The small ladies diving watches produced by Seiko in the 1970’s and 80’s are beautiful little watches with some exquisite details and which can be found for next to nothing, if you are patient. Both of the watches shown here were bought on Ebay around $35 each. One is a quartz, fitted with the 2625 movement, and the other a high beat automatic 2205.

They both had tatty bezels and scratched crystals when I received them but were otherwise in very nice condition. The dials on both are superb, with embossed hour markers and beautiful hands, reminiscent of the lovely Seiko 6159 divers of the 1960’s and, of course, to a lesser extent of the dials on the 6105 dive watches discussed here.

Both watches presented some small but annoying problems. Aftermarket bezel inserts are easily available for the 2205 but they are of rather ordinary quality. Unfortunately, the bezel on the 2625 is slightly larger than the 2205 and the inserts rattle around inside and need gluing to stay put. This is what I had to do with the quartz, in the absence of any other solution. The gap is small enough to go unnoticed and as this now belongs to my eldest son (aged 9 at the time) I was sure that small gaps would be the least of its problems (and this indeed turned out to be the case – two crystal and three insert replacements later).

The 2205 was destined for my wife and I wanted a higher quality insert than those available on Ebay. Much to my good fortune, I happened to notice a post on the Seiko Citizen forum in which a member from the Netherlands happened to mention that he had some new old stock (NOS) 2205 bezels. I contacted him and a week or two later, I had a new complete bezel for the 2205, supplied with a new gasket.

The next problem was the crystals. These are next to impossible to find. I searched for weeks and the only workable solution appeared to be an acrylic crytal sourced from a Seiko parts specialist in the US. However, I happened to stumble upon some crystals that sounded like they might fit from a watch parts house in the UK. I took a punt, bought two for a few pounds each, and they turned out to be a perfect fit with exactly the same profile and form as the originals.
The quartz watch needed no more than a fresh battery to get it going and has been running quite happily for the past few weeks. The 2205 was running very slow when I got it although the movement looked immaculate. I sent this off to a watchmaker for a service and although in ran sweetly for a while, it faltered and has been on my to do list for a while.  I’ll get around to it eventually.

One more small detail which I like. The 2205 movement hand winds but does not hack and the quickset date works by pulling the crown outwards from the time setting position.