Enicar Super Graph “Simonet”

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What is better than collecting watches? Collecting watches with a cool and interesting history! I told you some of the stories behind my watches just recently, but I think this is the coolest watch with one of the best stories so far. Besides the story I will explain the unique features of this watch in detail.

When you see the the picture of the watch at the top and you are a regular reader at enicar101, you will maybe recognize the distuingish look. I allready wrote about a similar watch which appeared out of the dark a year ago and gave me some puzzles to solve.

What we knew so far was that this is a watch, that was used during the Olympic Games in Tokyo back in 1964 by the Swiss shooting team. It was pictured in an ad in the watch magazine Europa Star and in the Enicar “Saturn” company magazin.

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Text:
Based on the close collaboration of the best shooters and the Enicar company, a special watch could be build for the shooting competition of the Tokyo Olympic games.
During the tests those special watches were very effective due to their precision and keeping time worries off the head of the shooters and free their mind for other important things

The guy you see in this ad, is the Swiss rifle shooter Hans Simonet. Together with 3 other Swiss rifle shooters he attended the competition and made it 13th place. The Hungarian László Hammer won gold.

I made contact with Hans, now 85 years old, cause I wanted to know more about these special Super Graphs , how they work and their relation to Enicar.

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The first thing you notice is the special bezel with those red segments. It looks kind of weird, cause they dont go from marker to marker, but end close to them. To understand what they do, we have to look into the rifle shooting rules. As rifle shooter with small calibre, you have 120min time, to complete your run, or 105min in an electronic firing range. In a large calibre competition you have 135min time, or 120min in and electronic firing range. If you set the start of the first red segment to 12o’clock, the segment will end at 1:45 or after exactly 105 minutes. The second red segment is exactly 135min long and the black one in between 120min. 105 + 120 + 135 is 360, so the last red segment ends at half of the bezel.

So the segments support the shooter in keeping their time. If they start a run, they just needed to turn the bezel to the hour hand and thats it.

The next thing you notice that is different to other Super Graphs are the small orange lume dots on the hour chrono counter. Again we see markers at 105, 120 and 135min. I guess this was for a cross check or maybe one shooter prefered the one option for the other. The orange marker at 6:30 is still a riddle for me. Those timings are unique for rifle shooters and wouldn’t work in pistol competitions.

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The watch you see here in the pics is Hans’ Enicar he was wearing on the pic at the top and during the Olympic games 1964. A lot of memories came with this watch. To honor Hans and cause its an old watch collector tradition to call watches after their wearer, I would like to name this special watch “Simonet”.

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Until now we have seen two of these watches. Cause they are special made for rifle shooting competitions and they just have been four shooters at the Olympics 1964 maybe just four watches were ever “build” and possibly survived. Well three: I also talked to the wife of August Hollenstein, another Tokyo 1964 shooter. She lost the watch during a dove race on the roof of her car somewhere in the Swiss woods in the sixties (no kidding). Unfortunately I think this watch is gone forever 😉