Reference:6694: Difference between revisions

<small>[[Reference:precision|Precision]] › '''6694'''</small>

==Core facts==

==Where it sits in the line==

==Production outline==

Rolex sold manual-wind watches for roughly a quarter century after the 6694 left the catalogue. Its own product pages for the Cellini Rolex Prince, live through December 2014, carry a section headed "Wound by hand" and read: "The Prince features a manually-wound mechanical movement - the 7040 calibre - specially developed and manufactured by Rolex." The specification block on the same pages gives "Manually wound mechanical movement" and "Calibre 7040, Manufacture Rolex". That is the manufacturer describing current production, and it settles the point.

==Movement notes==

Three calibers are documented on 6694 lots, all manual-wind, all 17 jewels, all from the Rolex 1200 family. Caliber 1220 is never named on a 6694 at any of the six houses searched.

The family architecture is described consistently by two independent sources — the watch-wiki caliber pages and a working watchmaker's teardown review of the 1200 series. The 1200 is the sub-seconds base; the 1210 adds centre seconds; the 1215 is the 1210 with a date; the 1220 is the 1210 uprated from 18,000 to 21,600 A/h; the 1225 is the 1220 with a date. The move from 1215 to 1225 in the 6694 is therefore a beat-rate upgrade rather than a redesign, and it lands somewhere in the mid-1960s. Datapoints straddle 1964 and the exact year is not settled. Owners report the practical consequence: escapement parts for the slower 1215 are scarce and expensive, and Rolex's own service network treats a 1215 watch as vintage and a 1225 watch as ordinary.

The date is non-quickset. Setting it means running the hands round.

===The automatic attributions===

Four of the six houses have catalogued a 6694 as automatic or self-winding. Every instance contradicts itself inside its own entry, and the pattern is the same everywhere: the error sits in the title or the prose sentence, never in the movement specification.

Sotheby's contributes the most instructive version. Two Dubai lots, offered eight months apart, both read "cal. 6694 automatic, 17 jewels" — the reference number entered in the caliber field. They share case number 5'106'160. It is one watch re-offered with the error copied forward, and the two entries disagree with each other on dial colour. Antiquorum's four self-winding lots all name a manual caliber in the movement line immediately below the word. Phillips and Heritage never call one automatic; a Phillips essay states the position plainly, noting that "the absence of 'PERPETUAL' on the dial is justified" by the manual caliber.

==Dial map==

===Factory colours and finishes===

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Markers run from applied faceted gilt chevrons and arrowheads on the earliest watches to the applied polished batons that dominate the middle and late run. Hands follow: dauphine early, then pointed batons with luminous inserts as the standard, with gilt daggers, alpha and — on at least one catalogued example — Mercedes hands appearing across the range.

===Special-order dials===

The 6694's most valuable branch is the special-order emblem dial, concentrated heavily in the Gulf states. Rolex supplied these to governments, armed forces, ministries, universities and companies, and they are where the reference's strongest results sit.

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Retailer signing is thinner but real. Tiffany & Co. dials are documented at two houses — an Antiquorum example sold with its original Tiffany presentation box, and a run of five from a single collection at Sotheby's.

The 6694 is the canonical base watch for aftermarket Mickey Mouse dials, and they are aftermarket. Bonhams catalogues them precisely, describing the dial as "Silvered, later applied Mickey and Minnie Mouse"; Antiquorum grades one "Reprinted" in its own dial grading and calls it a refinished Topolino dial. Christie's and Sotheby's both sell them without claiming factory origin. Forum specialists are blunter — the long-standing position among vintage Rolex moderators is that no genuine factory example exists, and that Rolex never offered a Mickey Mouse dial. They are still being manufactured today: a current parts supplier sells a new Mickey dial cut for the cal. 1225 with feet at 23 and 52 for well under two hundred dollars.

The same caution extends further. Salmon, tuxedo and bright primary-colour dials circulate on 6694 cases and are treated as refinishes by the specialists who see the most of them — one moderator states flatly that no red 6694 exists, and describes a UK operation that spent the late 1990s swapping tired original dials for fake coloured ones in imitation of Stella dials. Bonhams has nonetheless catalogued a "Red, signed" dial on a 1978 example without qualification, and Antiquorum labels its own red and green examples as aftermarket. The houses do not agree with each other. How much of the surviving dial population is original is itself disputed: one experienced contributor estimates nine in ten currently for sale are aftermarket, another says there is not much fake material on 6694 cases because values never justified the effort. Both are worth weighing before buying a coloured dial.

The case is a three-piece Oyster, tonneau in profile, with a screw-down back and a screw-down crown. The crown is a single-seal design rather than a two-seal Twinlock, a detail that matters in service — an oversized replacement O-ring is a common reason a 6694 crown will not seat fully. The crystal is acrylic with a moulded cyclops. The bezel is smooth and polished on steel examples, and engine-turned or fluted on the gold-cased variants.

Beyond plain steel, the 6694 was cased several ways. Gold-plated examples pair a plated case with a stainless steel back and carry a "KB 40" stamp between the lugs at six o'clock; the marking is read by forum specialists as Kessi Frères of Bienne, the case maker, at 40 microns of plating. Matching plated bracelets of the era carry a large P on the end link. No auction house records the KB stamp, so this identification rests on community research rather than catalogue evidence. Gold shell and gold-capped constructions appear in both yellow and pink, described variously as "gold shell top and sides on steel", "pink gold capped" and "pink gold topped and steel" with a steel caseback in each case. A gold-filled variant carries its own sub-reference, 6694/5, with a yellow gold engine-turned bezel. Antiquorum has catalogued one two-tone example as "yellow gold plated and stainless steel Rolésor".

The folded-to-solid changeover falls around 1976, so either can be correct on a mid-1970s watch. Leather is common on surviving examples but is usually a later fitment rather than an original delivery — auction descriptions mark these as "associated" more often than not.

==Auction record==

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Two watches in the record appear twice each, re-offered at the same house within months, which is worth knowing before treating lot counts as population counts.

Match the caliber to the era. A 1215 on an early-1960s serial and a 1225 on anything after the mid-1960s are both period-correct; the reverse combination needs explaining. Match the dial footer too: SWISS alone with radium on the earliest watches, T SWISS T after 1963.

== Related references ==

* [[Reference:3003|Precision 3003]] — where the Precision line begins