Hamilton Adds Great Dials To The Khaki Field Power Reserve; A Very Exclusive GS; The Elliot Brown Arne Cali Are Super Cool; Bianchet's Rotondo UltraFino In Rose Gold; A Moser With Quite A Name

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I'm glad Instagram reminded me of Elliot Brown, I should pay more attention to the brand.  

In this issue

• Hamilton Adds Green And Blue Dials To The Khaki Field Power Reserve

• Grand Seiko's SBGA529 Peach Blossom Is Exclusive Three Times Over

• The Elliot Brown Arne Cali Collection Are Four Field Watches That Are Way More Fun Than You Expect

• Bianchet Wraps The Beautiful Rotondo UltraFino In Rose Gold

• The Moser Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain Has Quite A Name

👂What’s new

1/

Hamilton Adds Green And Blue Dials To The Khaki Field Power Reserve

Hamilton has spent years pulling the Khaki Field in every direction at once: faithful reissues, automatics, bigger cases, smaller cases. The Power Reserve sits in the odd middle of all that, taking the hand-wound field watch and bolting a fuel gauge onto it. Last year we got the watch with black and white dials. Now we are getting two more dials, green and blue. A significant improvement over the launch colors.

The stainless steel case is 40mm wide and stays under 12mm thick, which puts it between the 38mm and 42mm Khaki Field Mechanical. The lug-to-lug is 48mm, which is just on the cusp of being too long, so this is the kind of watch most people will want to try on before buying. The case has a fully sandblasted finish. Out back is a screwed solid caseback, up top is a sapphire crystal with AR coating, and water resistance is 100 meters.

The green is a matte olive that’s just the perfect shade. The blue is a lighter mid-blue, less austere. Both keep the collection's core layout: large Arabic hour numerals, a minute track, and a 13-24 hour track in the centre of the dial. Hands and triangular markers are filled with Old Radium Super-LumiNova. The power reserve gauge sits at 9 o'clock with red F and E markings and its own small lumed triangular hand. A power reserve on a field watch is a strange thing to have, but on a hand-wound movement it kind of makes sense.

Inside is the Hamilton calibre H-23, a variant of the Powermatic 80 architecture. It beats at 3Hz, has 80 hours of power reserve, and uses a Nivachron balance spring for magnetic resistance. Each dial comes on a matching green or blue NATO strap with leather loops, and a quick-release sandblasted steel bracelet is offered as an alternative.

On the strap the Khaki Field Power Reserve is priced at €915; on the bracelet it's €995. See more on the Hamilton website.

2/

Grand Seiko's SBGA529 Peach Blossom Is Exclusive Three Times Over

Brands have a few levers to pull when they want a watch to feel more exclusive. Limited production is one. Regional exclusivity is another. Boutique exclusivity is a third. Grand Seiko just pulled all three levels for the Spring Drive Peach Blossom 62GS SBGA529, a run of 30 watches sold only in the US, and within the US only at the Grand Seiko Boutique at Lenox Square in Atlanta, run by Reeds Jewelers. Doesn’t get harder to get than this.

The case is made out of titanium, 40mm wide and 12.8mm thick, part of the 62GS line that traces back to Grand Seiko's first automatic from 1967. The line is known for its apparent lack of bezel, with the crystal emerging from the case. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is a pale pink, meant to echo the peach blossoms of Hanamomo no Sato, a village in Nagano that fills with cultivated peach trees and draws crowds every spring for the bloom. A soft frosted texture stands in for the petals, and it looks lovely. Central dauphine hands point out the time, with a date window at 3 o'clock and a power reserve indicator at 8.

Inside is the Spring Drive calibre 9R65, good for 72 hours of reserve and rated to +/-15 seconds a month. Spring Drive runs a conventional mainspring through a quartz regulator, so you get quartz-grade accuracy with the charm of a mechanical watch. The watch comes on a matching titanium bracelet with a three-fold clasp.

The Spring Drive Peach Blossom 62GS SBGA529 is limited to 30 pieces, available only at the Grand Seiko Boutique Lenox Square in Atlanta, priced at $7,600. See more on the Grand Seiko website.

3/

The Elliot Brown Arne Cali Collection Are Four Field Watches That Are Way More Fun Than You Expect

I don't cover Elliot Brown enough, and I should. They're a British brand that mostly deals in stealth black, gunmetal, and desert drab military tool watches, which is exactly why the new Arne Cali collection caught me by surprise in the best possible way. These are four limited-edition field watches themed around California culture, all bright pastels and swirls and gradients. It's the last thing you'd expect from these guys, and that's the whole appeal.

The base is the Arne field watch, 38mm wide and 12.8mm thick in stainless steel, with a screw-down crown and 200 meters of water resistance. Those are some pretty good measurements and stats, which make the Arne a very nice watch. The water resistance comes as a nice surprise, as so many field watches limit their water resistance to 100 meters, and the Arne Cali doubles that.

Each dial uses a California display, Roman numerals above the 3-to-9 axis and Arabic below, a layout that started life on tool watches because the mixed numerals tell you which way is up when you're reading the thing at an awkward angle. There are four dial options. The Phantom Horizon (606-007) reworks an aircraft attitude indicator into sky blue and grass green split by a red-orange horizon line, the colors inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge. The Ocean Ombré (606-008) is a purple-blue Pacific sunset gradient, the simplest and most obvious of the four, made even more attractive by the pink rehaut.. The Woodie (606-009) has a wooden dial nodding to the wood-panelled surf wagons, and it's the only one that has a gold PVD case. The Psychedelic Trip (606-010) is a tie-dye spiral of orange, yellow, and blues that radiates out from the logo instead of the center hands, so the whole thing reads deliberately off-kilter. Obviously my favorite.

Inside every watch is a Ronda calibre 715 Swiss quartz, hours, minutes, and seconds. All four come on a sailcloth strap.

Each reference is limited to 75 pieces. Price for three of the watches sits at £395, the same as the standard Arne, while the Woodie bumps up the price to £525, due to the wooden dial and gold PVD case. See more on the Elliot Brown website.

4/

Bianchet Wraps The Beautiful Rotondo UltraFino In Rose Gold

I’ve covered Bianchet a few times, usually with a bit of a raised eyebrow at their unique designs and significant prices. But the more I got to meet the brand, the more I got to meet the family behind Bianchet, the more I got to like them. They are still way out of my price bracket, but I very much like where they are headed. Recently, we saw them introduce the Rotondo UltraFino, a move away from their signature tonneau case into something rounder and more restrained. Now, that model gets a very nice rose gold treatment.

The case is made out of 18-carat rose gold, 39.5mm wide and just 8.9mm thick, slim for an automatic tourbillon. Finishing alternates satin brushing with mirror-polished bevels, and there's a black rubber gasket seated under the bezel that runs on every Bianchet as a house signature. The crown is black lacquered. Water resistance is 100 meters.

There's no dial in the conventional sense. The movement is fully skeletonized and openworked, so you're looking straight into the architecture, with the golden geometry of the bridges doing the work a dial normally would. The flying tourbillon sits exposed, and the black PVD bridges, set against the rose gold rotor, give it the monochrome-plus-gold look Bianchet is going for.

Inside is the in-house calibre UR01, an automatic flying tourbillon built in Grade 5 titanium and measuring 3.85mm thick. It runs at 3 Hz, holds 60 hours of power reserve, and has a solid 18-carat rose gold rotor along with a claimed 5,000 G shock resistance. The watch has a quick-release system: one configuration pairs a full rose gold bracelet with a black rubber strap, the other is a black-and-white rubber strap set.

The Bianchet Rotondo UltraFino Rose Gold comes in two variants, CHF 85,500 for the rubber-strap version and CHF 119,500 for the rose gold bracelet, both without taxes. See more on Bianchet's website.

5/

The Moser Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain Has Quite A Name

Quick, think of H. Moser & Cie. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s the incredible dials, right? Yeah, me too. The dials are so nice, it’s easy to forget that Moser is really good at serious at complications and the incredibly named Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain reminds us of that.

The case is made out of titanium, 40mm wide and 14.4mm thick, with a sapphire crystal front and a display back. The crown is decorated with Moser's "M". On the side is a sliding bolt for the repeater slide that slides on a Teflon runner. Note how complex this watch is and it still manages to come packaged in a 40mm case. Even the thickness is not that extreme. Moser doesn’t give us a water rating, which is just a bit funny because I can’t exactly imagine this watch seeing any water, not even rain.

The face of the watch will take some breaths away. The main plate is fully skeletonised, so you look straight through to the calibre, with the repeater hammers and chimes sitting on the dial side rather than hidden out back. At 2 o'clock, a small domed aventurine sub-dial breaks the skeletonized look, finished in Moser's fumé gradient and inlaid by hand with thin curved strips of mother-of-pearl that scatter across it like stars. Leaf-shaped hour and minute hands point to the time.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre HMC 909, skeletonised completely, beating at 3Hz with 35 jewels and a 90-hour power reserve. The flying tourbillon sits at 6 o'clock under a skeletonised bridge and carries a cylindrical hairspring, hand-shaped by sister company Precision Engineering AG using a process that takes far longer than a flat spring. It comes on a grey nubuck alligator strap with a titanium pin buckle.

The new H. Moser & Cie. Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain reference 1909-0501 is limited to 20, priced at CHF 378,350. See more on the Moser website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For Men’s Health, Brian Underwood investigates the flood of sunscreen misinformation on Instagram and TikTok, where influencers push inaccurate data about chemical UV filters, play chemist and promote their own DIY formulas, or even encourage no sun protection at all. Underwood sorts fact from fear, talking with dermatologists, chemists, and professionals who are working to reshape the messaging around sun exposure and sunscreen.

• Middle- and high-school kids of today are shattering track records on a weekly basis. Some of that is sneaker technology, some of it is training, some of it seems to be an intense competitive drive fueled by social media. Whatever it is, Brendan I. Koerner has seen it in his own kids—and now he throws himself into the world of scholastic speedsters for his latest Wired feature.

• He dresses up for his labor of love, always wearing a white shirt, a silk tie, and a blue four-pocket French work coat as he documents Nashville, Tennessee, moment-by-moment behind the lens of his Leica. Ray Di Pietro started photographing people and events in the city nine years ago and uses precise composition and framing to tell the story of the city and its people.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

My entire Instagram feed is just The Odyssey right now, and it’s kind of sad to see how many people are so deeply wrong about the Homer works. I’m not sure if this is an education thing, the fact that ti seems that many of these people have just learned about Homer a couple of months ago and got their info from AI abstracts of wikipedia pages, or just an asinine political agenda. What I do know is that I am forever grateful to my dad who read stories of Greek heroes to me in English when I was a kid. Not only did I learn English parallel to Croatian, it gave me an incredible basis for a broad and deep education. So, if you have kids, teach them the myths. In the meantime, listen to Stephen Fry on the Trojan War, because he obviously knows what he’s talking about.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk