In Case You're Curious About Servicing a Platinum Monaco V4 Belt-Drive TAG Heuer

There was an article on Calibre11 a while back about this watch that was being daily worn, it had been on the owners wrist getting a lot of wear over several years and it was interesting to be able to speak to how these Monaco V4's with their very eccentric belt-drive movement performs.

Ultimately, this watch made it to well over a decade before its first service and was not losing any time or performing poorly at all, it merely had a small chip on the crystal and rather than risk that getting worse or allowing moisture to get in, the owner felt it best to get it serviced.

When he and I were discussing it, we were both pretty worried... this is a haute-horologie grade TAG Heuer watch, in precious metal, with a wildly unique and unusual movement powering it. Our guesses were around the 5 figure mark based on experience with some other brands.

It turns out it's actually only $2,007.65 AUD or about $1,350 USD for the service on its own.

The blue alligator strap is another $954 but its a rather special strap at that, and the crystal is $1383 (all AUD).

I've been pleasantly surprised by how well TAG Heuer has taken care of some family member's watches in the past, including a TAG Heuer WAB2010 AquaRacer that had been ruined by salt water, of the major brands they're definitely among the best in terms of after sales support and servicing costs in my experience.

Any before and after pics, curious to see how it looks after a polish?

Service for my cal. 360 WG was about 1350 AUD, crystal and hands were quite cheap and came back like new:

I don’t have any pics handy but the case is actually very good condition. The crystal I can understand why it is so expensive as it is one of the most complex large crystals I’ve seen made from sapphire. It’s not like a normal Monaco crystal but has these two giant facets on the sides of it, so it is a 3d trapezoid shape rather than flat. It also curves through those facets too. If you see the image below you’ll see what I mean with the sides, the apex of one of those facets is where it chipped.

There is a thread here with before pics of one and link to an article on c11 (unfortunately not accessible anymore) that was beat up;

https://tagheuerforums.com/threads/new-post-the-monaco-v4-platinum-as-daily-wearer.116889/

That’s the watch, it actually doesn’t look beat up in person at all, I took the photos under harsh lighting to bring out the imperfections but for how long its been used daily in a precious metal case it was remarkably good.

Incidentally this was the service cost on my brother’s Rolex Daytona two years ago:

Can you imagine the service costs on those? Of course, I'll never have to worry about that.

I just remember this was covered in the first post a few months back, and I have to agree, that is not as much as I would expect.