300 guitar might play better than that particular $3000 guitar (with often different specs even!) but to say anything authoritative you'd need to compare dozens of specimens of identically specced guitars which unfortunately nobody ever does. Then you get idiotic statements like "Well I haven't played a cheap guitar that feels the same as my [insert specs here] Gibson (a brand known for extreme variance) so they can't be any good" as well as "I like my $400 Squier better than a $3000 Stratocaster so it never makes sense to pay more than $500 for a guitar" (nevermind that there are smaller brands whose entire focus is on the highest build quality instead of vintage accuracy).

Have you seen Jim Lill?

I feel like you may have far higher standards than me for instrument quality.

In 1995 I was dealing with bad frets and a warped neck. Now I'm just dealing with bad frets on a cheaper tool. To me, that's huge progress.

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