Kessel 7-Melody Calculator Watch

This super full-featured calculator watch I had dismissed as being a dud – since the only melody I could get out of it was Yellow Rose of Texas, and then only sometimes.

Which is one of the pitfalls of collecting rare and sometimes obscure watches – there’s rarely ever a manual, or even someone else with the same watch that might be able to help out with something you’re missing.

This being the case, sometimes you can take ages to work out some functions, or never find them at all.

Fortunately, this was the former – although it did take several months (and buying some other watches with this module) to finally stumble upon the missing melodies.

So to the functions of this particular watch — which are very similar to the highly-advertised 21-feature Multichron watch (although Multichron doesn’t have melodies):

• 12/24 hour time (to switch between, press the top-right button in setting mode)
• Day/date/month/year – which times out around 1999 so you have to find a similar year in the perpetual calendar to set the date correctly – on the plus-side, though, once you have set it, you don’t see the year in any other mode other than setting, and it automatically sets the day.
• Hourly chime (press and hold top right, press bottom right)
• Daily (melody) alarm (press and hold bottom left, press bottom right to cycle through the melodies)
• 1/100 chronograph
• 8-digit calculator

I also have this watch as the Haverhills HL-29, and would imagine it came with other watch brand names on it as well.

They are rare — most people haven’t heard of it, and despite posting about it in forums with thousands of members, no one could offer a solution as to how to enable the melodies. Like everything, if you play with it long enough, eventually you might stumble upon what you were searching for, and now this watch plays its seven melodies as labelled.

Another interesting function it has is the ability to disable the alarm on certain days. By default it will play every day, but in alarm set mode if you hold top right then press a button on the keypad between 1-7 it will turn off the alarm for that particular (Mon-Sun) day.