Omega Seamaster ST 135.0005 and the ’59 ’66 logo change

9 years ago  •  By  •  1 Comments

I just got an '60s Omega watch from my wife. It belonged to her grandfather. It took some digging but I found the watch reference. It is an Omega Seamaster ST 135.0005, or so I thought. Everything about my watch and the image from the Omage site is the same. It has no date, the dials are equal and the baseplate is equal including the quarter markers which are double on the watch.

There is only one thing different and that is the Seamaster label.

After some more digging, I found out that they changed the label. Same watch but a different R.

ST 135.0005
Left: the image front the Omega website. Right: a reference image from a forum which is equal to my watch. You will also notice that the crown on the right watch seems different. The crown on my watch is the same as the crown on the left image.

I started digging deeper and I also found an Omega Seamaster 30 with both kinds of logo’s and I found even a third version of the logo. Omega seemed to have altered the logo in three steps. First they altered the r to not stick out anymore and then they rounded the starting S.

seamaster-logo-change
Left: The sharp starting S longer R. Middle: The sharp S but normal r. Right: The rounder S and the normal r.

In the second phase of my search, I thought they switched between 1962 and ’63 but that was not the fact. I found a Seamaster CK 14722 from ’59 on the Omega site with the Sharp S normal r logo. I also found a sharp S longer R logo on a Seamaster 30 ST 135.0007 from ’62. I also found a Seamaster 600 from ’62 with the rounded S logo and my watch is from ’63 and has both logo’s.

I started looking even more closely at the ’63 models and I saw there is even a 4th difference in logo’s. Look at the starting S from the left watch on the first image. It seems wider than the more hooked S from the left watch on the second image. I looked at every watch model from ’66 and they al have the same logo: rounder S and normal r.

I was officially completely lost. I now started looking at every Omega watch created from ’51. I compared every S and to be honest, until ’66 they al seem different. When I found a Seamaster from ’69 with the ‘old logo’ I gave up. (I figured out later I looked at the models until ’66 where the ’69 watch is actually built in ’69, but by now I had spend more than 6h on it and it was the middle of the night.)

I don’t know why there are watches from the same year with different logo’s. I don’t know why there are watches from the same model with different logo’s. But it’s a good thing that you now know the Omega logo’s differ and that dating a watch by the logo’s is not the way to go 😉

omega-speedmaster-ST-1350005

Ps. I did find that the first year the hands go from triangular shape (image 2, left) to ‘straight’ with a point (image 1, left) is ’59.

Ps 2. The Calibre 550 Seamasters from ‘59 and ‘61 are close visual relatives to my watch. The only difference is the text “Automatic” under the Omega logo which is not present on my watch fase. Automatic watches are… automatic and my watch is a manual wind watch.

Ps 3. I went trough the Omega Addict database and searched Seamasters and looked at all the logo’s.

This will make dating a watch based on the logo a little easier. My watch is most likely from ’62 or before.

Ps 4. Somebody at the Dutch forum explained that sometimes logo’s also change when a watch gets a redial.  That means that the dial is cleaned and touched up by hand or repainted from scratch. So don’t look at the logo alone!

Ps 5. The watchmaker opened up the watch and it is a Calibre 600. That means that there is a good chance it’s a ST 135.0005. It might also be a Omega CK 14750. We’ll know more after the cleanup of the watch.

Ps 6. I could hardly find any material searching for the 135.0005. I did find a lot when I searched for 135.005. This model is a Calibre 600 but has a different back plate. Since the Omega website itself has not proven to be very acurate I’m leaning more towards the watch being a CK 14750.

The search is over! It is a CK14750. The guys at Juwelier Scheich just confirmed it.

Comments 1

  1. Christopher Heick
    I have an old seamaster it is a dive version as it has three dials I do not know the reference number It does not have the omega symbol is this a sign of a fake if not does it hurt it's value

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