Zodiac watches from the 1970s

14 pieces by Zodiac from the 1970s — each one I owned and serviced before listing it, with its reference, calibre and condition stated in full.

Zodiac had been in Le Locle since 1882, and spent the 1970s doing what a small Swiss maker had to do: running its own calibres and buying somebody else's electronics at the same time. The Astroquartz arrived in 1972 on ESA movements — an attempt to carry the Astrographic, with its floating mystery hands, into a decade that no longer wanted a mechanical answer — and the Astrodigit went further, to an LCD with no hands at all. The mechanical line never stopped while any of that was happening. What the decade shows is a company visibly hedging, which is why its output from these years reads less like a range than an argument.

The Zodiac calibres are less closed than their own numbering suggests. The 70/72 family descends from an A. Schild base and was worked up around 1962 with Doxa, Eberhard, Favre-Leuba and Girard-Perregaux, so a watchmaker who has never opened a Zodiac has almost certainly opened its ancestor; the quickset 72B is a late variant of the same family, from 1973. The quartz is the harder proposition, because the circuit is the part that fails and nobody has made one in forty years — a dead Astroquartz is a search for another module rather than a repair. None of this is priced in. A 1970s Zodiac carries no story premium, which is the reason to buy one and the reason to look hard at what has already been replaced.

The calibres here are ESA 9362, ESA 940 111, Zodiac 134, Zodiac 61A, Zodiac 68A, Zodiac 70-72, Zodiac 72B, Zodiac 76 and Zodiac 88D, 10 references between them, in gold-plated and stainless steel cases.

1 of the 14 is available now; the rest have sold and stay listed, because what left first says more about Zodiac in this decade than anything I could write about it.

Reference guide: Zodiac Sea Wolf — 15 generations and 74 references, with calibres, serial dating and buying checks.