5/25/2023 0 Comments Louis audemars serial numbersIt has been suggested by people more knowledgeable than me that the case quality of his watches is not as good as those used by the original company. If made by him using a movement from the original company ( especially if its number appears in my ledgers) they can usually be identified by a disparity between the movement number and the case number as he certainly bought his cases in - and very probably not from Meylan Freres ( as did the original company) because they would have been owed a lot of money and the Audemars family were less than totally popular in the village for a while after the bankruptcy. ( We have no archive or records from hs successor company). Watches by his company are now - in my opinion - very rare indeed as it didn't last very long. He certainly signed his watches as such as well as selling ( as you have noticed) watches to some of the original company's customers. His original idea was to finish them at his own expense so they could be sold to restore the company's fortunes but, as it became clear that wasn't going to work, he stockpiled them and used them to found his own successor business also - and confusingly - titled "Louis Audemars & Cie". There is some evidence from my archive that he did so at "knock-down" prices. During the last year or three of the company's existence Louis-Benjamin Audemars-Valette ( my great Grandfather and the grandson of the original L-B A) "bought" ( probably using his wife's money - she wasn't short of a franc or two) large numbers of finished and unfinished movements as well as some finished watches.
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