Jacques Lemans Chronograph

Jacques Lemans

Functions

  1. Time: Hours, minutes, seconds and a 24 hour display
  2. Calendar: Weekday, day of month, month and moonphase
  3. Chronograph: Seconds (minimum: 1/8), minutes (30 min dial) and hours (12 hour dial)
  4. Movement: Full mechanical selfwinding movement.
  5. Case: Stainless steel case with mineral glass and glass back
  6. Bracelet: Polished steel with butterfly clasp

Dial Details

This watch offers a very nice dial, compared to most other 7751s on the market. It's a white painted metal dial with a structured inner part (if you look closely onto the logo on top of these pages, you might recognize it) and three sunken sub dials, centrically brushed.

The minutes are shown by small and rather unique looking relief roman figures, which are silver colored. At first glance, they look like standard markers, only if you look at them in details, you will recognize the "I", "V"s and "X"es. On the outside, there are the common (and false) lines for the minutes (which are a bit too short and small) and for 1/5th seconds. They are wrong, because the Valjoux 7751 advances in 1/8th second steps and therfor, the second hand can never tough the 1/5th second markers.

Outside the minutes, there's the date dial, showing the numbers 1 to 31. Since they are very near the minute indices, you can mix them up with the minute markers, therefor you sometimes have to look twice, to read the chronograph second or time minute hand.

Between the dial and the crystal, there's a small which (plastic?) ring, which features a tachymetre. In the small booklet of the watch, there's a short description, how to use this dial to time the speed of your car, for example.

On top of the dial, you find the silvery 30 minutes subdial. Even with the two date fields in between, all thirty markers are perfectly readable. This is not too common on other watches.
The two date fields show the weekday and the month from two discs in german language. Due to the contrast (black font on white background), they are perfectly readable and they can be easily distunguished from the rest of the 30 minutes chronograph subdial.

On the left, you find the combined permanent seconds and 24 hours dial.
As you can see on the markers, the main purpose of the dial, is to show the hours of the day. Since there are no 60 seconds lines, but only 24 lines, the permanent seconds are a bit difficult to read. In fact, the only way to read them exactly, is to wait, until they show a multiple of five seconds. In practice, it's sufficient to check, if the watch is running and to set the watch.
The benefit of that dial layout is, that it doesn't look overloaded. Many 24hr/60sec subdials of 7751 watches suffer of overloading here.

The 24 hour hand has got a luminous inlay. It's the only luminous hand of the entire watch.
The 12 hour/moonphase dial is a bit difficult to read. The problem here is, that both, the 12 hour hand, and the background of the moonphase dial are in a dark blue color and therefor missing any contrast.
While the pretty moon phase (unfortunatly not in 3D) is easy to read, you have to look very closely onto the 12 hour hand. Additionaly, the dial markers are rather short, that decreases readability, again.
The 12 hour/moonphase dial is a bit difficult to read. The problem here is, that both, the 12 hour hand, and the background of the moonphase dial are in a dark blue color and therefor missing any contrast.
While the pretty moon phase (unfortunatly not in 3D) is easy to read, you have to look very closely onto the 12 hour hand. Additionaly, the dial markers are rather short, that decreases readability, again.
However, between 2:30 and 9:30 stopwatch time, this dial is very well readable

 

9 out of 10 points for the dial.

 

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