Seiko and Honda Honor The Most Absurd Scooter Ever; Favre Leuba's Two-Tone Deep Raider Day Date; The Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium; AP Adds A Flying Tourbillon To The Bleu Nuit Ceramic Collection

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. August is a month that the vast majority of the watch industry takes off, so there aren’t a lot of releases going around. I still do my best to come up with at least four a day and it’s looking good so far. However… The one brand that doesn’t care about summer vacations seems to be Seiko and I’m sitting on a boatload of Seiko releases. I’m trying to spread them out as much as possible, but don’t hate me if you notice a lot of Seiko popping up on an almost daily basis.

In this issue

• Seiko and Honda Honor The Most Absurd Scooter Of All Time With A Yellow Field Watch

• Favre Leuba Adds Two-Tone Steel And Gold To The Deep Raider Day Date Collection

• The Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium Brings The Grönefeld Brothers Touch To A Dressier Watch

• Audemars Piguet Introduces Their Flying Tourbillon To The Bleu Nuit Ceramic Collection

👂What’s new

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Seiko and Honda Honor The Most Absurd Scooter Of All Time With A Yellow Field Watch

The Honda Motocompo was 42 kilograms of two-stroke urban absurdity: a folding 1981 scooter designed to collapse into the trunk of a Honda City and unfold wherever you parked. It was never fast or advanced, let alone appreciated and widely used, but it has aged into a design icon. It’s also the very last motorcycle that I would expect that would get a tribute watch. But Seiko has a great relationship with Honda, having done tribute watches to several of their cars, so it isn’t that much of a surprise. Honda is marking the Motocompo's 45th anniversary and Seiko is celebrating it with the HDB010.

The case is very familiar, with dimensions you can’t exactly hate: 36.4mm wide, 12.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.4mm in steel. A matte black hard coating covers it, and the crown reads "TURN" on its side, borrowed from the scooter's fuel cock. A curved Hardlex crystal sits up front, and a red tinted mineral glass with the Honda logo and an illustration of the Motocompo on the back. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial has a matte yellow base, embossed black Arabic numerals, Lumibrite markers, and a black horizontal bar across the center with the Honda logo, mimicking the iconic protective bars on the bike. The Automatic script uses Motocompo's typeface, and the day-date discs are blacked out to match.

Inside is the calibre 4R36, Seiko's workhorse automatic running at 3Hz with a 41-hour power reserve. The black nylon strap continues the joke: the keepers read "Carrying Point" and the tip reads "Insertion Point," both references to how the scooter strapped into a car.

The new HDB010 goes on sale worldwide in September 2026 in a box shaped like the Motocompo's shipping carton, limited to 8,000 pieces. Only the UK price has been confirmed, but it converts to about €400. See more on the Seiko website.

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Favre Leuba Adds Two-Tone Steel And Gold To The Deep Raider Day Date Collection

While I might have had a bit of doubt, there’s no denying that the revival of the Favre Leuba brand under Patrik Hoffmann in 2024 has been somewhat of a success. While we don’t know what their sales are like, they have had a pretty consistent release schedule over the last two years, and it’s great to see it. Now, following the all steel models, we’re getting a two-tone take on the Deep Raider Day Date in steel with yellow gold PVD accents.

The case is 40mm wide and 12.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48.2mm. Surfaces are mostly vertical brushing with a polished bevel running along the mid-case, and the gold PVD is used on the fluted part of the unidirectional bezel, the crown, and the central bracelet link. The ceramic bezel insert is color-matched to the dial with golden numerals. A double-domed sapphire crystal with AR coating sits up top, and both the crown and caseback screw down. Water resistance is 300 meters.

Three dials are available: blue and green with a sunray-brushed gradient, plus a solid black. The central hands and the hourglass logo at 6 o'clock get the same yellow gold PVD treatment. All three use a sandwich construction, with Super-LumiNova glowing up through the elongated recessed indices. A rectangular day-date window sits at 3 o'clock with white discs outlined in white, and you can switch the display between English and German.

The automatic calibre FLD05 is essentially a Sellita SW220-1 beating at 4Hz, with a fairly modest-for-the-time 38 hours of power reserve. The integrated three-link bracelet has the gold PVD on its central link and closes with a butterfly clasp.

The Deep Raider Day Date two-tone editions are available now, priced at CHF 2,100. See more on the Favre Leuba website.

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The Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium Brings The Grönefeld Brothers Touch To A Dressier Watch

You know the Grönefeld brothers by now: Tim and Bart, the Dutch duo behind some of the most lavishly finished independent watches money can buy. Grøne Oldenzaal is their more accessible brand, launched in 2024. Following the Manueel One and the Moment Meter Chronograph, which were kind of sporty models, we’re now getting the Horologium. Interestingly, this new hand-wound, quirky and dressy watch looks a LOT like the 1941 Principia, a model that the brothers make under their grown up Grönefeld brand, that sells for mid five figures. Kind of a risky move, to offer such a similar watch with off-the-shelf internals and a much lower price, but I won’t be complaining much about it. You’ll have to ask 1941 Principia models how they feel about it.

The case is 39mm wide and 10mm thick in stainless steel, with the signature Grönefeld vocabulary translated to the lower-tier brand: polished concave bezel, brushed flanks, downward-curving stepped lugs, and a conical crown. Front and back sapphire crystals sit on orange gaskets, a small Dutch flourish you'll notice every now and again. Water resistance is 50 meters. This is dressier and more comfortable than the Manueel One, and the proportions are close to ideal for the style.

Two dials are available, each giving you a completely different vibe for the watch. Which is cool, because one’s more traditional, while the other gives you a lot of expression through the dial. Even the brothers call it that. The Quirky, as the model is called, has a vivid Dutch orange center with baby blue accents, right up to a baby blue strap with orange stitching. The Classic is a sunray-brushed salmon with silver-toned accents and is the one I'd wear. Both use heat-blued hands and diamond-cut, high-polished applied markers, and both swap the Manueel One's central seconds for a small seconds on a raised, diamond-cut plateau finished in circular brushing and sandblasting.

The movement is a hand-wound take on the La Joux-Perret G100, an architecture normally seen in automatic form, now visible through a display back. It beats at 4Hz with 60 hours of power reserve. It’s nicely decorated as well, with Geneva stripes, diamond-cut bevels, and blued screws. Straps are leather with contrasting stitching, baby blue on the Quirky and brown on the Classic, on a steel pin buckle.

The new Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium is limited to 188 per variant, priced at €2,390 without VAT. Orders open 13 August 2026 at 3PM CET, with deliveries starting mid-September. See more on the Grøne website.

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Audemars Piguet Introduces Their Flying Tourbillon To The Bleu Nuit Ceramic Collection

It feels like the Bleu Nuit collection, in which Audemars Piguet renders its iconic Royal Oak variants in beautiful blue ceramic, has been around forever. But they’ve only been doing it since last year. It has a timeless look, making it feel like it’s much older of a collection, but it also means that they can run through a bunch of models before it gets very boring. For their latest Bleu Neuit, AP is releasing the Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon in the deep blue Stern Frères developed for the earliest Royal Oak Jumbo dials, made by adding black pigment No. 50 to the lacquer.

The case is 41mm wide and 10.6mm thick, with 50 meters of water resistance. Every surface, including the integrated bracelet, is ceramic in the same Bleu Nuit shade, which makes the alternating satin-brushed and polished finishing the thing that gives it an interesting look. And hand-finishing ceramic to keep the Royal Oak's sharp facets crisp is very difficult. You get a sapphire crystal on top, while the caseback crystal is set in a titanium frame.

The dial continues the monochrome idea to its conclusion: a matching Bleu Nuit Grande Tapisserie with white gold applied markers and lume-filled Royal Oak hands. At 6 o'clock the rhodium-toned flying tourbillon sits under the dial with no visible upper bridge, so it looks kind of magical.

Inside is the in-house calibre 2950, the automatic flying tourbillon that debuted in the Code 11.59 before moving to the Royal Oak. It beats at 3Hz with a 65-hour power reserve. The sapphire caseback shows the movement which is decorated with Côtes de Genève, circular graining, polished bevels and a rhodium-toned 22-carat pink gold rotor. The bracelet is made out of the same perfect blue ceramic, closed with a titanium clasp.

The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon Bleu Nuit is part of the permanent collection with price available on request. I’ve seen about CHF 200,000 reported. See more on the AP 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 China Books Review, Zhang Er reflects on growing up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and how she owes her love of reading to Auntie Zou, a librarian who stripped banned books of their covers and any pages marked with the library seal of the Workers’ Club, smuggled them home, and secretly loaned them to her. Even amid the chaos of that era, Er remembers this part of her childhood as magical, a time “where characters sprung from their pages and interwove with each other’s lives,” and she imagined worlds far beyond the one she lived in.

• Ready to test your knowledge of hue, value, and saturation? Rivka Galchen’s latest for The New Yorker is a trove of fascinating details about our understanding of color. Galchen opens with the buzziest tidbit: an experiment conducted by a vision scientist who used a laser to stimulate a selection of his own cone cells and glimpse a color unknown outside of his laboratory. From there, she roams—through philosophy and art history, from studios to pigment shops—complicating our understanding of perception with each new turn of her titular question — What Would It Mean to See a New Color?

• When Jessica Black was 16 years old, she told a story to North Carolina police detectives that helped convict five friends of murder. Decades later, she’s still trying to correct the record. Matthew Bremner’s feature for Financial Times is a brisk tick-tock of efforts by Black and her incarcerated friends to overturn criminal convictions they claim were built on disturbing intimidation tactics.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Have you seen videos from the Craighill company on Instagram? Those dudes that take everyday objects and supposedly upgrade them. I’ve been flooded by the videos. And at first, they’re cool. But the more you think about what they are doing, the more ridiculous it seems. As is perfectly said in this video I’ve attached here.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk