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- There Are No Big Releases Today, So Here's A Stuffed Edition Of Indie and Micro Brands: A Steel FC Is A Great Deal, Ball Fixes True GMT Shortcoming, Zero West Pays Homage To Trains, Bovet Has A Different Meteorite Dial...
There Are No Big Releases Today, So Here's A Stuffed Edition Of Indie and Micro Brands: A Steel FC Is A Great Deal, Ball Fixes True GMT Shortcoming, Zero West Pays Homage To Trains, Bovet Has A Different Meteorite Dial...
You can't expect the major players to have a new watch every day of the week, but you can always discover a new favorite independent watchmaker
Vuk Radic
May 05, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes
Hey friends, none of the big manufacturers decided to announce watches today, so this edition of It’s About Time will be a bit different. Instead of focusing on just five major pieces of news and keeping it around the 5 minute reading mark, I stuffed this edition to its gills with a bunch of news from all sorts of smaller and indie brands to make up for the lack of big news. Don’t worry, we’ll be back to our regular schedule on Monday.
In this issue:
The Steel Frederique Constant Tourbillon Is A Great Deal
Bovet has a different meteorite dial watch
Ball attempts to fix major true GMT shortcoming
Zero West pays homage to a world-famous locomotive
And… invite your friends to win a Seiko Alpinist
Today’s reading time: 9 minutes and 30 seconds
Everybody needs a green faced watch in their life. That’s why we have a new giveaway - it’s the Seiko SPB121J1, aka the Seiko Alpinist in a wonderful shade of green. In fact, we’re giving away two of them!
All you have to do is click the button below and have five of your friends subscribe. Both you and one of your friends will be eligible to win one of the watches
We only have two conditions when entering this giveaway - invite 5 of your friends to subscribe and live somewhere were you can buy the Alpinist, so we can get this for you and ship it to your address. That’s it!
👂What’s new
1/
Exactly a week ago, I wrote about the new Frederique Constant Classic Tourbillon Manufacture in pink gold that the brand launched to mark their 35th anniversary. While the price of the watch, considering the in-house movement and pink gold case, was a relatively acceptable €25,995, it would have been better if it were a bit cheaper. Maybe €10,000 cheaper? Well, good news, because Frederique Constant is adding two new stainless steel tourbillon models.
The basics of these new Classics Tourbillon Manufacture steel watches remain the same, with a polished 3-part case with reasonable dimensions; 39mm in diameter and just below 11mm in thickness. Both editions are paired with a blue alligator leather strap with matt finishing, and closed by a steel folding clasp.
The dial sticks to the style introduced on the gold model, with much simpler lines too. There are no faux-guilloche or Roman numerals, just a sunray-brushed base with applied markers and hand-polished hands. You can get it in blue or silver, while the one-minute tourbillon sits at 6o’clock.
The watch will be limited to 350 pieces per colorway, and I assume they will sell out pretty fast, despite the price of €14,495. It’s a lot, but keep in mind that you’ll struggle to find an in-house Swiss made tourbillon for under 30k, with the odd exception of a TAG Heuer, Horage or CODE41.
2/
Look at this Bovet. Then remember that this is a more subdued watch from the brand. That was the actual brief when they introduced the 19Thirty collection - to create straightforward everyday watches. Yeah, ok…
Bovet is introducing a version of the 19Thirty with a cosmic blue Gibeon meteorite dial housed in a matte sandblasted titanium case. The design cues of the collection, with the signature bow and crown at noon, are inspired by a 1930s pocket watch. This new version comes in a 42mm case that’s only 9.05mm thick.
To reveal the lines and patterns of the Gibeon meteorite, the dial is first etched with nitric acid and then treated with a transparent blue PVD coating. Like other 19Thirty models, the dial features an inverted figure eight with the hours displayed in the larger top circle and the running seconds in the intersecting sub-dial at 6 o’clock. A sapphire caseback reveals (because of course it does, the Bovet brothers created the first transparent casebacks in the early 19th century) the beautiful in-house calibre 15BM04, a manual-winding movement with an exceptionally robust power reserve of seven days on one barrel.
The Bovet 19Thirty Blue Meteorite & Titanium joins the regular collection, is fitted with a matching blue textile strap and retails for CHF 35,000.
3/
Seeing as GMT watches are all the rage this year, in the past two weeks I referenced (and tried to explain the differences between) the two main types of GMT complications - the “traveller” or “true” GMT that has a jumping local hour hand, and the “caller” GMT that has a jumping GMT hand. Both types come with their pluses and minuses. The major shortcoming of true GMT watches is that they don’t come with a quick-set date, as one has to rotate the local hour hand until the correct date is displayed.
Enter Ball, a brand that’s not on your radar that often. Their new Roadmaster Pilot GMT Green attempts to solve the issue. The Roadmaster is not a chronograph, and yet, you can clearly see the two pushers on the left hand side. Ball uses them to control the local hour hand. Pressing on the pusher at 8 o’clock jumps the local hour hand backwards while pressing on the pusher at 10 jumps the local hour hand forward. This is a quick and convenient way to adjust the local hour and it allows you to use the crown for a quick-set date, unlike many true GMT watches. This is made possible thanks to the COSC-certified Ball calibre RR1204-C, based on the Sellita SW220 or ETA 2836 industry workhorse calibres.
The case, just like the bracelet, is made of titanium and measures 40mm in diameter, 47.8mm lug-to-lug, 14mm in height. It also has 300 metres of water resistance thanks to a screw-down crown and case-back.
This Ball Roadmaster Pilot GMT will be limited to 1000 pieces, and is available for pre-orders now until the 10th of May at a price of $2,799. After the pre-order period ends, price will go up to $3,249 (RRP).
4/
British company Zero West, makers of the Spitfire S4-P9427 and H1 Hurricane (the watches, not the planes, obviously), has just launched two new, limited-edition pieces that celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Flying Scotsman, a famous steam train designed and built in 1923. The watches, the FS-1 and FS-2 Flying Scotsmen, are limited to 100 pieces each, but the brand promises this isn’t your average special edition.
The FS-1 and FS-2 come in at a wearable 41 mm in either polished or black PVD-coated finishes, respectively. It has an almost steampunk style with a unique lug system attached with four screws. As an added gimmick, on the back of each watch and behind a sapphire disc, you will find an actual section of the steel boiler from the original Flying Scotsman, engraved with the Scotsman’s original serial number ’1472’.
In true Zero West fashion, the dials of the FS-1 and FS-2 are well-thought-out and packed with interesting detail. Like with all of their watches, longitude and latitude are printed at 6 o’clock. In this case, they point to Doncaster Works, where the Flying Scotsman was designed and built. The FS-1 dial takes inspiration from the gauges found inside the cab of the Scotsman, and steers the watch in a more utilitarian direction. The FS-2, however, borrows its design from a famous clock on platform 8 at Kings Cross station in London. With its applied chrome Roman numerals over the deep black dial, it’s a more monochromatic offering. Powering both variants is the SW200-1.
The Zero West FS-1 and FS-2 are available now as limited editions of 100 piece each at a price of £3,000 excluding VAT
5/
Ferragamo makes fantastic shoes and a couple of very nice bags. They also make horrible watches. Just look at their website. They look like generic fashion brand overpriced pieces, some of which even seem like dupes of watches from Richard Mille and the like. However, they just released the F-80 Skeleton. Yes, it’s plastic. Yes, it’s overpriced. But at least it’s a stab in the right direction, and it’s interesting.
When Swatch came out with the bioceramic MoonSwatch we all had a good chuckle at them attempting to rebrand plastics. But it looks like bioceramics are here to stay, even if they are just plastics. At least you can get interesting colors out of them.
The F-80 Skeleton comes in a bioceramic case that’s 41mm wide. The lugs have a single oversized screw at the center of each integrated lug assembly. You can get the watch in several colors - Amaretto, which is a medium matte tan tone with faint pinkish undertones or Navy Blue, a rich and even matte navy tone.
Both new Ferragamo F-80 Skeleton models share essentially the same skeleton dial layout, other than color. Amaretto-cased models render this intricate skeleton layout in a case-matching buff hue, although a metallic texture helps to keep this colorway from appearing too uniform in photos. The greater contrast between the rose gold ion plated dial hardware and the skeleton dial surface helps to make the Navy Blue model a far more legible option, although it loses some of the monochromatic smoothness of its sibling.
Ferragamo powers both new F-80 Skeleton models with the Landeron 24 automatic skeleton movement. This powerplant is closely patterned after the ubiquitous ETA 2824’s architecture, and offers broadly similar performance including a 40 hour power reserve at a 28,8000 bph beat rate.
The watch will cost you a pretty hefty $2,195. If they cut the price in half or even more, this would be a fantastic watch. At this price it’s just too much for a plastic watch with a modified ETA.
6/
In 2021, with the launch of the Open Water diver, Vero made a hard pivot from making their watches in house in Oregon toward outsourcing their manufacturing to trusted Swiss partners, and refocusing the brand on customer service (they now offer a ten year warranty) and shifting the design language into something a little bolder and more colorful. And that’s what you get with the newly introduced Meridian, Vero’s take on the classic field watch with a manually wound movement.
Vero characterizes the Meridian as a “weekend watch,” which is borne out in the casual color schemes of the two models that launched the collection. First up is the Rambler, a bright blue dial with a red and white outer track, and easy to read black Arabic numerals at each hour. There’s also the Rally, with its cream colored dial and accents in the perimeter in blue and red.
The cases are 38mm in stainless steel, and are defined largely by their wide, radially brushed bezel. The watches are mounted to a very nice five link bracelet that uses the Nodus developed “NodeX” push button micro-adjustment clasp.
It has a 100 meter water resistance rating and a flat sapphire crystal, and the movement is the Sellita SW-210 manually wound caliber. It’ll run for 42 hours on a full wind, and has been custom decorated with black coated plates, heat blued screws, and “snail finished” gears.
The Meridian is available now at a retail price of $795.
7/
While you might not recognize his name instantly, you have certainly heard Martin Tillman’s music. He has composed the soundtracks for movies like Total Recall, The Da Vinci Code, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Dark Knight. After a chance encounter with Christien Hutter, CEO of high-end German watch manufacturer Moritz Grossmann, Tillman suggested they should collaborate.
Selecting the Moritz Grossmann Backpage as the canvas, the result is a highly limited watch with an almost fully exposed mechanical movement. The case is made of 18k white gold and measures 40.5mm across and 11.3mm in height. It comes with Moritz Grossmann’s crown-and-pusher system to eliminate any play of the hands while setting the time. .
Your eyes will be drawn in by the inverted and semi-exposed calibre 107.0. The only thing ‘obstructing’ the view is the half-circled hour track with small seconds sub-dial, executed in a very lovely champagne tone. This holds applied black indices and is surrounded by a minute track printed on a sloped flange. Time is indicated by handcrafted polished steel hands for the hours, minutes and seconds, with the central two having a luminous HyCeram insert. For the rest, you can witness the superb levels of finishing of the front-mounted Grossmann balance, the hand-engraved balance cock, the violet heat-annealed screws, the German Silver mainplate underneath, the running gear and so on. It’s a work of art with a contemporary touch, perfectly in tune with Tillman’s work on the electric cello, his instrument of choice most of the time.
The Moritz Grossmann Tillman Electric Cello Watch is limited to just four pieces. The watch is worn on a handmade Kudu leather strap fitted with a polished stainless steel pin buckle. If you can get your hands on one, it will set you back EUR 37,300.
🫳On hand
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⚙️Watch Worthy
A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like
Strayer is a new watch brand from the creative mind of Mr. Ola Stray. An accomplished Swedish industrial designer, Mr. Stray answered the “call of horology” in deciding to develop his own watch brand, starting with an interesting debut model family known as the STR 4601. “STR” stands for “System-Turn-Release,” a term related to how this watch case was engineered. In short, there is a mechanism that locks and unlocks the middle case from the outer case (the turning lever near the crown is the switch). When unlocked, the middle case is able to be pushed out and then put into another outer case (each STR 4601 watch comes with two outer cases). The idea is to further a sense of giving the watch fashionable versatility. What is probably more interesting is how well the case system is actually engineered.
⏲️Wait a minute
A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting
In 1986, Barbara Lowe Vollick won five games of ‘Jeopardy!’ in a row. Her episodes were then taken out of circulation. What followed was a nearly 40-year hunt for the missing tapes—and a quest to find out what really happened between the show and its most enigmatic champion.
For 25 years, ex-Special Forces officer Dave Eubank has been dodging bullets to bring humanitarian aid to rebels in Burma’s ongoing civil conflict. Critics say he blurs the lines between combat and relief work while proselytizing the Gospel. Rolling Stone spent three weeks in the jungle with him to try to learn the truth
Charles III will be crowned king of the United Kingdom tomorrow. And it seems that this title from the Guardian sums it up best: “God save us all: Britain is about to get the king it deserves”
👀Watch this
One video you have to watch today
Last year, two filmmakers made the same documentary about volcanoes. One got nominated for an Oscar, the other one was made by Werner Herzog. This is an interesting video about what Herzog’s The Fire Within reveals about the meaning of ecstatic truth, the deep humanism invoked by sublime wonder, the inexplicable magic of cinema, and what happens when two filmmakers make the same movie.
💵Pre-loved precision
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Everybody needs a green faced watch in their life. That’s why we have a new giveaway - it’s the Seiko SPB121J1, aka the Seiko Alpinist in a wonderful shade of green. In fact, we’re giving away two of them!
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