or the Citizen Crystal Seven as it is more commonly known. Another addition to fill some holes in my Citizen watchbox.
This series was introduced in 1965 replacing the Autodater Jet series as Citizens most common medium quality watch. It was the first watch in Japan to be sold with a Sapphire Crystal, as is evident from the name. The line was priced from JPY 11,500-19,500 at the time and was an instant success, selling more than one million watches in the first year. It had a very broad range with 21,23,27,30,33 and 43 jewels with the 33j version featured below. The higher jewelled watches had a very brash detailed caseback as you can see from the pictures. It is a bit complicated to compare to a Seiko series as it is such a broad range reaching probably all the way almost to KS quality but the 51XX and the 52XX series with watches like the Presmatics are similar in time and pricing. To the amateur, the movement also looks a bit like some of the 5XXX.
Crystal needs a bit of polishing but other seems like a nice watch. Was also quite cheap as these watches are not all that popular.
To get from 33j to 43j, they put a lot of glass on the rotor, 16 jewels if I count correctly. (pic from Nakahiro)
And added a fancier badge. (pic from Nakahiro)
You can learn more about the 43j Crystal Seven at Nakahiros web page.
http://translate.google.com/translate?sourceid=navclient&hl=en&u=http%3a%2f%2fnakahiro%2eparfait%2ene%2ejp%2fmoji%2fcrystal43%2ehtml
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