Bargain vintage, better than cheap new watches?

There are scads, piles and heaps of vintage watches out there. Russian, Japanese, Swiss and US made, simple, elegant mechanical watches that can often be had for a pittance. You can find everything from Timex and Seiko to Oris and lesser known marks like Favre-Leuba. The good, you can get a sharp looking watch from a notable maker, often at $20 or less. The bad, it's next to impossible to tell if it's a fake and refurbishing a vintage watch tends to kill it's value. 

However, if you're shopping for $20 watches should you really be overly concerned with authenticity and collector value? No, you should not and if you think you should you're pursuing the wrong hobby. This is where we get to, "If you like the watch wear it." I genuinely like some of my "junk" watches but I feel better about my purchases of vintage pieces by trusted brands. 

The one pictured above was my grandfathers LeCoultre. He picked it up overseas when he was in the Army during WW2 and he absolutely adored it. A $20 LeCoultre would be hard to find but other Swiss marks like Favre-Leuba and West End Watch Co are obtainable and this type of 17 jewel Swiss movement powers a lot of vintage watches. The only thing I don't care for with vintage watches is that before the era of dive watches an awful lot of watches look an awful lot alike. The cases for everything from Oris to Citizen are hard to distinguish at a glance on the cheaper models but they have a multitude of details to obsess over. 

My LeCoultre is small by contemporary standards but I've gotten used to it on my wrist and it's got me thinking about an extended project hunting up vintage(and non-vintage) watches to build a great collection on a minuscule budget. The big question is would I kick myself for owning a dozen $20 watches instead of one $240 watch. I can hear my grandfather now, "You don't have enough money to be cheap." I also don't have $240 to spend on a watch today but I can probably scrape together $20.