Tissot Gentleman 40mm T1274071109101: specs and what to check

Silicon, not Nivachron

This is the specification that separates the reference from its stablemates, and it is easy to flatten into a generic claim about antimagnetic hairsprings.

Tissot publishes, for this watch: patented silicon balance spring.

For the PRX and Seastar references documented on this site it publishes: patented Nivachron™ balance spring.

Those are genuinely different materials with different properties, and a dealer who writes "Nivachron" here because that is what Tissot usually fits has made a factual error on the one movement detail the page actually gives.

It matters commercially too. Silicon hairsprings are a selling point in their own right, and a buyer comparing two Tissots at similar money is entitled to know which one they are getting. Quote the phrase as printed.

What the page withholds is everything else: no movement number, no count of jewels, no beat rate, and no figure for how far it may run out in a day. Describe the movement as Swiss automatic, 80 hours, patented silicon balance spring, date — and no further.

Eighty hours means a weekend off the wrist is survivable. Wind it fully, set it down, and check it three days later.

Twenty-one millimetres

The published lug width is 21.00 mm.

That is an awkward number. Twenty and twenty-two are the sizes every strap maker stocks; twenty-one is a fraction of the market, and a 20 mm strap in a 21 mm gap leaves visible play while a 22 will not go in.

Two things follow.

Do not promise an easy strap change. If a buyer asks, tell them the size first. It is the single most useful thing you can say about this watch that they will not work out from photographs.

Note what is absent from the sheet. Several Tissot references documented here list interchangeable quick release bracelets. This page does not. So a strap change here means spring bars, a tool and the risk of a slipped blade across the lug — not a thumbnail on a tab.

The bracelet reference is T605044607, and it closes with a butterfly clasp with push-buttons: hidden, load-bearing and worth opening a dozen times to confirm both wings latch.

A window worth using

The case back is see-through.

On a reference where the maker publishes almost nothing about the movement, that window is your best source of information. Wind the watch, look through it under a loupe, and check the obvious things: no oil creeping from the jewels, no witness marks where the rotor has touched, no burred screw slots from a previous service, no fingerprints on the bridges.

It will not tell you the calibre. It will tell you how the watch has been treated, which is the more useful of the two.

Size, weight and rating

40.00 mm in both directions, 11.50 mm thick, 164.00 g complete.

A hundred and sixty-four grams is substantial for a watch of these proportions — heavier than the 138 g PRX 40 and the 148 g Seastar 40 — and nearly all of it is bracelet. That is worth a line in the description, because weight is what a buyer feels first.

Water resistance is 10 bar (100 m / 330 ft). No threaded crown is described on this page, so the rating assumes a crown fully pushed home.

The crystal is sapphire, coated on its bottom side alone. Nothing on the outer face can be scratched; anything wrong on the inner one is a new crystal.

The dial is listed as green with index hour markers and Super-LumiNova applied to the hands. Tissot gives the origin as Switzerland and the warranty as two years from new.