Today’s Watch – Citizen 6501 Automatic BLTI, 21 Jewels

This watch asserts its 1970s heritage – Citizen introduced more colourful designs at that time as tastes changed and customers looked for something different from traditional design. Citizen pioneered the use of black coating on light alloy cases, and today’s watch combines that with a titanium carbide bezel and gold dial, so the case material code is BLTI. Previously I thought that the ‘TI’ referred to tungsten, but subsequent research confirmed it to represent titanium carbide. The gold hands and hour markers are nicely highlighted with black, and it’s finished off with horizontally faceted glass. The steel crown is not original to this model – it should be a gold plated one. The movement is the 6501, the day and date version of the 6000 calibre, with 21 jewels. An English only day wheel suggests this might have been aimed at the export market. The burgundy bracelet is an original, made of soft resin, I suspect not necessarily to this model. Black would have made more sense – this example is from October 1972:

More info on this watch here: https://sweep-hand.org/2011/10/19/this-weeks-featured-watch-15-6501-with-tungsten-bezel/

Advertisement
This entry was posted in Vintage Watches and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.