TEST IMAGE. Steel dive watch on a neutral surface.

Seiko 6309-7040

Watches›Mechanical watch›No. T-001

1979→now

Seiko 6309-7040

Name: Seiko 6309-7040
Brand: Seiko
Price: 485.00 EUR
Availability: InStock

From the collection of Mira, Utrecht

▶ Hear Mira tell it, 9 min

TEST DATA. A 1979 Seiko 6309-7040 on a later steel bracelet, running and keeping time.

€485

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About this one

TEST DATA. A 1979 Seiko 6309-7040, the cushion-cased automatic diver, on a later steel bracelet. Day and date at three, black dial, original bezel insert.

TEST DATA. Wearing. It winds itself as long as it is on a wrist, and stops after about a day and a half on a shelf. Water resistance is not claimed. The case has not been pressure tested, and on a watch this age that means keep it out of water until somebody has.

TEST DATA. Most 6309s that come up have had the bezel insert replaced, and the replacements are obvious once you have seen a few — the font is wrong and the colour is too black. This one has the insert it left the factory with, faded to a grey-black, with the pearl still in the pip.

Condition

How it looks

TEST DATA. The case has been polished at some point, so the lines are softer than they left the factory. The bezel insert is faded and has two small chips at eight. The crystal is clear with light surface marks. The bracelet shows stretch.

How it works

TEST DATA. Winds, runs and sets. Day and date both change at midnight and both quickset. Running at about +25 seconds a day, which is fast and normal for an unserviced 6309. The crown screws down cleanly.

Checked by Unseend in September 2026, before it was photographed and again before it is packed. Every photograph on this page is of this exact piece.

The facts

Year	1979
Made by	Seiko
Made in	JP
Weight	150 g
Object	No. T-001

In the box

TEST DATA. Watch and bracelet. No box, no papers.

The model

Seiko's automatic diver of the late seventies, the one that taught a generation what a dive watch looks like.

Kept 1974–2026 · 31 objects

Everything Mira passed on

Where it came from

Mira, Utrecht

Mira's cameras

TEST DATA. Thirty-one cameras and two watches, kept in one cabinet in the hallway for fifty years. Mira bought the first one to photograph her children and never stopped.

I kept them where I walked past them. A camera you cannot see is a camera you never use.

In Mira’s own wordsOpens here

TEST DATA. The cabinet was in the hallway, which everybody found strange. Most people keep a collection somewhere out of the way, in a spare room or a cellar, and mine was the first thing you saw when you came through the door. That was deliberate. I wanted to walk past it.

The first one was a Zeiss my father gave me in 1974, the year my eldest was born. He said a photograph is the only thing you can make that is worth more in thirty years than it was on the day, and he was right about that, although he was wrong about almost everything else. I still have the light meter that came with it. That one is not for sale.

I bought the second because the first jammed, and the third because the second was too heavy to carry with a child on my hip. After that there was no reason any more. There was a market on Saturdays where a man sold cameras out of a suitcase, and I went every week for eleven years. He knew what I had and he would keep things back for me. When he died his daughter sent me a box with four of them in it and a note that said he had put them aside.

People ask whether I used them. All of them. Every single one has been through a roll. There are cameras in that cabinet that have photographed three of my children and two of my grandchildren, and a few that only ever went to Zeeland and back, and one that I took to Rome and dropped on the steps at Santa Maria in Trastevere. That one still works. You can see the dent.

What I was never interested in was the boxes. I know that is what makes them worth something, and I know I have cost myself money over fifty years by throwing them away, but a camera in a box is a paperweight. I bought them to use and I used them, and the marks on them are mine.

The hardest part was not deciding to sell. It was deciding not to leave them to the children. They do not want them, and they were too polite to say so for about ten years, and in the end my daughter said it plainly, which I am grateful for. A collection that nobody wants becomes a burden the day after you die.

So I would rather hand them over now and know. That is the whole reason I said yes to this instead of the auction house, who wanted them in lots of eight with no names on anything. I want the person who buys the Rolleiflex to know it went to Rome.

Arrivals at eight, Amsterdam time.

Seiko 6309-7040

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