This article is made for those who are interested in figuring out how to read the Seiko Serial Number or for those who want to know approximately when their Seiko was made.
There are many articles online where they show how to decipher the Seiko Serial Number, but there are still a lot of guesswork in the correct year as the serial number only indicates to the nearest decade. Therefore, in this article, I will put together a list of Caliber Production dates and How to read the serial number.
How to read the serial number:
In the first photo the serial number is 1N0945.
From this info, I can say that my watch is made in either 2001/ 2011, November, Number 945 in production.
1 – Year – 2001/2011
N – Month – November
0945 – Production Number – 945
In the second photo, the serial number is 394799.
From this I can deduce that my watch is made in either 2003/ 2013, September, number 4799 in production.
3 – Year – 2003/2013
9 – Month – September
4799 – Production Number – 4799
However, if the condition of the watch looks old and beat up, those who are less in the know will make an assumption that it may be an older watch hence interpreting the year as 1991 or 1993 and so on.
Therefore, the best way of knowing when the watch is approximately made is to take into consideration the movement caliber.
How to find the movement caliber:
In the photo above, one can see the number in the format of 4R36-00V0 in the top left corner of the caseback.
The first 4 number/letter combination is the movement caliber number for the watch. In this case it’s the new 4R36 movement, which replaces the 7S26 movement.
So from this new information, from the table below, we can see that the 4R36 movement is introduced in year 2008.
Therefore, we can put the production year of this watch more accurately to year 2011, as 2001 would be impossible.
However the limitation to this method is that for movements in production for more than 10 years, it would be more difficult to pinpoint the exact decade it was produced.
Serial Number Interpretation Table:
Movement Production Year Table:
And a Very good excel spreadsheet by Duncan, or known as Cannop in SCWF.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cannop/files/seikocalculator.xlsAdditional Links:
http://quartzimodo.com/how-to-tell-when-your-seiko-watch-was-made-part-1/http://people.timezone.com/library/extras/extras631803474986250000
