OLEVS Classic Wrist Watches,Men Business Watches Dress Watch with Day,Green/Black/White/Blue Face,Flywheel Multifunction Luminous Men Stainless Steel Wristwatch

My 40 year old Sako watches are developing problems, so I was looking for something else for every-day wear – something that would cost significantly less than getting the old Sakos repaired. This seems to fit the requirement. LOTS of options on styles and looks, all just skins on basically the identical quartz watch as far as I can tell. At first glance, this one seems pretty impressive.

I did not want any digital display of any type, just a real watch. But I also wanted at least a date, and ideally a rotating bezel that could mark basic elapsed time. Again, I was able to find the right match with all the options I saw available. There seems to be several price ranges for these Olevs watches, but nothing to tell me how they differ, if at all. If the manufacturer chooses to not be specific about the differences, I am assuming the more expensive ones are the exact same watches that are only intended to sucker buyers that feel better about not buying the cheapest ones? I wouldn’t trust the watch for being water resistant in any way (neither the crown nor the back screw down), but otherwise it seems like a decent choice.

Now for some specifics – I am a big guy – not particularly fat – but big enough that many watches with a standard leather band are just barely big enough to fit me. This watch with the stainless band is plenty big – in fact I had to remove two links. And they do include the tool needed to do this – just be careful how you use it. Many other reviewers have complained about how flimsy that tool is and how easy it is to break the pins, but I found that they mostly just did not understand what they were doing – if you are careful, it works just fine.

Here’s the deal, the links in the watch band are not precision machined inside, so the links do have some natural slop and flex in how they move around the pins. And the pins seems to mostly be just the tiniest bit too short to fully go from one side of the link to the other. This in no way affects the look or feel of the watch band, but it DOES make it easy to screw up when you try to remove a link. The little tool they give you does not have any mechanism to hold the band fixed in place, so as you begin to turn in the punch to remove a pin, the band will naturally flex up a bit over the base of the tool, and this allows the pin inside the link to move slightly out of alignment with the hole in the link.

And that is the problem.

If you let the band rise up as you screw in the tool, that tip of the punch on the tool can slip off the face of the pin inside the link and go into the hole at an angle, causing it to bend or break. The problem is very simply remedied by just holding the band down with your thumb!

Once I recognized this issue, any pin in the band (except one) was very easy tor remove without damaging anything. That single exception was stuck in place hard enough, and had enough slop in the pin fit, that I just never could get the tool to stay in place. So I simply went to a different link.

Good looking watch