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Awesomeo

Mido Baroncelli III HM Factory - Review

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Awesomeo

Today I’ll be reviewing the Mido Baroncelli III Heritage, manufactured by ‘HM Factory’. The baroncelli is a dress watch through-and-through, with a very simple yet elegant dial, slim profile, and minimalist design.

Tim (Fat Panda/Watchfinder) hooked me up with this watch, and seems to be one of the only dealers able/willing to source it. He offers an amazing service that is heads and shoulders above anything I've used before, with great QC pictures and clear video. He was very patient with my pedantic QC refusal over a misaligned date wheel, and always answers emails quickly, professionally and with flawless English. He's also clearly very knowledgable, and is kind enough to answer my occasionally dumb questions!


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My first impressions out of the box were great. The overall finish of the watch is outstanding. I have no other information about the factory, and I’m not sure what other brands they manufacture, but there’s nothing on the watch that I feel is sub-par or lacking.


The watch dimensions (measured crudely with a body fat calliper) in millimetres are:

Thickness: 8
Width:  39
Width + Crown:  44
Lug Width: 20
Lug to Lug: 48

Weight (inc strap): 50 g

 

The Dial

The dial finish is sublime. There’s a gorgeous egg shell texture to the dial face which gives it an extra edge of shine, it’s almost a satin type finish that has a greater lustre under lighting. The face is cream, befitting for its heritage moniker, which contrasts nicely with the high polish hands and white date wheel. There is a flat sapphire with AR coating on the inside edge, and a round capped bezel that sits a step above the case.


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The printing is top notch. Everything is well aligned and crisply defined. Both the markers and dial text is raised considerably, which give them a unique reflective property on the dial face. This makes the dial and text easy to read from arm’s length.


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The Hands

My favourite part about this rep is the hand stack. It is flawless. The sword hour and minute hands have a centre fold that gently bevels out. On the top side the steel is polished, and on the lower it is a fine satin finish – this really gives the hands presence on the minimal watch face. The minute hand stretches to the exact boundary of the minute markers; impressive tolerances indeed.


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This dual finish extends to the counterweights, which are an arrow head type shape and perfectly proportioned to one another. When all hands are aligned, the spacing of each hand uniformly decreases The second hand counterweight overhangs, and draws to a very fine point.


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Now on to that gorgeous blue. It’s heat treated steel, so naturally the colour and reflective properties are amazing. It really elevates the design and overall feel of the watch in my opinion, and adds a nice contrast that would pair well with a navy suit or tie. The seconds hand is slightly longer than the minute hand, and stretches perfectly to the boundary of the indices. The counterweight shape actually has the same angle and taper as the tip of the hour hand, which creates a nice repeated design element to really tie the hands together. Super impressed with the hands overall.


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Other Bits

The datewheel is a hair of a mm aligned to the top of the window. I rejected my first QC as it was far worse than this one – not much information about this rep out there, but it may be a general issue with the rep.


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The main USP of the gen watch is it’s thin design (for the price). The rep comes in at 8 mm, 1.25 mm thicker than the gen. It’s still the thinnest automatic watch I own, and is very comfortable under a shirt cuff.


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The crown also bears the MIDO branding, and sits a comfortable distance from the case for winding. The winding mechanism is suspiciously smooth. At first it felt like it wasn’t actually engaging the gear, but if you hold it to your ear you can hear the gentle winding and sure enough the watch springs to life. There are two adjustment positions for the date and time, and the movement is hackable.


Caseback

The display caseback is engraved with correct markings and spellings, and all text is correctly oriented. The rotor decoration is great, however the movement could have really benefited from blued screws to match the gen. As the gen uses the ETA 2892 and the rep an Asian clone of that movement, everything is in the same place – it’s a shame a bit more attention wasn’t placed on the decoration, as it could have been so much better.


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Strap
The strap material is a nice, soft leather with faux alligator texture. There is a simple branded clasp (no deployant here). The gen strap can be obtained from the Swatch Group for $27, but I don’t feel like I need to replace it at all. The strap is brushed branded as per gen with stamping on both leaves.


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Tells/Flaws

Thickness
As mentioned above, the rep is 1.25mm thicker than the gen. I think the amount this is noticeable depends on how the watch fits your wrist size – if it fits flush, you’ll be hard pressed to visually gauge 1mm. However, if it sits a little high off your wrist (as it does on mine) it may look thicker than it is.


Date Wheel
The font on the gen is thicker, and has the same 3D effect as the dial printing. I’ve also noticed alignment issues, which you’d obviously not expect on the gen. Swatch are really reasonable for replacement parts, I’m sure it’d be an easy swap out, but out of the box this is probably the biggest tell on the wrist.

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Movement
The movement is an ETA clone. Again the rotor is really well done. Down to the notches in the centre ring and the finishing. It’s perhaps even more of a shame then that they omitted the blued screws.

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I’m not sure if HM factory would even consider releasing a second version –it’s definitely not a best seller. But if they were, for a couple of dollars more perfecting the date wheel and screws they’d have a first class rep. As it stands I guess it’s a 2:1.


Conclusion

Overall I’d give the rep a 7/10 – there are tells, but on the wrist they are minor, and HM factory really nailed the dial and seconds hands perfectly. If the size were right I’d buy the gen in a heartbeat – it’s that nice.

Which brings me on to the sad part. I’ve loved the look of this watch since I saw it – I was even more enamoured whilst unboxing it. But my initial feeling when putting it on my wrist was that it is too small. My wrists are 8”, but are oddly shaped in that they are wide (thumb to pinky) but thin. I also have massive hands, which can make smaller watches seem dwarfed on my wrist. I think the sweet spot for this watch would be 6.5-7 inches, but honestly if my wrists were slightly less wide I wouldn’t have a problem.

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Going to give it a bit more wrist time and see, perhaps a strap material change will help. Next to my nomos the size difference is minimal, but I think the increase in lug to lug size, and the slightly larger dial on the nomos is really the tipping point between too-small and just-small-enough. My original plan was to sell my Tangomat for a blue Ahoi datum, and have this as my white-faced dresser, but I may have to part with this one instead.

I’ll leave you with another QC pic of Tim's, which is better than anything I have managed to snap! Any photo with the background you see below is his photography. You also get a video for QC!

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Edited by Awesomeo

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McGilli

Wicked. I'm really novice when it comes to Reps, so, seeing comparisons in reviews and in such detail is really great. Great way to start learning :)

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Awesomeo

 Couldn’t get over the small size on my gigantic wrists, so sadly letting this one go on RWI’s M2M.

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NFleischer

Very nice review, thanks. Never saw Mido rep before, also well done.

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watchmaker26

Nice watch. I’m searching for the improved version of it. Do you know if there is an improved version out there?

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