Audio and video here.
Greetings everybody.
We are live and we're going now.
Quiet numbskulls, I'm broadcasting.
This here is a true story
about crossing the pond at
night in the world's
smallest cockpit on the tanker
Through the weather.
Oh, and to the tanker crew who did that.
Thanks a lot.
We really appreciated that.
I'm just kidding.
No, I'm not.
Well, there I was, crossing the pond,
and you could see that I
wasn't exactly fond.
So there I was sitting at my
desk around June of twenty, twenty three.
I received an email from
from a fellow down at Pax.
His name was actually said I
could use his name, Mike Chick,
and he's affiliated with
the Harrier program.
He had an idea to celebrate, I guess,
their sunsetting it
officially sometime in
twenty twenty seven.
And he knew the plan ahead
and he wanted to
commemorate it with a watch.
He was a watch fan or watch guy,
and he ran it up the
flagpole to his boss.
His boss liked the idea.
He reached out to me and.
We started talking and he
knew the store and knew my channel,
knew I'd done batch runs
for things like this.
And there started a, I don't know,
probably a twelve to
eighteen month design cycle
of back and forth and
government stuff and how
that goes and how long
things can take to get approvals.
And just to obviously use the Harrier name,
it needed Boeing's approval
and whoever else.
yeah now here we are we got
a uh we got a watch to
limited run we're only
gonna make as many as we
get orders for uh so taking
pre-orders the pre-orders
will close september so
about four weeks or so from
now um four and a half
weeks or so uh go to
production then we're gonna
ship them out uh to whoever
whoever wanted one wow I
want one yeah right now I'm
gonna put my order in
I ordered one I may order
another one I'll tell you
what this is cool greetings
everyone repeat here kind
of a departure from our
usual format because we
usually have aviators but
actually we do have an
aviator yeah
congratulations in fact an
aviator he got his private
he's working on his
instruments so that's very
cool we'll talk to you
about some of that too a
little bit but uh
So, yeah, we had a group chat.
Our show a couple weeks back
was with the Young Guns
from Five Forty-Two.
They threw the link to your
video in the group chat,
and it immediately piqued my interest.
And, oh, cool,
we'll put a link in the show
notes with this, too, on the blog post.
This is a cool watch, folks.
I would go look at this thing.
And, oh, by the way, two things.
One, this is not an advertisement.
He's not a sponsor.
We love this thing,
and we wanted to let people
know about it before the window closed,
and you got screwed by not being there.
And secondly, this is repeat.
Thanks for joining us.
Where's my co-horse, Fig?
Hey, I am straight from the fucking DMV,
baby.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.
Yes, I do.
Yeah, I've been delayed, and I apologize,
but it's really a pleasure
to have Mark with us.
Thank you.
Mark from Long Island Watches, right?
Long Island?
Yeah, you got it.
Yeah, that's where I am.
Yeah, Long Island Watches.
And I'm excited, first of all,
to talk to you about this
specific watch because in
the link that he's talking about,
I watched it yesterday
morning while I was shaving
about five in the morning
at some undisclosed
location that I was working,
and I was like, holy shit,
I got to have one of these.
So let's talk about this.
yeah very cool well first
and foremost um so the
origination of the idea was
out of uh out of pax river
yeah and and working with a
guy on on design items um
we had a question and I
know it's too late now to
to incorporate it was there
ever any consideration of
putting the squadron
patches on anywhere for the
you know so I'm not too
well versed you know like
in the program itself but
you know the case back's
got the the four country
consortium that's involved
and that was kind of where
it you know the only
branding I guess or yeah
plain branding that you know
that they really wanted to do.
I think maybe it just leaves it more open,
I guess, because originally, you know,
it was just going to be
open to their community.
Right.
And then they let me open it
up to the public,
which was very nice of them, like,
you know, to sell it to my customers.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know how big
I don't know how big the
audience is on your side, but on my side,
it's,
I preach to watch guys and a lot of
watch guys also happen to
be either their pilots or
their wannabe pilots,
aviators kind of thing.
So it might scratch and itch for them.
And then I guess the third prong is,
you know, I'm, I'm born in seventy six.
So the Harrier is kind of a
plane that I grew up with in the eighties,
eighties, early nineties.
And to me, that was another thing.
I was like, wow, that's another audience.
Just these
whatever generation I am of
people that kind of remember this thing,
you know,
doing the vertical takeoff and
landing when we were kids.
And that was, you know, so cool.
So it was kind of like three
prongs that we could attack.
Nice.
Yeah.
I remember the first time I
ever saw the Harrier,
it was on television and I went, Oh,
that's fake.
And yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
I was like, uh, no, actually it's not.
That's real.
I'm like,
Jets can't do that.
Yeah.
I was like.
Eleven or twelve.
And then.
You know.
Went on to.
Fly one of those things.
I had no idea.
It would be my life's path.
Um.
So.
Uh.
Folks, you got to go look at the video.
The illumination on this alone is,
it looks like an instrument panel.
Yeah, it's cool.
Super Luminova C-III.
What the hell is that, Mark?
Are we all going to die of
cancer for looking at our new watch?
No.
It's crazy how things are so
basic in watches.
I guess they're just unknown
to people outside the community.
So Superluminova, well,
I guess if you want a
little bit of history,
to take you back to you
mentioned cancer and everything else,
you're thinking of the
radium girls who were painting dials for,
I guess, World War II.
and they were taught to put
the bristles on their
tongue when they did the
radiant paint on the dials
and radium obviously we
know today is radioactive
and they all got some kind
of a cancer and died I and
then they they switched to
something safer which was
tritium which is an isotope
of hydrogen and that was a
paint that they applied to
dials tritium I want to say
fell out of favor in late
seventies early eighties
because still radioactive
And then a compound was
developed that you guys,
everyone knows is glow in the dark,
right?
Superluminova is just a,
it's a Swiss or it's part
of a Swiss company that
just makes this paint.
And it's called, um,
whereas like radium and
tritium is photo luminescence.
This stuff is radio luminescence.
This stuff is photo luminescence,
which means it absorbs
light when it sees it.
And it just lets it go when it's dark.
So that's what you see.
You see the green, it lives forever.
It doesn't degrade.
At least not in our lifetime.
And it doesn't give off any
harmful particles or
anything that'll permeate
your skin or any stuff like that.
Thank goodness.
Yeah, don't worry.
I mean, it looks so cool.
I'm like, man, and it's bright.
Obviously, you know,
you put a light on it for the video.
Yeah, of course.
it would display well, but I mean,
it is absolutely gorgeous.
And the other idea I had,
I have a really nice Seiko aviator,
a citizen aviator rather.
And the bezel on that got
scratched up pretty quickly.
I like your idea there.
Tell us.
Yeah.
So the bezel insert itself
is what's called it.
It's Sapphire,
which basically is the way it sounds.
Same thing as the crystal on the watch.
So Sapphire is a nine on the
hardness scale and,
So pretty much the only
thing that's going to
scratch it is another
sapphire or a diamond.
So the bezel inserts,
the bezel itself is is is
three sixteen steel.
And then the the bezel
insert is a piece of sapphire.
So there's an annual ring of
sapphire and it's painted
from the underneath.
Yeah.
So thank you.
First of all,
it's not going to scratch
because it's sapphire.
But then the paint's not
going to scratch because, well,
the paint is underneath.
So just it just shines right through.
oh so that's the that's the
bezel itself yeah so the
thing that turns in in both
directions um yeah I mean
I'm wearing a watch so this
thing that turns this one
happens to be steel the
insert yeah yes the insert
itself is is sapphire
what are you wearing it's a
I got a gmt master so
you're how old uh it's a
ninety so so that is
aluminum they were using
back then so that will
scratch and everything else
oh it does hey they've
moved to what cerakron now
that was a few years ago
where they're now ceramic
and ceramic is like
sapphire ceramic doesn't
scratch but ceramic
Rolex figured it out,
but you can only fire
ceramic in certain colors.
That's where sapphire comes in.
Sapphire is paint.
It's not painted underneath.
You can kind of paint it
whatever color you want.
But yeah, same thing.
So that little disc inside
the bezel is just sapphire.
Far out.
Nice.
Well, all right.
What else?
Let's see.
Why the limited run?
Is it a cost issue?
No, it's not.
It was one of the requests
from PAX was to make it that way.
Yeah, just make it limited.
They want it shut off after
a certain period of time.
And as I said,
that was one of the things
that they mentioned to me.
They're like,
you can open it to your audience.
Because I guess they didn't
know what the response was going to be.
They didn't know how many
were going to sell.
I mean,
I really need to make a hundred to
kind of keep
everybody happy, you know,
kind of financially and everything else.
Are you going to get there?
We've surpassed it already.
As of this morning,
we sold like a hundred and ten or so.
Oh, that's fantastic.
So, yeah, so I'm happy.
But, you know, like I said,
there's like a month left.
And with people like you,
You know,
it's kind of just like Sam in the
program office said and
Mike in the program office said.
No,
it's just like kind of like these
spider webs are all starting to form.
We're going to double your
order right now.
Right,
it's growing legs because people
like you never would have
heard about it if some of
these other people didn't mention it,
right?
Because you don't, I mean, man,
my channel's got a lot of followers,
but if you don't follow it,
you don't follow it.
What is the actual link?
Is it longislandwatches.com?
That'll work.
own that one it's long
islandwatch.com but I kind
of own every very long
there you go all right yeah
something else something I
learned a long ago yeah buy
all of those oh my god yes
yeah very cool um all right uh so
You told me pre-show that
you were an aerospace
engineer working with other programs,
and so that's how you had
some familiarity with PAX River.
How did you get into the watch gig?
Oh, wow.
And specifically,
how did you wind up – and
I'm assuming you've done other – in fact,
I know.
I've looked at your website.
You've done other aviation watches.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
I mean, I've –
always loved aviation
personally but no so I
wound up being I was an
aerospace engineer at um
bae systems which is like
the former british
aerospace north america
division for from to uh and
then shortly after I
graduated college I
graduated in um always been
a fan of wristwatches like I'm you know
Just loved them.
I wouldn't say loved them, but liked them.
And my dad had a decent
collection of a couple of nice watches.
And it just so happens that one day,
I was meeting my college
buddies for lunch.
We were just chatting.
And one of them was wearing
an interesting watch.
I said, what the hell are you wearing?
He showed it to me.
what'd you pay?
Eighty bucks, blah, blah, blah.
Where'd you buy it?
eBay in Germany.
And I was like, wow.
I'm like, I could sell that.
I don't know why.
It just kind of popped into my head.
You know,
I was already working as an
engineer for like three years.
I was like,
I could get a side hustle
selling something like that.
And that's kind of what I did.
You know, I contacted the seller,
bought ten, sold them on eBay,
some of the profit, some of the loss.
And it's literally rinse and repeat,
twenty years late, you know,
twenty years on.
Same seven hundred dollars
and parlayed it into, you know,
what it is today.
Nice.
Very cool.
All right.
Well,
I'm both excited and bummed that it's
going to be a limited run, right?
I mean, everybody wants to watch.
It's more valuable.
Yeah.
Well,
that's why you and I need to buy two.
Right.
And the ones we're not going to wear,
we wait until everybody got to have one,
can't get one,
and then we pay for the ones we bought.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
And what about,
so all the collaboration
details on the design that
was all done with,
you said Mike Chick down at PAX River?
Yeah, pretty much.
So designer that works for me, Ryan,
and a guy that he works with, Silvio.
These two guys kind of just
went back and forth.
All different varying ideas.
You know, Mike had some ideas.
Ryan had ideas.
And just constantly going
back and forth and figuring
out what's best, what looks best,
what's manufacturable.
That's obviously the big one.
And yeah,
we kind of landed up on the
design that you see today.
Well, fantastic.
It's a gorgeous watch.
So I make an order.
I agree.
And not tell mama.
Yeah, I know.
Right.
Yeah.
They're all going to be
serialized after we get it done.
You know how many we have.
We're going to make that many.
I mean, to be honest,
I'll probably make another
two or three percent just in case.
I always like to have extras
just just in case something happens.
Somebody's lost in shipment or something.
I can't say, oh, I can't make another one.
Yeah, right.
Oh, what a concept, yeah.
Yeah,
I always err on this side of caution
and make a couple more.
But other than that, yeah, it'll be done.
So you're not going to put a
serial number on the watch, though?
No, on the case back.
Yeah, on the case back.
It'll be numbered.
Let's say we make... Let's
say we make two hundred and
thirty-seven watches.
It'll say yours is number
thirty-two out of two
hundred and thirty-seven.
Literally.
Is there any chance to get
one with the number two
twenty-three on the back for repeat?
So I always tell people,
and I'll just be honest with you,
that I don't reserve serial
numbers because it's such a
pain in the ass.
But however,
if I make at least two hundred
and twenty three and there's one of those,
then, yeah, you son of a bitch.
He just snaked that from out
from underneath me, Mark.
Well, he's live.
I can't tell him.
No, the customer is always right.
Beautiful.
Hey, you got the lighter.
You got the Zippo lighter, Fig.
Well, if you play your cards right,
you're going to get one too,
you sumbitch.
Well, if you play your cards right,
I may give you, I don't know,
two thirty one.
The odds of getting three
long in their
five-forty-two seem pretty low.
You're killing me.
Oh, my gosh.
All right.
I have a question about the
technical question about the watch itself,
Mark.
Go ahead.
I remember this was a long time ago,
about twenty-six hours ago
when I was listening to your video.
uh, the,
the movement is automatic movement
made by Seiko.
Right.
And where is the,
where is the watch going to be assembled?
Yeah.
So that we just covered that before.
So even though the movement is,
is Japanese,
the watch will be assembled
in China in one of my factors.
Okay.
And I don't know anything
about that movement.
Is that a good, is that a reliable?
So when you get back into,
when you get back into my
space here where I live, um,
seiko is pretty much the
workhorse of the affordable
automatic watch I mean this
isn't automatic right yeah
much like your watches yes
and you know for all the
popularity that we think
automatics have they still
represent probably less
than five percent of the
overall watch market really
people don't understand oh
yeah you know you gotta you
gotta wind it or wear it to
get it to run and keep
running it has about forty
hour power reserve this and that um
so it's either seiko is
going to be your movement
or going to be miyota which
is owned by citizen
everybody knows citizen so
miyota watch miyota watch
group or miyota movement
group uh it's the seiko nh-
thirty-four is the only
affordable gmt movement
that has come out of japan
in the last uh thirty forty
years um so yeah they
released that movement back
in twenty about twenty
twenty or so twenty twenty one
And dual time zone movement, super cool.
Twenty-four joules, hand-wind, tacks,
forty hours.
It is in a good deal of the
Seiko watches that we sell.
So Seiko, when they make a movement, right,
so this is,
you correctly identify it as the NH-XXIV.
When Seiko uses it in their watches,
it's called a XR-XXIV.
It's the same movement, just unbranded.
Okay, okay.
They're in the movement business.
They're in the watch business first,
but they're also in the
movement business.
And they sell their movements to, you know,
to the trade.
And a lot of them at that.
What do you mean by jewels?
What does twenty four jewels
mean in the watch?
Sure.
So.
I mean, we could go forever.
I also have a series on the
channel called Watch and
Learn that's ninety-seven
or so issues deep,
so you can go into that catalog.
So in automatic watch, right,
it runs on a spring, right?
Power is all stored in a
spring and that power is
transmitted from the main
spring all the way finishing the training,
you know, pretty much to the second hand.
And it's a powerful spring, but
it still is subject to friction.
As things get smaller,
friction gets larger and
larger and larger.
So the effects of friction
get massive when you get
down to the scale of what
we're talking about.
So to counteract that,
every important gear, if you will,
or they call them wheels,
you'll notice a gear.
is mounted on artificial or
synthetic rubies and that's
a jewel so a typical
three-handed watch needs
seventeen jewels that's it
being jeweled to like the
second wheel or something
Seven in the regulating
mechanism and then for a
bunch of the wheels that go around.
For something like this,
it's got an extra GMT hand.
It's got a date,
a couple other complications.
Complications meaning
anything other than time.
Twenty-four joules.
So there's twenty-four
little synthetic rubies in the movement.
It's not really a mark of quality.
Back in the early two thousands,
people kind of considered a
mark of quality.
Oh, thirty jewels must be better.
It's not.
But twenty four is pretty much standard.
Anywhere from like seventeen
to twenty six is what most
watches is what most watches will have.
OK, that makes sense.
So because you can't build
ball bearings that small.
That is one hundred percent on point.
Yeah.
OK.
All right.
Very cool.
Well, you have any more watch questions?
Yeah.
So stand by because I'm
going through my list.
Oh, sure.
Take your time.
I want to make sure we haven't.
Well, so I saw that it comes with two.
Is it the option to get two
different bands?
You get it.
It just comes out.
It comes that way.
And so you get the you get
the bracelet and the leather strap.
And so that you don't need
tools to change them.
They're going to have what's
called QR pins on the back,
quick release pins.
And you can pretty much just
pinch it with your
fingertips and the pins
will retract and you can swap it out.
that's awesome that's also
hot okay so the face uh
looks like the fan blades
yes right uh you know for
the pegasus engine and I
noticed uh from the video
the canopy itself when you
turn the lights off the
canopy also glows yes which
is which is a nice touch
yep and what was the other thing um
Of course, on the back,
it's got the flags of all
the countries that flew it.
And is there a date?
Is there a date on the back?
Like the date?
There's a date on the bottom
of the dial on the front.
It says since nineteen seventy one.
OK.
That's that's bad ass.
Yeah, it is.
I don't know.
That's it.
That's the end.
That's all I got.
All right.
Cool.
So here here we go.
So you did aerospace engineering.
Did you study that in school?
Yeah, I did.
I went to a little place
called the Cooper Union in Manhattan,
got my bachelor's there,
graduated in ninety eight,
worked in aerospace till twenty eleven,
also got my master's and my
New York State professional
engineering license.
This worked for a while.
And then, you know,
basically the transition
out of engineering was
simply because my oldest,
who was getting into kindergarten,
we had someone to put him
on and off the school bus.
So I kind of decided to stay home.
My wife stayed working.
And then I grew the business from there.
And today is actually his
nineteenth birthday.
Hey, yeah.
Happy birthday.
Thanks.
And yeah, so that's it.
I just grew the business from from there.
And eventually my wife ended
her career and what she did.
She was a controller at a
private equity firm.
She came to work for me as well.
Now I've got, you know,
Right?
Very cool.
All right.
So you got your private pilot last year.
How long did it take you to get your PPL?
When did you start doing that?
So unfortunately,
that took me longer than I wanted it to.
I started that in May of
twenty twenty two.
And then I got that towards
the end of twenty four.
There was an eight month
stint where I never stepped
into a plane due to a back issue.
This back issue.
And but yeah,
so after I finally got all that sorted,
I got my head back in the
game and started in earnest,
got my PPL just before
Thanksgiving of last year.
Nice.
What'd you fly it in?
One seventy two.
Nice.
Well, congratulations.
And thank you.
Thank you.
That's that's that's no small feat.
No, I know.
I know it was it was cool.
Yeah.
What was the what was the hardest part?
and you know what believing
believing confidence in
yourself honestly hundred
percent that was it
landings everything else
sure difficult as hell you
know the thing that scared
me the most when I started
though was not any of that
it was so we you know we
were talking before I I
learned that right here at
Republic and the airspace
is you know it's a Delta
but it's super freaking
busy yeah it is and the
comms were the big thing
that worried me the most okay and now
I'm like, wow,
I can't believe you were
worried about that.
You couldn't land for damn,
but you were worried about
talking on the radio.
Right.
It's amazing how many people
go at non-controlled
airfields that are just
terrified of actually
having to talk to
controllers because they
all speak English and that's hard to do,
I guess.
I definitely understand.
I definitely got it.
And then it took a while.
But that was that was my number one fear.
And you know, landings,
I don't think have still come.
So it doesn't matter.
Yeah, no, not for any of us.
But you know, exactly.
So all right, any any close calls,
scary moments or funny moments?
Oh, wow.
In aviation?
Yeah.
You know, one of my solo, one of my solos,
you know,
when I was just endorsed for
solo doing the pattern,
there was some guy
literally going the wrong way,
doing all sorts of things.
And they actually asked me
to exit the Delta until
they can figure out what to do with them.
It was just me and him in the pattern,
which was unheard of.
It's usually very crowded.
And they told me to exit the Delta.
And I'm like, what?
I'm like, I'm a student.
I got to, okay.
They're like, yeah, you got to leave.
They're like, you know what you're doing.
You got to leave.
I was like, okay, I'll leave.
And I came back a couple minutes later.
That was about it.
You know, other than that,
I've just been having fun doing stuff.
It's okay.
That's okay.
You know,
you don't have to have a lot of
excitement with that kind of thing.
Exactly, exactly.
I'm okay with that.
I mean, I've had, obviously,
aircraft issues.
The airspeed indicator
pegged at forty no matter what I did.
know kind of some weird
things but that's that's
some that's schools in it
for profit for you sure
We actually had that recently.
We wanted, we landed,
we couldn't get past about
sixty knots no matter what we did.
And it turned out there was
a big old bug right in the
middle of our pitot tube.
Weird.
It's usually what happens.
Yeah.
I don't think in forty-three
years of flying until about
three weeks ago,
I've ever taken a bug
directly into the pitot tube.
Yeah.
That'll do it though.
Oh, man.
Well, I'm excited, Mark.
Thank you for coming on and
telling us about this watch.
I am ordering one as soon as we hang up.
Awesome.
Beautiful.
And yeah, so people know.
So we're closing in
September twenty third and
I expect to deliver
sometime in the middle of December.
I'm hoping earlier I
actually do the popularity for Christmas.
Yeah, I do the popularity.
I kick started a whole bunch
already just to get production rolling.
But yeah,
that's kind of like the goal right now.
Very cool.
Well, I'm super excited.
I guess I'm gonna have to go
out and order about one
hundred and ten of them to
get close to my two twenty three number.
facts but no you know I
don't think I'm going to
have to I think once people
hear this and the word gets
out I think there's going
to be some more coming in
trying to get as this
widely disseminated as we
can so very cool well mark
thank you for taking time
out of your day to join us
we're deeply appreciative
that you could and we're
really excited that you
decided to build build a
watch dedicated to one of
the greatest attack jets ever made ever
Yeah, I agree.
Very cool.
All right.
Well, thank you for your time.
Thank you, everybody.
Take care of yourselves.
And until next week, stay safe.
See you.
And we'll see you.
Well,
there I was crossing the pond and you
could see that I wasn't exactly fond.
Of all the shit I was wearing on that day.
Now an F-Sixteen is cramped enough,
but it's even worse.
With all that stuff supposed
to save your life.
But we knew there was no way.
Because when you're going
down in the North Atlantic, man,
it's over.
Hold on.
What did he say, Spig?
He said it's over.
That's a dumb question.
Skip that.
We're out.
That's a dumb question.
Take care, everybody.
I'm going to end this.
It was a dumb question.
That's a dumb question.
Skip now.
We're out.
And, oh, Badass is going to buy one.
Very cool.
Hey.
Take care, everyone.
He's in.
He's got about seven
thousand pictures of him.
All right.
Exactly.
Maybe more.
Shit,
he might have a hundred thousand
pictures.
Take care, Badass.