Timex Adds A GMT To The Deepwater Meridian; Seiko Expands The Cocktail Time Collection; Watch Ho And Selten Make A Steamer Basket Dial; Moritz Grossmann Brings Back Friction Silver-Plating

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. So, this morning we had Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune line up in the morning sky, this evening we’ll see a solar eclipse, and at night we’re passing through the Perseid meteor shower. The chances that it’s not the end of the world today are pretty slim so I’m off to the Zagreb Observatory to check out the eclipse and meteor shower. Good luck everybody!

In this issue

• Timex Adds A GMT Function To The Very Popular Deepwater Meridian

• Seiko Expands The Compact Cocktail Time Collection With Beautiful Brown, Blue And Green

• Watch Ho & Co. And Selten Take Inspiration From A Dim Sum Steamer Basket For The Yum Cha

• Moritz Grossmann Brings Back Friction Silver-Plating For A 36mm Tefnut With Turquoise Numerals

👂What’s new

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Timex Adds A GMT Function To The Very Popular Deepwater Meridian

Over the past few years, Timex has been building out the Deepwater Meridian line into something more serious than its price suggests, and the people seem to approve. As Seiko keeps moving up in price (without giving us more bang for buck), Timex saw the opening in the affordable diver/sports watch market and decided to slide in. That’s what the Deepwater Meridian is, and now it’s getting a GMT version, as was expected. This is the new Deepwater Meridian 200 Auto GMT.

The stainless steel case measures 42mm wide, 14.50mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48.80mm. It’s not a small watch, sure, but it’s a sturdy sports watch in the purest sense of that description. The cases have a brushed finish with a couple of polished accents, and the screw-down crown at 3 o’clock has generous guards. On top of the case is a sapphire crystal, something that Seiko doesn’t offer in a lot of its lower-budget sports watches, surrounded by a bidirectional 24-hour bezel. Water resistance is 200 meters.

There are three color options for the dials and bezels, and they’re pretty classic — black, green and blue, with matching bezels. The bezels are split into two sections, one for daylight and one for nightime hours. The black is matched with grey, while the green and blue are matched with black. The dial remains pretty much unchanged in its setup, with a magnified date at 3 o’clock, applied markers, broad hands, plenty of lume and bright red, arrow tipped, GMT hands.

Timex, traditionally, doesn’t say what movement is inside, but we know it to be the Seiko NH34a, a caller-style GMT beating at 3Hz with roughly 41 hours of reserve. The watch comes on a Jubilee-style bracelet with a quick-release system.

The Timex Deepwater Meridian 200 Auto GMT is available now, priced at €549. See more on the Timex website.

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Seiko Expands The Compact Cocktail Time Collection With Beautiful Brown, Blue And Green

I told you we have a lot of Seiko releases to get through these days, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. And what a tip it is. The already beautiful Presage Cocktail Time collection, inspired by cocktails from Tokyo’s Star Bar, is getting three new references, the HCB001, HCB002 and HCB003. You know that they come with beautiful dials, but they also get the smaller case in the collection, which is much welcomed.

The case is made out of steel, with pretty good dimensions — 38.5mm wide, a bit under 12mm thick with the domed crystal, and a decent 45mm lug-to-lug. It could be a hair thinner, but let’s not get greedy. The case has straight lugs, a brushed finish and a thin-ish polished bezel surrounding a Hardlex crystal. I wish Seiko would switch to acrylic crystals here, but what can we do. Water resistance is 50 meters.

Then, the dials. The HCB001 gets a gradient blue that looks almost like a stormy sea, with silver hands and applied markers. The HCB002 and HCB003 are a bit warmer with gradient green and gradient brown respectively, paired with yellow gold- and rose gold-colored hands and markers. Underneath the translucent color, the dial base has a light texture that perhaps looks most like scratches. There’s a round date aperture at 4:30.

Inside is the calibre 4R35, Seiko's workhorse automatic and the backbone of most of its entry-level mechanical watches. It beats at 21,600 vph and has about 41 hours of power reserve. Straps vary by reference: the HCB001 gets a five-link brushed-and-polished steel bracelet, while the HCB002 and HCB003 come on light-brown or dark-brown leather with a three-fold clasp.

All three are available now, priced at €490. See more on the Seiko website — the HCB001 here, the HCB002 here and the HCB003 here.

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Watch Ho & Co. And Selten Take Inspiration From A Dim Sum Steamer Basket For The Yum Cha

There’s a pretty high chance you have no idea who Jackie Ho is. I mean, I do this every day and I hardly know who he is. But that’s because I don’t live in Hong Kong. If I lived, I would likely at least be familiar with Watch Ho & Co., a very cool collector community. I know Watch Ho & Co. for their collaborations with the watch brand Selten, all of which have produced incredibly compelling dials. Now, the two are coming together, and just like previous ones, this one has a personal connection for Ho. The dial is style after steaming baskets found in tea houses, named Yum Chaafter Hong Kong's tea houses Ho spent his childhood in with his grandparents.

The case is made out of stainless steel, 38mm wide and 9.95mm thick with the box style sapphire crystal (or a very svelte 8.35mm without it), with a very nice 44.5mm lug-to-lug. When I said this was a very personal watch for Ho, I meant it. On the solid caseback is an illustration done by One Hour Watch of young Ho sharing a meal with his grandparents, and you can engrave a number of your choice onto the restaurant's table marker. Water resistance is 50 meters.

Then, there’s the dial, which is just incredible. It starts as a silver blank that Selten's master engraver Qin divides into roughly eighty sections, each hand-cut with dozens of bright-polished lines set at varying depth and direction to mimic woven bamboo, the lattice of a dim sum steamer lid. Then they apply multiple layers of transparent Grand Feu enamel and the result is a color called Fumé Amber that flows from honey-gold at the centre to smoky brown at the edges. Tea leaf-shaped hands round the theme out.

Inside is the new manually wound Sellita SW210-2 M Power+, adjusted in five positions to roughly ±6 seconds per day. I say new Sellita SW210-2 because this is the upgraded Power+ version, which bumps up the power reserve from a previous 40 hours to 65 hours. The watch comes on a tan Italian nubuck from HasNoBounds. Keeping true to the theme, the watch comes in a real handcrafted bamboo steamer basket and the warranty card resembles one of the red dim sum order slips you find on every Hong Kong tea house table.

The new Watch Ho & Co. x Selten Yum Cha is limited to 100 pieces, priced at HKD 38,828 or about €4,290. See more on the Selten website.

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Moritz Grossmann Brings Back Friction Silver-Plating For A 36mm Tefnut With Turquoise Numerals

Moritz Grossmann is deep into a run of anniversary watches for founder Carl Moritz Grossmann, born 200 years ago. This is the fifth gift to the man in the series, following the Hamatic, the Tremblage, the Tefnut and the Backpage Tremblage. Once again, it’s a Tefnut, their smaller dress watch, but it gets a bit groovy with a 19th-century silver-plating method most brands abandoned long ago. This is all so very German, as you would expect.

The case measures 36mm wide and 8.5mm thick, which puts it firmly in dress-watch territory. Sure, there might be no need to point that out, but it’s curious that Moritz Grossmann often makes quite large watches intended to be in the dress territory. So this is a bit of a relief. The stainless steel is entirely polished, with gently tapered lugs and a large flat crown. Sapphire crystals are found on top and bottom, and both reveal beautiful things underneath.

Starting with the dial, it does something quite unusual. First a brass base is engraved with Roman numerals, filled with turquoise lacquer and fired in a kiln. Then, the dial is silver-plated the surface by friction, an old technique that rubs a paste of silver powder, salt, cream of tartar and water into the metal by hand to leave a matte, grained finish. Very cool. The 1875 logo, the railway minute track, the small seconds and "Made in Germany" are all done in black. The hands are made in-house, ground with diamond files and flame-blued to a bright blue with razor-sharp tips.

Turn it over and you’ll see the manual-winding calibre 102.1, just 3.5mm thick, beating at 3Hz with a 48-hour power reserve. The German silver 3/5 plate has wide Glashütte ribbing with polished bevels, the balance cock is hand-engraved with a floral motif and a discreet "1826," and the movement uses white sapphires in solid gold chatons instead of synthetic rubies. Steel screws are heat-annealed to a violet-brown. The watch comes on a bluish-grey kudu leather strap with a steel prong buckle.

The new Moritz Grossmann Tefnut 36 Silver-plated By Friction Turquoise Blue is a limited edition of 12, priced at €29,000 without VAT. See more on the Moritz Grossmann 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

• There’s nothing like walking into a pub and sitting down at an empty stool where your regular order awaits you. You have been seen; it’s a singular feeling of camaraderie and community. Club 2101, a dive bar in Oakland California, opens around 8 am each day. For The Oaklandside, Azucena Rasilla profiles a 16-hour-day in the life of the 80-year-old haunt, a story as colorful as the dedicated regulars who frequent the establishment, many of them captured in evocative photos by Sarahbeth Maney.

• Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.

• Stormy Morse lost two partners to gun suicide. She didn’t know that the second one, Lewis Tabler, had made the National Rifle Association the beneficiary of his retirement savings through its planned-giving program. In this feature, co-published with The New Yorker, Mike Spies describes what happens when the NRA, which has long denied a connection between access to guns and suicide rates, comes to collect.

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One video you have to watch today

Love a good Tiny Desk Concert, and this one is good. Also, Eve is a great person, I still remember her being incredibly kind to my wife. Good stuff.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk