Not sure if this was asked earlier but how long did it take you to reach where you are now with your collection? How many years ago? And pushing my luck here, how did it start? Was there a watch that started it all? 
I have been 'collecting' for about 20 + years, but only going a bit serious in the past 3 to 4 years after I 'retired' (still young at 43). It was a slow process, buying a watch a year, sometimes 2. So it is an on-going process. At the same time learning about watches, what makes them tick, meeting people within the industry and outside the industry. At the moment, I am at the end of my watch collecting life-cycle, having too many pieces and only two wrist to use them. Also I have most of what I want, and the brands that I want. Some of the watches that I have were bought on a fancy and some are really old, having bought them a long time ago and never selling them off.
My Casio and military collection is pretty new, but I have stop as I realised I have way too many Casio G-Shocks. As for the military timepieces, you really need to know what you want and what is out there as it is a minefield. So I have what I think represent military watches from the British and the American. Perhaps I will keep them, perhaps I will sell them. I have sold of a few of my British military watches. So at present I am photographing them. I am still streamlining the watches and will continue to do so until I have the (what I believe) correct number of watches.
Anyway, I started from school, destroying a number of watches along the way, trying to figure how they work and so on. The watch that really started it all? Casio G-Shock? Citizen Ana-digi? Don't really know.
