The watch I wear most is a copy

The top of my rotation is not the most expensive watch I own, nor the prettiest, nor the one I would show first to someone asking about the collection. It is a Laco Augsburg 39, and it sits on 10.7% of my logged days, ahead of twenty-six others.

It took me a while to accept that number.

What it copies

The Augsburg reproduces the B-Uhr, the observation watch the German air force used in the Second World War. It did not belong to the pilot: it belonged to the bomber's navigator, the man leaning over the table plotting course and noting times on the map. It had a 55 mm case, an oversized crown to operate with gloves, a soft-iron cage against the aircraft's magnetism, and hacking seconds, to set it against a time signal to the exact second.

Five factories made it: A. Lange & Söhne, Wempe, Laco, Stowa and IWC, the only Swiss one. And the detail I told in the post, still the one that gets me: the watch was property of the Luftwaffe, not of the navigator. He was issued one before take-off and returned it after landing.

Pforzheim, 1925

Laco began as Lacher & Co. in Pforzheim, then the German capital of jewellery and watchmaking. Together with Durowe, its movement arm, it became one of the city's larger houses. Stowa, another of the five, was a neighbour there — Walter Storz founded it in Hornberg in 1927 and moved to Pforzheim in 1935.

On 23 February 1945 the city was bombed. Stowa's factory was rubble. Laco carried on making watches among what was left, and the pilot watches only returned to the catalogue at the start of the 2000s. The brand's own history page gives no exact year, which says something about the size of the gap.

What mine actually is

Here honesty charges its price. My Augsburg is 39 mm, not 55. Typ A dial, hours 1 to 12 on a single ring, triangle at twelve. Sapphire crystal, display back, 5 ATM.

And inside it there is no German calibre. There is a Laco 2S, which is a Japanese Miyota 82S0. A German homage to a German instrument, with a Japanese movement, assembled in Pforzheim.

It is the copy of a watch nobody could own, made with a part the original story never knew.

This bothers me less than I expected it to. The 82S0 is robust, it hacks like the original did, and it costs a fraction of what a manufacture movement would. The realistic alternative was never an Augsburg with a German calibre at a similar price. It was no Augsburg at all.

Why it wins

For months I assumed my rotation leader would be the NOMOS or the Junghans. Those are the watches I would pick to represent the collection, and they sit right behind, on 8.9% and 8.5%.

What the log shows is duller and truer. The Laco wins because it demands no decision. Black dial, big white numerals, 39 mm that vanish under any sleeve, and the feeling that if it hits a door frame the problem belongs to the door. It is the watch I grab when I am not thinking about watches.

The ones I admire most are the ones I choose. This is the one I wear.

What the log says

Ten point seven per cent of the rotation, first among twenty-seven watches. Two wears in the last thirty days and none in the last seven, which shows that accumulated lead is not the same thing as recent use.

Without logging, I would have bet wrong about my own collection, and gone on betting wrong. That is why I started writing it down.