Like many people I really want a Cartier Tank. And like a lot of those people, I can’t really afford one. Who knew that having just one son would turn out to be quite so expensive! (But I wouldn’t change it for the world of course!) Instead of Cartier, I have Seiko. I have… quite a lot of Seiko. Maybe 100? Around a fifth of them are quartz, mostly vintage but some newer. And amongst them, sitting idly in a watch box for the best part of three years, hardly ever seeing the light of day, was a big brute of a tank style watch. This is the Seiko 7T62-0GK0 Tank.

A steel alarm and chronograph quartz watch with a curved upper profile and crystal that stretches at the peak to a full 13mm from the caseback, it is approximately 37mm across excluding crown and pushers, and around 44mm from lug tip to lug tip. Those lugs are short though, and house a fitted bracelet in their 25mm width. In the middle is a black rectangular dial with white dog-tooth hour markers and a date only window. It has silver framed subdial at 6, 9 and 12 for alarm setting, running seconds and chronograph minutes respectively. Silver hour and minute hands with lume plots are quite easy to read at a glance and are topped with a chronograph elapsed seconds hand.

The 7T62 movement was introduced in the very early 2000’s is a fairly low-end modern Seiko workhorse with plastic innards, no jewels and an accuracy of around +/- half a second a day. I’ve found that mine operates well within that, but I don’t wear it often so that may help. The bracelet is fitted to the watch, although it is a little short for my farm-hands sized wrist, I have had to install a clasp extender. I’ve not tried it on any other straps, but I suspect some tapered vintage style leather would probably do well. It sits well on my wrist, but because it is quite a chunk of watch, you know you are wearing it, and it won’t slip under a well-fitted shirt sleeve.

Quite why my Seiko 7T62-0GK0 Tank has languished in the box, unloved for so long, is a mystery to me now. I picked it up some time ago as part of a deal and didn’t take to it at first I suppose. I got it out of the box a while ago to take some photos of it so I could list it on eBay. When I was taking the photos, I started to look more carefully at it to get the best angles, and started to see in it what I hadn’t before – the large, curved profile crystal and the unusually shaped chrono pushers. I started to like it, and it’s now very much in rotation and will remain so. At least until I get that Cartier…