Farewell Orange Soxa. Hello Inverse Sinnko!

As I've progressed down the path of WIS-dom, I've started turning over a new leaf. Started with cheap watches, picked up a few RMW's, and now I'm on to modding watches (back to cheaper watches!). The only difference is that this time I'm starting to mod the watches myself, learning how to work on watches.

It started with changing the hands on my Binnacle Anchor. Easy enough change, and it looks great. Totally changes the character of the watch. Next came a movement replacement on a busted quartz watch of my wife's. That worked out OK too, it's ticking away nicely upstairs.

Now comes the next step - wholesale changes of my Orange Super Soxa. In at least some ways now that Noah has left us, I'm sad to have changed this watch around as he built the 6r15 powered Orange Soxa. In one sense it would have been good to keep the watch as it was, a memory and legacy of his work. On the other hand, Noah loved modifying watches, and I'm hoping he would have liked the mod I did. And the Orange Soxa will live again, as I'm keeping all those parts for a future mod.

I've always liked the look of Sinn watches, particularly the 556 / 656 / 657 line. Simple, straightforward, easy to read. Price tag is less than friendly though. Plus they're all black dialed, which is not really my favorite. After browsing various parts from Jake Boudreau and Yobokies, I came up with an idea and a plan for modifying the watch. A white dialed Sinn 657 looking watch. The Inverse Sinnko:



The bezel insert, chapter ring, and hands came from Jake, the dial from Yobokies. All the work was done by yours truly. This definitely stepped the difficulty up from the hands change as more care needed to be taken when changing the hands - there's a date change involved as well. Replacing the chapter ring involved popping the crystal out. And there's the matter of precisely gluing in the bezel insert so everything lines up. Plus overcoming bone-headed moves like not removing the caseback gasket when working on the watch. That resulted in tearing that gasket, requiring a replacement.

Still, I like the end result quite a lot. Pretty close to a dead ringer for a white dialed Sinn 657, down to the date window at 4:30. It's got the tried n true hacking n handwinding movement (big plus in my book!), decent lume on the hands & pips above the hour markers, and a watch case which I know fits my wrist very nicely. Plus it's neat to be able to say that you did all that work.

So while it's no longer what Noah built up, the heart of the watch itself is still Noah's doing - he's the one that fitted the 6r15 movement into the SKX007 case. And I'd like to think that I'm keeping his watch modding spirit going.

For reference, here's how the watch started: