I recently purchased Mondani's famous "Collecting Rolex Submariner". The book is massive, 265 pages of thick-stock glossy paper, filled with images of our favorite tool watches
Great book, highly recommend. As excellent a reference book on Submariners (and Sea-Dwellers) as it may be, I'm not sure it is a complete work. Yes, it contains all the key versions of the
Submariner, Submariner Date and Sea-Dweller. They even included the
Deep-Sea (both versions - I have their 2015 edition) as well as the
SD4K.
You've got your
James Bonds, Gilt, Spider, Ghost, Red, Red-Depth, Underline, Exclamation-Point, Bart Simpson, meters-first, "At-The-Top", COMEX, MilSub, Double-Red, Great-White, etc. Heck, there's even three dial-versions of the
16600, not including the
COMEX and Italian Police-divers ("Polipetto") versions!
Everything you could wish for... except for maybe the A-Series SWISS dial...
. So naturally my first thought was
"oh no, they were right, it's just another Service Dial...". And maybe it is. The thing is I'm still convinced that most of (if not the whole) A-series were assembled with SWISS dials.
Furthermore, the bezel is from the MK-I (tritium) period as well as the caseback on my A-series (the inner-side of the "MK-I" / Tritium casebacks are stamped with "16600" while the "official" lume dials, Mondani's MK-II and MK-III dials, are stamped with "2220" - Rolex's contemporary coding).
Given the above, I could easily conclude that my 16600 was originally a MK-I T-dial that was serviced by Rolex... if it were not for the sheer quantity of A-series with SWISS dials out there. As such, the possibility that this is indeed a transition dial still exists.
And I'm not the only one to think so...
http://www.rolexforums.com/showthread.php?t=265018
They are able to show that the 16600 SWISS dial and the Service dial have different fonts (for example, the longer "
f" in "
ft" as well as added spacing)
But for now, my SWISS-dial 16600 will have to settle for the pages of the T-dial, 16600-caseback, fat-four bezel MK-I...
