Don't miss the next drop
In our opinion, a genuine black waffle-textured dial on a 1950s Cyma Cymaflex is one of those finds that quietly rearranges what a serious vintage Swiss collection looks like. Honeycomb dials from this era show up most often on far more famous houses, which means a properly preserved Cyma example wearing this exact texture in this exact color sits in collecting territory that almost no one is actively hunting. We rate that as opportunity. Pair it with Cyma’s first automatic caliber and a Watersport designation, and you have a watch with a real story that has not been told in twenty years of forum chatter.
Cyma’s history runs deeper than most of the auction catalogs let on. The brand was founded in 1862 by Joseph and Theodore Schwob in Le Locle, taking its name from the Latin word for sprout. In 1892 the company partnered with Frederic Henri Sandoz and built its main factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Jura town that produced the bulk of Swiss watchmaking output for the next century. By 1903 Cyma had merged with Tavannes into what became Cyma-Tavannes, a manufacture that designed and built its own movements in-house through the middle of the twentieth century. The Cymaflex designation on this dial refers to the brand’s proprietary anti-shock device, a patented jeweled cushion at each end of the balance staff, marketed in the 1950s as Cyma’s answer to Incabloc. The Watersport name signaled enhanced water resistance for the era. Both were genuine engineering claims, not styling alone.
The caliber R.420 powering this example holds a real place in Swiss horological history. It is Cyma’s first automatic movement, in production from roughly 1943 through 1954, and what makes it interesting is the bumper architecture. Rather than rotating a full 360 degrees, the bumper rotor swings through a limited arc and rebounds off paired buffer springs at each end, generating winding force on the back-and-forth motion. The R.420 runs at 18,000 vph, carries 17 jewels, holds about 40 hours of power reserve, and feels distinctly different from a modern automatic when wound on the wrist. Our movement photographs show the bumper signed CYMA along its curved arc and the bridge plate stamped 17 JEWELS at the outer edge, with the train wheels, balance, and visible ruby jewels all sitting under copper-toned bridge work that has held its finish gracefully across seventy years.
The case carries a gold-tone finish over its steel construction, with the warm yellow color sitting across the lugs, bezel, and case sides while the inner caseback opens to bare steel. Light wear softens the gold at the high points along the lug edges and case shoulders, exactly the kind of honest patina that tells you this watch was worn. Dimensions are slim and proper for a mid-century dress sport hybrid, 33.2mm across, 41.5mm lug to lug, with 16mm lug spacing. The caseback wears its stamped Cymaflex specification verbatim around the perimeter, reading AUTOMATIC CYMAFLEX WATERRESISTANT ANTIMAGNETIC in a clean circular arrangement, with the inner disk showing the soft spiral wear pattern of seven decades of careful servicing. The crown at three appears original and proportionally correct.
The dial is the headline and it absolutely earns the billing. A black waffle-textured surface carries its honeycomb pattern crisply and consistently across the entire face, with no fade or break in the texture, and the way light catches the raised grid creates a depth that flat dials simply cannot match. The Cyma C-with-arrow logo crowns the dial at twelve, with CYMA Automatic in gold italic script immediately below. CYMAFLEX WATERSPORT sits in gold sans-serif at six, and a small SWISS marking runs at the very bottom edge. Applied gold markers carry the time: a double-baton at twelve, larger gold darts at three, six, and nine, and smaller gold dart markers at the remaining hours. A printed inner ring of fine gold dots tracks the minutes. The hands are gold dauphine for hour and minute with a long thin gold central seconds hand carrying a small counterweight tail. Fine speckling on the dial surface adds the kind of textural variation that vintage collectors read as character rather than flaw.
We have paired it on an OTTUHR brown leather strap with a gold-tone polished pin buckle, sized for wrists up to 7.75 inches and chosen to echo the warm gold dial elements and the case finish.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty. For the collector who already has the obvious mid-century Swiss names and wants something with a genuinely uncommon dial, a real piece of Swiss horological history in its bumper-winding caliber, and the kind of quiet originality that holds up to close inspection, this vintage Cyma Cymaflex is, to us, an honest standout.
