MK Personal Collection Super Rare Rolex Steel Cosmograph Ref 6263 "Fuerza Aerea del Peru" Wristwatch

MK Personal Collection The present lot is part of a larger privately held collection and is intended for exhibition purposes only. Rare Rolex Steel Cosmograph Ref 6263 "Fuerza Aerea del Peru" Wristwatch with Original Box and Papers Circa 1974. This very fine men's steel Rolex Cosmograph "Daytona" with a three-body construction case and screwed-down dedicated case back engraved "Fuerza Aerea del Peru" Peruvian Air Force (Internal ID # 657). It has a triplock crown and chronograph pushers (one missing), anti-reflective tachometer graduation black bezel Serial # 4,049.201, bi-color black and matte silver original dial with applied steel bâton indexes and tritium dots, subsidiary "guilloché" black dials for the seconds, the 12-hour and 30- minute registers with luminous steel bâton hands. Cal. 727 rhodium-plated Rolex movement with 17 jewels, straight-line lever escapement, monometallic balance adjusted to 3 positions, shock absorber, self-compensating Breguet balance spring, microstella regulating screws that is in good running condition. The watch is accompanied with the original hanging tag, inner and outer boxes and the blank guarantee Rolex certificate. One of the highest echelons of Rolex collecting is represented by military timepieces, which encompass watches made for the armed forces of a country. The company is known to have at some point in time worked with numerous armed forces or military organizations, including the English Navy, Italian Police, and of course the Peruvian Air Force - as in the case of the present timepiece. Watches made for the Fuerza Aerea Del Perú - or FAP - are today extremely elusive not only in virtue of their intrinsic rarity, but also because of the heavy usage they underwent which implies many pieces were simply lost, and many others were heavily refurbished. While the most obvious characteristic of FAP timepieces is the engraving to the case back, there are two other traits that define these watches. One is that the serial number - all or part of it - has to be present on the inside of the case back, thus linking together case body and case back. The other is a much subtler detail, and often lost due to the reasons mentioned above; on the opposite side of the back from where the FAP engraving is, these watches present an extremely lightly engraved military issue number. So light is this engraving that even a gentle polishing would irremediably erase it. Only a meager percentage of FAP watches still retain this number today, and this piece is indeed one of them, the number 657 still totally readable on the back.