Bulova 1966 Accutron

Wow, is that interesting. Thanks for sharing. I searched the 1963-67 Accutron linebook as well as all 1965 thru 1967 general linebooks and find nothing. If I had to guess, I'd say military or an unknown Railroad approved variant. I'm personally stumped and for now have to default to

1966 Unknown.

With all due respect to all collectors of vintage time pieces a hang tag made up by a previous owner doesn't give us much to go on and may not be entirely factual. I've never seen this configuration in a wrist watch but have seen it hundreds of times in what I call an instrument panel clock as found HERE. My guess (and it's nothing more than that) is that this is the movement from a panel clock repurposed into a wrist watch case.  It's hard to suggest a classification as IF that were the case we would classify it as Non-Conforming (a designation for watches made up of components from various watches). I suggest that while we don't see anything in the Bulova line Books (catalogs) from the era we could classify is as a 1966 Bulova Accutron.

Any chance of seeing the movement and the model number?

The 214HN used by the Astronaut models has 2 hour hands, 1 x 12 hour minute hand + 1 x 24 hour minute hand. Could this just have the standard 12 hr minute hand removed?

The 2142 is another possibility that utilises a second 24 hour minue hand.

The TE10, TE-11 and TE-13 clocks used in aircraft and the space program that Geoff suggests is a pure 24 hour timepiece and uses this dial configuration and colour (Black with white numbers). Geoff's theory is plausable.

Darold Hanson's guide book has some good information of these TE clocks.

Rare might be a good description if we knew more about the movement used.

MrTrunk - please understand, our mission is to help ID old Bulova watches using verified Bulova advertising from the 1920's onward and a series of Bulova dealer facing catalogs from the 1950's onward. If we can't validate a watch ID using information we believe to have come from Bulova we generally assign an ID of "unknown".  All that means is that we can't find it in any of the source material we have on site. We generally do not accept validation from other collector websites unless they verify their claims through source material as well. We are not suggesting that what you think to be true about your watch or it's rarity is not true as you're free to believe what you believe, we just can't validate or verify it using our research material. I agree that we've not seen this particular watch in the past and I am interested to learn more about it.

If at all possible we ask to see a photo the movement and maybe a photo of the dial out of the case, which doesn't seem to be to difficult of an ask.

At this point I will suggest that we ID your watch as a 1966 Bulova Accutron as that's really the only thing we can tell from the photos you've provided. Thanks for sharing it.

This might be a silly question but, could any Astronuat be converted into something like this by not installing the standard hour hand and swapping out the dial. I appreciate that an original dial itself would be hard to find, but I am wondering about the technicalities of creating such a timepieice.

The standard Astronaut I would imagine has 3 gears: 1 x 24 hr, 1 x 12 hour and 1 x minute. If I read the above referenced post right, the true 24 hr timepieced has just the one hour wheel (gear) along with the standard minute wheel (gear). Is my reading of that post correct?

Here's a 1966 parts listing for the 2142 Astronaut additional parts.

132 = 24 hour wheel

137 = 12 hour wheel

136 = Minute wheel

134 =  12/24 conversion wheel (not sure this is what it's called)

My thinking is that these true 24 hr timepieces didn't used part 137 and parts 134 and 132 were slightly modified.

The question I have is, did someone convert a TE clock movement into a wristwatch, convert an Astronaut, or is this a genuine 24 hr wristwatch timepiece?