This early 1970s Elgin is highlighted by an unusual and striking “basket weave” dial. It is powered by a Swiss-made FHF manual wind movement with surprisingly nice finishing, cosplaying as an “Elgin 394.”

Representing the last gasp of American watchmaking, we have this elegant Lord Elgin automatic. Elgin certainly pulled out all the stops for this one - the 760 movement has a highly innovative and unusual integrated automatic mechanism resulting in a very thin automatic watch, even by today’s standards, and the balance is free-sprung, eliminating the need for regulator pins. Unfortunately, all of this innovation makes servicing these movements a bit of a headache - they are not particularly watchmaker-friendly. The automatic winding mechanism is also a bit delicate and most of the moving parts are fully engaged during manual winding, so you definitely want to minimize manual winding of these movements.