About

We help people buy an old American pocket watch without getting burned. Name the grade you’re after, like a Hamilton 992B, a Waltham Vanguard, an Elgin B.W. Raymond or an Illinois Bunn Special, and there’s a page for it. Each one tells you the watch’s story, what the engraving on the movement should say and what to check in a listing before you buy.

What collectors know about these watches is scattered across serial tables, forum threads and decades of trial and error, and a raw eBay search gives you none of it. So we keep 29 watch pages in one place, write down the tells that usually take years to learn (refinished dials, movements moved into other cases, missing setting levers and worn gold fill) and pick the listings we’d buy.

We don’t sell watches. No affiliate links. We earn nothing. We run no analytics and set no tracking cookies. We’re not affiliated with any maker we cover or anyone who owns those names today. See how we work for how the pages are researched and our disclosure for how links, picks and photos work.

Standard Time is part of allbutnew, a set of shops for secondhand gear. Got a pocket watch to sell? The “Get an offer” link on every watch page sends it to our watch expert, who replies by email.