Telling Real from Real — Part I of II

The steel automatic Daytona ran for thirty-eight years toward a kind of perfection. Its admirers ran the other way.

Rolex Daytona Ref. 16520 (1988-2000) with Patrizzi Dial

To know a steel Daytona you have to open it. All four references — the borrowed-hearted original of 1988 and its three sealed descendants — wear a solid caseback, a disc of steel screwed down over the movement, so that the single most consequential fact about any given example, the calibre turning i…