Seiko Adds Compass Bezel To 5 Sports Field; New Bell & Ross BR-03 Looks Good In Green; Sinn's 936 In Black; Strehler Continues Expanding Eponymous Brand; Chaykin Makes The Thinnest Watch. Again

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. How’s everyone feeling about the impending AP x Swatch collaboration? I’ve seen a photo that I can’t tell if it’s real, but looks very convincing… I like it, if that’s it…

In this issue

• Seiko Adds A Compass Bezel To The 5 Sports Field Series

• The New Bell & Ross BR-03 Looks Really Good In A Moody Green

• Sinn Gives Their 936 Chronograph A Full Black Case And Bracelet

• Andreas Strehler Continues To Expand His Eponymous Brand With A World Timer Trio

• Konstantin Chaykin Might Have Made The Thinnest Watch In The World. Again.

👂What’s new

1/

Seiko Adds A Compass Bezel To The 5 Sports Field Series

Despite Seiko’s trend upwards in price, the Seiko 5 Sports Field range has kind of remained one of the better value propositions in the accessible watch market for a few years now. Back in 2023, Seiko gave it a GMT complication — the SSK023 and SSK025 — which made an already capable explorer watch genuinely more useful. Now they're adding something different: a rotating compass bezel, borrowing a feature that's long been a fixture of the Prospex Alpinist line and bringing it down to sub-€400 territory. Four new references, the HDB006 through HDB009, all mechanically identical but split into two distinct personalities.

The case is the same stainless steel unit Seiko has been running in this line for a while: 41mm wide, 13.2mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48.5mm. It's not a small watch on the wrist, but it wears predictably for the size. There’s the controversial hardlex crystal on top, mineral glass caseback, push-pull crown, 100 meters of water resistance. The new bidirectional bezel is steel with a diamond-pattern knurl on the flanks — the HDB006 and HDB007 get a brushed steel finish, while the HDB008 and HDB009 are coated in brown or black respectively.

The four dials break cleanly into two camps. The HDB006 (black) and HDB007 (white) are straightforward, glossy, and unadorned. The HDB008 and HDB009 lean into the outdoors brief with a green and a brown dial, each matched to its bezel color. Across all four versions, the Arabic numerals are coated in LumiBrite, compared to the previous Field watches where only the square markers were lumed. In the center of the dial, you’ll find the 13–24 hour scale and at 3 o’clock is a day-date aperture.

Inside is the calibre 4R36, Seiko's durable workhorse automatic. It runs at 3Hz, delivers around 41 hours of power reserve, and is about as far from glamorous as you can get. The HDB006 and HDB007 come on a three-link steel bracelet with folding clasp; the HDB008 and HDB009 get nylon straps with leather lining and a pin buckle, color-matched to the dial.

The Seiko 5 Sports Field Series with compass bezel launches worldwide in June. Strap versions (HDB008, HDB009) are priced at €390; bracelet versions (HDB006, HDB007) at €410. See more on the Seiko website.

2/

The New Bell & Ross BR-03 Looks Really Good In A Moody Green

The BR-03 has been through enough colorways by now that a new one needs something else going for it. The Green Steel has it: Bell & Ross dropped the minute track on this version, swapped in baignoire-style hour markers and applied numerals, and ended up with the cleanest BR-03 dial layout they've made since the 2023 refresh. Except for the wild date placement, of course.

The case is the familiar 41mm steel square, 9.65mm thick, with the four corner screws intact and the mix of brushed and polished surfaces that makes this case work as well as it does. At under 10mm thick, it wears surprisingly well for a square watch. You get a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on top, and 100 metres of water resistance.

The dial is where this one gets interesting. It's a sunray green with a gradient that darkens toward the edges, finished in glossy lacquer that shifts with the light. It’s a beautiful color, but you might miss the bigger change here: Bell & Ross has dropped the minute track entirely, replacing it with applied numerals and baignoire-style hour markers. It's a cleaner, more elegant look than the standard BR-03, and it suits the dressy green finish. Hands and markers are filled with white Super-LumiNova X1, glowing green in the dark.

Inside is the BR-CAL.302-1, a Sellita SW300 base running at 28,800vph with a 54-hour power reserve. The watch ships on a black box calfskin leather strap with a spare black synthetic fabric strap included, both with a steel pin buckle.

The Bell & Ross BR-03 Green Steel is priced at €3,990 and is available now, as part of the regular collection. See more on the Bell & Ross website.

3/

Sinn Gives Their 936 Chronograph A Full Black Case And Bracelet

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on two new Sinn watches, the groovy 554 & 554 RS and the pretty cool 308 Hunting Watch. What i completely missed is the 936S, a limited edition black version of the existing 936 chronograph. But since I see it’s still available, despite only 100 being made, I figured I could write about it still.

The case is 43mm wide and 15mm thick, which puts it firmly in "you'll know it's there" territory. The thickness comes partly from the movement architecture, partly from the tegiment steel underneath a black hard coating that Sinn claims resists scratches better than standard finishing. Water resistance is 100 meters, and the chronograph pushers work underwater thanks to Sinn's D3 technology, which seals the pushers directly into the case band rather than using the external sleeves you'd find on most chronographs.

Most chronograph dials are cluttered at the best of times — 30-minute counter, hour counter, running seconds, all competing for attention. The 936S cuts through that by replacing the 30-minute and separate hour counter with a single 60-minute totalizer. The elapsed-time hands are painted red, the running seconds hand on the nine o'clock subdial stays white.

The movement is Sinn's in-house modified SZ05, based on the Valjoux 7750 and adapted specifically for the 60-minute counter. Beat rate and power reserve are in line with the 7750's standard spec, which means 4Hz and 56 hours. The bracelet is a black steel H-link, which suits the aesthetic and adds to the tool-watch character.

The 936S is limited to 100 pieces and priced at €4,150. See more on the Sinn website.

4/

Andreas Strehler Continues To Expand His Eponymous Brand With A World Timer Trio

Andreas Strehler has spent decades building watches of extraordinary mechanical complexity — the Sauterelle à Lune Exacte, the Trans-Axial Tourbillon — which makes the brand he launched three years ago all the more interesting. Strehler the brand was conceived as a deliberate act of restraint: same in-house manufacture, same level of finish, stripped of complications. The Sirna, the first model, was a time-only watch. The Säntis, named after the mountain that overlooks his Appenzell atelier, is the second, and it adds a world time display.

The case is 40mm wide, 9.7mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47mm, and it's made in-house. A single crown at three o'clock controls everything: wind in the neutral position, city and 24-hour ring adjustment in the intermediate, time-setting fully extended. Water resistance is 30 meters. This is not a sports watch and makes no pretense of being one.

The dial is built in layers, with a machined, pattern-engraved, hand-polished titanium centre and three functional rings radiating outward. The outermost displays 24 time zones, with sun symbols marking DST-observing cities and the brand name anchoring CET on the ring. Inside that, the 24-hour ring splits day from night in the obvious way, with luminous printing. The minute track at the periphery has lume at five-minute intervals. Hour and minute hands in polished steel with arrow-shaped luminous tips stay legible against all of it. Dial, minute ring, and crown are available for personalisation; the city disc locations do not. Which is kind of awkward. I know the watches in the photos are likely prototypes, but I’ve seen them out with other media and in shows. That’s kind of a problem because the watches, and even the technical drawing of the watch on their website, misspells Sydney. I hope they fix that for production watches.

The calibre SA-30W is the in-house automatic from the Sirna, modified to carry the world time module. Total component count is 224, beating rate is 21,600vph, and the balance is a free-sprung type with four adjustment screws, regulated by Strehler's own lever escapement. Power reserve is 60 hours. The skeletonised 18k gold rotor runs on ceramic ball bearings, visible through the sapphire caseback alongside the polished bevels, inward-angled chamfers, Geneva stripes, perlage, and finely grained wheels. The strap is brown calfskin from Ledertique and Atelier Petrov, lightly grained with off-white contrast stitching, fastened by an in-house pin buckle. Alternatives are available on request.

The Strehler Säntis is priced at CHF 24,750 excluding taxes. Annual output is planned 30 to 50 watches. See more on the Strehler website.

5/

Konstantin Chaykin Might Have Made The Thinnest Watch In The World. Again.

When Konstantin Chaykin unveiled the ThinKing at Geneva Watch Days 2024, it was quite the shock — a 1.65mm-thin in-house watch from an independent Russian maker, dropping into the middle of a thinness arms race between Piaget, Bvlgari, and Richard Mille. Just one problem: it was a prototype, with no word on whether it would ever reach production. The prototype sold at Phillips in 2025 for CHF 508,000. Now comes the ThinKing Mystery: same 1.65mm profile, same in-house movement, but built for production in a series of 12. That makes it, by most accounts, the thinnest mechanical production watch in the world, edging out the Bulgari Octo Finissimo Ultra which comes in at 1.7mm.

The case is 41mm wide and 1.65mm thick — a figure that requires a moment to process. For reference, that’s about 16 pieces of paper thick. Please, go find 16 pieces of paper just to get a feel for how thin that is. Chaykin uses a high-strength stainless steel alloy that undergoes intensive heat treatment to resist deformation, with tolerances measured in microns. The case alone passes through approximately 40 routing checkpoints during production, a process the brand likens to aerospace engineering rather than watchmaking. Chaykin doesn’t list a water resistance, but come on…

The dial, such as it is, is a vertically brushed stainless steel surface with printed hour and minute markings around the perimeter of where the sapphire discs ride. The "Mystery" designation refers to a new feature added over the prototype: two 10.6mm sapphire discs, 0.2mm thick, that display the hours and minutes, with no support, seeming to rotate freely. Three rollers positioned around each disc guide their rotation without excessive energy drain. The effect is genuinely uncanny — two transparent discs turning on an impossibly flat plane, as if they have no mechanical reason to move at all. The Joker-inspired character of the original is preserved, though the expression here is almost meditative.

The in-house calibre K.23-3.1 runs at 18,000vph with a 38-hour power reserve — an improvement over the prototype's 32 hours, a consequence of the new drive system being more efficient. The movement winds via a special key, and a dedicated winding box is included. That box, measuring 47mm × 43mm × 9.2mm and comprising 112 components including its own safety reversing clutch. The entire watch weighs 12.1 grams without the strap. The strap is leather with titanium stiffeners and elastic inserts — patented — specifically designed to reduce stress on the case.

The Konstantin Chaykin ThinKing Mystery is priced on demand, but it’s expected to be around CHF 400,000. Twelve pieces will be made. See more on the Konstantin Chaykin 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

• Tim Carpenter dreams of distant places he’s never seen, but the real journey begins in a basement in rural Indiana, where an FBI agent finds a private museum built from the detritus of half the world. What starts as a tip about illicit artifacts becomes a race to untangle obsession, theft, and the fate of the dead — and the deeper Carpenter looks, the harder it becomes to ask: what exactly did one man believe he was saving?

• A drenched, unnamed body in a steamer trunk by a Florida highway opens this New Yorker story like a cold-case fever dream, where every clue seems to breed more conjecture than truth. As Detective Paul Drolet sifts through missing women, bad tips, and half-remembered lives, the central mystery hardens: how do you identify someone who seems never to have been missed?

• At 10:15 p.m. in a sleeping Colorado town, a deputy sheriff lured a taxidermist into a deer hunt that was really a test of loyalty. Behind the fake name and backroom bargains was an undercover federal agent threading his way through a valley full of poachers, crooked lawmen, and easy violence. The deeper he went, the harder it became to tell who was hunting whom.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Well, guess I’m about to do a road trip to Monaco.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk