This is a nice watch story about collecting vintage watches. 

Everybody knows what a NOS watch means, and this one is indeed new old stock, stickers and tags intact, but… the story is not so straight forward.

This looks as the day it left production, a NOS Citizen watch, no scratches, clean sharp lines, perfect bracelet, no dirt, perfect acrylic crystal, perfect dial, perfect hands, stickers and tags. And we are talking about an old watch, made in 1969. Let’s see the watch!

The case is made of stainless steel, round, with straight lugs. Al the lines are straight, clear and bold. The watch is polished entirely. The crown is signed, as usually, “CTZ”. There is a perfectly integrated stainless steel bezel that holds in place the acrylic crystal. As you would guess, the crystal raises a little bit on the edges, but the surface is perfectly flat as parallel to one another as possible. The diameter is 39mm and it is “parawater”. (I love this Citizen trademark feature)

The dial is simple, grey, with a sun burst pattern with a date at 3 and the day at 12. Both the day and the date frames are applied and so are the Citizen logo (under the day frame), the baton hour markers (double for 12 o’clock) and the “7” badge at 6 (between the writing – “Crystal Seven” and “33 jewels”).

The movement, and now the plot thickens, inside this gorgeous NOS Citizen is… the Citizen NOS calibre 5270, with… 21 jewels! What?! Why is it written on the dial 33 jewels and the watch model suggest it is a 21 jewels movement inside? How come inside is not a 5240 (for example) or another 33 jewels movement? I have an idea, but that will be in the conclusion. As for the calibre 5270, it is an automatic, with a nice black rotor, 21 jewels, that can be winded by hand also, with a day and date function.

The bracelet is a beautiful brushed with two polished longitudinal lines. It has folded links and closes with a beautiful satined (as most of the vintage Citizen should have) clasp. The clasp has a raised polished Citizen logo with sharp lines and edges.

Conclusion: Just a beautiful, clean, honest design watch, but not so honest when it says on the dial that the movement inside should be 33 jewels, but in fact it is a 21 jewels calibre. So, my point of view regarding this is that the dial and the day wheel was changed at a later date. I wonder if the hands and date wheel belong to the watch or to the dial?  After all they are basically on the same base movement (5270 and maybe 5240). I might suspect that this is the way it was made 45 years ago.  So this is just a recent “marriage” watch, made from NOS original pieces. Unfortunately, watch collecting is not always easy. 🙂

Thank you Stephen for your, much more detailed answer, and your blog: http://www.sweep-hand.org: “You can see from this that the case number is for a Seven Star model, not a Crystal Seven. The model is a Seven Star Deluxe in fact with day and date window at 3 o’clock (I have a pic of that in a book, but I’ve not scanned it yet), which uses a 21 jewel 5270 movement. The dial design with a separate day window at 12 o’clock was used in the earlier Crystal Seven models up to 1968 as far as I’ve seen, so a production date of 1969 seems too late for that layout to me. So it looks to me that the NOS case and 5270 movement has been used with a NOS Crystal Seven dial and day/date wheels (I guess they would fit since it’s the same base movement) and although presented as an original NOS piece I doubt that this is correct.”