Introduction
I was rather surprised to discover the other day that it has been almost five years now since SJX published an article I wrote on the history of the Grand Seiko VFA’s.
Having recently published a primer for collectors on the first Grand Seiko, I thought it might be apposite to take another look at the VFA’s. The benefit of an additional five years of collecting experience, and the ability to examine the last decade’s worth of listings on Yahoo Japan Auctions thanks to my subscribing to an archiving resource, should I believe enable me to pen an update worth perusing.
Rather than simply re-write the original article updating it with what I have learned, I thought it might be more fun to simply start again from scratch.
Let’s see how we get on!
What exactly is a “VFA”?
When the first Grand Seiko was launched in 1960, Seiko’s aim was to prove to the world that they could make a watch every bit as good as the best Switzerland had to offer. Indeed, the headline for the announcement of the watch launch in the March 1961 issue of Seiko News was -
“Challenging Switzerland’s finest domestic products. The finest domestic products.”
One way in which Seiko sought to meet the Swiss head-on was by ensuring their watch was produced to “excellent” chronometer standards, which at that time was defined by the Bureaux Officiels de Contrôle de la Marche des Montres as being accurate to +12/-3 seconds per day.
The story goes that the Swiss were none-too-happy with Seiko testing their own watches in Japan, insisting that no watch deserved to have the word “Chronometer” on its dial unless it had been tested in Switzerland.
With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps this wasn’t the wisest move on behalf of the Swiss - after all, if you tell a company that they are not allowed to use your standards for testing watches, what else do you expect them to do but come up with their own, improved, version?
Thus, by the mid-1960’s, Seiko turned their backs on the Swiss definition of what constituted chronometer-level performance, and came up with their own, eponymous “Grand Seiko Standard”. The Swiss by 1966 had tightened up their standard to a precision of +10/-1 seconds per day. Grand Seiko went three better - their new standard was +5/-3 seconds per day.
But Seiko didn’t stop there. Benefiting from the lessons learned from their participation in the Neufchâtel Chronometry Competitions of the 1960’s, by the end of the decade, both Daini and Suwa were able to launch watches precise to an astonishing +/- 2 seconds per day - and guaranteed to be accurate to 1 minute per month for the first two years of ownership.
These watches were described as being “Very Fine Adjusted”, or “VFA” for short.
VFA production timeline
My original article on the VFA’s that was published by SJX was structured around the appearance of the different VFA references in the Seiko catalogues (both regular, and “Special Luxury”) of the era. For this article I am going to take a different approach.
As I did for the article on the first Grand Seiko -
- I have for the purposes of this newsletter researched examples of the watches that have come up for sale over the last decade, in order to establish a production timeline for the VFA’s. This study has resulted in a database containing details of over 200 watches, more than 75% of which I have been able to ascertain the production month of the watch from the first two characters of the caseback serial number.
It is this real-world data that has led to a deeper understanding of the history of the VFA’s than I had before, and there are some very interesting nuggets of information to be gleaned.
I will (broadly) be presenting the VFA’s in this article based on the order of their first production, and not their catalogue appearances.
Below is a graphic showing the production dates for the VFA’s that I have been able to track down - this comprises data from the ~150 watches where the case serial (or at least the first two characters of it) was visible.
Ok, so that may be a little too small on mobile, so for ease of reading here it is split into two -
Ok let’s break this down by reference or group of references. Firstly, the watches produced in December 1968.
Grand Seiko 6185-8000 and 6185-8010 VFAs
The 6185-8000 is the watch that was featured on the cover of the publication that launched the first four VFA’s - the Seiko Special Luxury Catalogue from 1969. I have written a very detailed article on this catalogue as part of the series of newsletters I published detailing every vintage Grand Seiko reference -
Turning to page 7 of the catalogue, we see the 6185-8010 pictured alongside the 6185-8000.
Both of these watches - with cases (and for the 6185-8000 also its bracelet) manufactured from a palladium-silver alloy - are extraordinarily rare. Following an extensive search I have only managed to track down sales of around a dozen examples across both references - 8 of the 6185-8000, and just 6 of the 6185-8010.
Of these, I have the case serial numbers for 11 of them, and every single one of those was produced in a single month - December 1968.
Whilst there of course could always be the possibility that in time an exception turns up, based on this sample size, I’m fairly confident in stating that the entire production run for these references was from December 1968.
Here’s a studio shot of each reference -
One point of interest regarding both of these references is that examples can be found of each with, and without, VFA printed on the dial. Currently it is not known what the background to these variants is. For quite some time I felt that maybe after the watches had been purchased, customers might have been offered to have VFA printed on the dial at service, but the 6185-8010 example pictured above is in unworn condition, and so it seems very unlikely that it would ever have been sent for a service and “updated”.
In my original article for SJX, I started off by detailing the four watches launched in the 1969 Special Luxury Catalogue, but the research I have done for this article requires me to change that structure, so next up I will discuss just the Daini contribution to the VFA’s debut - the 4580-7000.