Tissot Supersport Chrono T1254171104100: specs and what to check

Coating is the whole condition question

Tissot publishes the case material as 316L stainless steel & PVD coating, and that phrase should govern the entire inspection.

Bare steel forgives. A scratched steel case can be refinished, and a good watchmaker will return it to something close to factory without a buyer being able to tell.

PVD cannot. It is a thin deposited layer bonded to the steel. When it wears through, what shows is bright steel against a dark case — a permanent, obvious patch. And polishing does not restore it; polishing removes more coating and makes the area worse.

So look where coatings always fail first:

• Lug tips and case corners, which meet door frames and desk edges
• The clasp, opened and closed daily, rubbing against itself
• Link edges along the bracelet
• The case flanks at their widest point
• Around the pushers and crown, where fingers and tools land

Anything you find is a permanent condition issue. Photograph it, describe it, price it in. A buyer who opens a box to a bright wear patch you did not mention will read it as concealment, and from where they are standing it looks identical.

The bracelet has to be coated too

Because the coating is a finish rather than a material, a replacement bracelet is one of the most common bodges on watches like this.

Tissot gives the bracelet reference as T605052437 at 22 mm, listed as interchangeable quick release.

Hold the bracelet against the case in good light and check the colour and sheen match all the way along. An uncoated steel bracelet fitted to a PVD case is instantly visible in person and easy to hide in a badly lit photograph, which is precisely why it gets done.

Then work the butterfly clasp a dozen times. It folds into the bracelet, so nobody inspects it, and at 165.00 g it is carrying a real load every time the watch goes on.

Aluminium bezel, graded on its own terms

The bezel is stainless steel with an aluminium bezel ring listed under case options.

Aluminium neither chips like ceramic nor scratches bright like mineral glass. It fades — especially coloured inserts under sunlight — and it takes small permanent dents where it has been struck.

Grade it accordingly and describe the material by name. A dulled aluminium insert is ordinary ageing, not damage, and a buyer who knows what aluminium does will not expect otherwise.

What the chronograph actually does

Quartz chronograph PowerDrive on a 1.55 volt cell, with a battery end-of-life warning, thirty-minute and tenth-of-a-second counters, a centre chronograph seconds hand, and ADD and SPLIT.

Test the last two properly. ADD should continue an existing count after a stop and restart rather than beginning again. SPLIT should freeze the display while timing continues underneath, then catch the hand up when released.

If the seconds hand is lurching in multi-second steps, check the battery before you check anything else — that is the end-of-life warning doing its job.

Case and crystal

42.00 mm in both directions, 11.27 mm thick, rated 10 bar (100 m / 330 ft) with no threaded crown described.

The crystal is sapphire, and the antireflective layer sits on its underside only. Look for haze trapped behind the glass at a shallow angle; expect the outer face to be bare.

Dial blue, index markers, Super-LumiNova on the hands.

Tissot does not publish a caseback description for this reference. Do not fill the gap from another Supersport — look at the watch, say what it has, and make clear that this part is your observation.

Made in Switzerland, two-year warranty from new.