So, I had this Citizen watch kicking around. It’s been in my drawer for ages, honestly. The other day, I was clearing things out and found it. The strap was totally shot, all cracked and nasty, but the watch itself, it still looked pretty decent. I thought, “Hey, maybe I can get a new strap for this thing, give it a new lease on life.” Or, you know, at least figure out what model it is to see if it’s even worth the effort.
That’s where the real “fun” started. First things first, I needed that model number. Seemed simple enough, right? Well, not so fast.
My Hunt for the Elusive Digits
I picked up the watch. Looked at the front, the dial. It said “Citizen,” “Eco-Drive,” all the usual stuff. But no model number staring back at me. Nope, that would be too easy. So, I flipped it over to check the case back. That’s usually where they hide these things.
And sure enough, there was a bunch of tiny writing engraved on the metal. Seriously tiny. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, so I had to grab my phone, turn on the camera, and zoom in. I felt like I was performing micro-surgery or something just to read the darn thing. It’s always a bit of a mission when they make the text that small, isn’t it?
Once I could actually see the engravings, there wasn’t just one clear number. Oh no. There were a few sets of characters. I saw:
- A string that looked like it might be a serial number.
- Some other codes, maybe movement caliber or case type.
- And then, a couple of hyphenated numbers.
I was looking at these thinking, “Okay, which one of you is the golden ticket?” It wasn’t immediately obvious. I remember squinting at it, turning the watch this way and that under the light. I even tried a quick search on my phone like “how to find Citizen model number” just to get a general idea of what I was looking for, because just staring at the back of the watch was getting me a bit frustrated.
Eventually, I started noticing a pattern from what I’d seen online and what was on my watch. Citizen usually has this format, often something like a few characters, a hyphen, and then more characters. For instance, you might see something like XXXX-YYYYYY or XXX-X-XX-XXXXXX, that kind of structure. It’s not always the longest number on there, but it usually has that hyphen breaking it up.
So, I focused on the string of numbers that had a hyphen in the middle. It looked something like H500-S012345 (just an example, not my actual number). There was another longer number without a hyphen, which I figured was probably the serial number – unique to my specific watch, but not the model identifier.
I took that hyphenated number and did a quick search with “Citizen” and that number. Bingo! Results started popping up for that specific model series. That’s when I knew I’d nailed it. It matched the style of my watch, so I was pretty confident.
So yeah, that was my little adventure. It wasn’t rocket science, but it definitely took a bit more poking around than I first expected. You gotta get up close and personal with the back of the watch, and kinda know what format you’re looking for. Once you spot that hyphenated code, you’re usually on the right track. Glad I got it sorted in the end, now I can actually look for that strap!
