BezelBase:About
About this project
BezelBase is a hobby project with a simple ambition: capture the historical record of Rolex watches in one place, as thoroughly and honestly as possible. Not a blog, not a dealer site — just a reference, built by enthusiasts who keep falling deeper into the details and figured other people might want to read what they found.
The long-term goal is to cover every Rolex family.
How this is built
Every claim in a BezelBase article traces to a named source — Rolex primary material, the Vintage Rolex Field Manual, auction catalogues from Phillips, Sotheby's, and Christie's, specialist dealer archives, and documented collector research. Where sources disagree, both positions are presented with attribution. Where the historical record has gaps, they are acknowledged rather than glossed over.
The articles are structured for reference use. Each follows the same architecture: core specifications, production outline, movement notes, dial map, case and bezel details, bracelet fitment, special branches, and market context. Built to be scanned, not just read.
Acknowledgments
The watch collecting community has spent decades building a body of knowledge that no single person could have assembled alone. Much of what appears on BezelBase exists because collectors, forum members, dealers, and independent researchers did the original work — photographing their watches, documenting dial variations, debating serial ranges, and sharing hard-won insights in places that were never designed for permanent archiving.
Forum threads get buried. Websites go offline. Photobucket breaks its links. Dealer archives disappear when a business closes. The research persists only as long as someone remembers where to find it. Part of what BezelBase does is preserve that work — gathering scattered findings into a single, structured, and properly attributed reference so that the knowledge these contributors built does not quietly vanish.
Every article carries a source list that names the people and publications whose research informed it. Where an individual collector's original analysis shaped a section — Mark Lerman's Red Submariner primer, Beaumont Miller II's matte dial taxonomy, Tomvox's Maxi dial research, Marcello Pisani's coronet classification, Ed Delgado's Pre COMEX identification — they are credited by name. Where photographs from collectors, forum posts, or reference sites appear, they are used in the spirit of preservation and attribution, not appropriation.
If your work appears here and you would like it credited differently, expanded, corrected, or removed, please get in touch. The people who built this knowledge base deserve to have their contributions recognized properly, and we take that seriously.
Contribute
This is an open project. If any of this interests you, there is plenty of work to do.
- Improve an article — every page is a working draft; click Edit source and make it better
- Bring sources — auction results, dealer archives, published research, anything that strengthens a claim or fills a gap
- Upload photos — images of watches you own are welcome (see the image policy)
- Flag errors — if something is wrong, say so; getting it right matters more than getting it finished