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Unitas 6497 Swan Neck Replica Movement |
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Articles -
Watchmasters Corner
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Written by Ziggy Zumba
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One of the easiest ways of spotting certain fake Panerais was to flip the watch over and look at the movement through the exhibition case back. The counterfeit models used a non-modified Unitas 6497 movement, while Panerai used a heavily revised version that included a signature "Swan Neck" bridge. If your watch didn't have the swan-neck bridge it was probably fake.
Recently several Unitas movements used in replica watches have been sporting a version of the swan-neck bridge. Ziggy gives his breakdown of this modification. A fascinating read if you're a Panerai fan.
Well here it is as promised.
It is a ETA 6497-1 not a -2 (-1 is 18,000BPH, -2 is 21,600BPH).
And plse note, it is NOT a Unitas movement, that is a misnomer. Unitas originally designed and built this movement when there were wood burning watches, but these models, as are all PAM 6497-1 movements, are all ETA movements. If you order Unitas parts for an ETA movement, you'll find out that they don't fit, because they are not the same.
So here is the movement in living colour, it looks great.
Here's the beast in pieces waiting for cleaning:
Note the size of that mainspring....
Nice finish on the mainplate.
Beveled gears for the mainspring and crown gear.
Parts fit and finish is up to ETA standards, not Asian standards.
Note the very faint -1 at the end of the serial #, this tells me that this started life as a 6497-1 model
Not the excellent finish and quality of the bridges. Whoever made these knows what they are doing, tolerances for the jewel holes are in the 0.001mm or less (just a rough guess). You would not be cutting one of these new bridges on your dremel and drill press, you need high tech tooling and skills to make these.
ETA gears throughout.
However, after all this, we still have the short cannon pinion, at 2.65mm, to fix the recessed hand issue you need the longer ones, at 3.15mm, but they are very difficult to source, no luck so far.
Same for the hour wheel, it should be 2.15mm for the longer posts.
Overall the movement was clean, a bit of lint but not bad.
I did note that the new escape bridge and the balance co** were extremely difficult to remove, so I got the old reemer out and enlarged the alignment pin holes to 1.09mm and that fixed the tightness.
RG
Articles 
Panerai 
Unitas 
Unitas 6497 "Swan Neck" Replica Movement 
swan-neck 
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Ziggy Zumba |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 14 August 2007 )
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