Audemars Piguet

Ancienne Le Brassus
1583

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He means no disrespect...

Hi,
 It's that there are no APRO's without the A designation for the serial number. There simply is no AP RO number 001, but there IS a A01- and that wold definitely be the first one sold.
If you have the new AP book by F. Chaille (Flammarion pub), you'll see on page 216-217 an image and info about one of the very first RO's, number A26 in fact. It was made in 1972 and sold on June 15, 1972.
 Also if you look up some of the famous auction houses, you'll see some info on these first RO's. There's one if I remeber correctly numbered A33 that also sold in 1972 and there's a nice description and picture of the sales receipt, etc.

So he said not to start this discussion again because in the past there's been lots of misconception (yes even from AP employees!) about a non A series APRO. But that is just misinformation.

So... the first series of RO are A series... you can also see from the old AP book (the Brunner, et al) that the movements for these RO's were already manufactured and in in stock in 1971 (which is of course normal!), but given that this RO's movement is numbered at 127059 one can start to guess at how many were produced and whether they took a straight batch of 1000 cal 2120's for the APRO or if they just cased them as the orders came in (which appears to be the case with this info on the serial number and case number, i.e. we can speculat ad infinitum.

To give credit to 'only5402' although he doesn't have many posts, he definitely knows what he's talking about!!  Look up his posts for prior discussions of this serial number issue as well and you'll see he's one of the few who can separate crazy infatuation from actual solid info.

And about this particular APRO, I agree that jewelers are experts at messing up watch cases in order to take inscriptions off! It looks like it's simply been heavily sanded.

Hope this helps,
S