The NOMOS Club Worltimer Looks Best In Black And Lume, And New From Timex, Buci, Chronoswiss And Konstantin Chaykin

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Back from the Nomos Forum and I'll report on how cool of an experience it was when I have a moment to think about it and put my thoughts on screen. But very fun overall.

In case you just got one of these emails and don't know where I've been for the past month, you can read the whole story here.

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1/ NOMOS Gets Nightlife Ready With A Lot Of Lume on the Club Sport Neomatik Worldtimer Dark

As you might have already read, I just got back from the Glashütte where I attended the Nomos Forum. This is their annual event to which the invite journalists, influencers, retailers and partners for a day of presentations of novelties. But it's more than that. It's fantastic to get to see behind the scenes of one of my favorite brands. I got to see their manufacturing facilities, assembly and saw a bunch of watches that I can't write about yet. But soon! What I can talk about is the new variant of the Club Sport Neomatik Worldtimer. And let me tell you, judging by how difficult it was to snatch one for a few minutes of hands-on time, this might be a huge hit for them. It's called the Dark and it doesn't just get a dark dial color. It gets ready for a night out with a BUNCH of fantastically placed lume. I like this thing a lot. In fact... Well, more about that later.

The steel case is unchanged. It's 40mm wide, 9.9mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48mm. First, those lugs are short by NOMOS standards. Perfectly short, one could say. Second, the 40mm might sound large, but thanks to it's very rounded look and kind of incredible thinness, it wears a lot smaller than you would expect. It looks like a 38mm on my wrist. On top is a domed sapphire crystal and on the side is a screw down crown with a red indicator if it's unscrewed. Water resistance is 100 meters. I hate the term go-anywere-do-anything, but this just might be the one watch that can do it all.

The dial is glossy black. NOMOS calls it enamel; it isn't fired enamel, but it looks clean and deep. Would I have liked a matte black more? I'm not sure. I would like to see the option, though. Hands, numerals, the 24-hour subdial at three and the outer city ring are all off-white, which is in fact just Super-LumiNova that glows a bright blue, while the small seconds at six stay black. By day it's a restrained black-and-cream watch. At night it's the best version of this dial NOMOS has made. The pusher at two advances the hour hand and the city ring in one-hour steps, and the subdial keeps your home time in 24-hour format with a two-tone day/night ring.

Inside is the in-house calibre DUW 3202, a 4.8mm-thick Neomatik automatic with a central rotor, beating at 3Hz with a 42-hour reserve. It uses the NOMOS swing system and is regulated in six positions; through the sapphire back you'll see stripes, blued screws and a three-quarter plate. The three-link steel bracelet is comfortable, but its polished folding clasp just screams: "scratch me, scratch me". This is a perfect watch, if the colors work for you, that could only be improved with a better clasp.

The NOMOS Club Sport Neomatik Worldtimer Dark, reference 793, is part of the regular collection and available now. Price is set at €4,400 with the sapphire caseback and steel bracelet. See more photos here and the watch on the NOMOS website.

2/ Timex Goes All Telecaster Butterscotch for Fender's 80th

Fender turns 80 this year and the Telecaster turns 75, and to celebrate those two occasions, they're teaming up with Timex. Most collaborations at this price point are usually a simple color change and an applied logo, this one goes a bit deeper. Now, as not a huge fan of electric guitars, I can't say this is for me, or whether others will see this at a bit corny. But what you get is a very intricate dial that takes the Tele's butterscotch blonde finish, and the seconds hand is shaped like the guitar itself.

The stainless steel case measures 41mm wide and 14mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 46.5mm. A chunk of watch, especially for a simple three-hander. It's mostly satin brushed with polished bevels, set against a brushed screw-in caseback. On top is a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating, you get 200 meters of water resistance, and a knurled crown at 3 o'clock stamped with the Fender logo.

The wood-grain dial is the main attraction of the watch. It's warm and honey-toned, with the iconic Fender script done in black. Applied indices, luminous hands and a date at 3 o'clock round it out. The bi-color 60-minute bezel splits black over yellow, with each half's numerals printed in the opposite color.

Inside is the Miyota calibre 8215, a 21-jewel automatic beating at 3Hz, with 42 hours of power reserve. It's dependable, cheap to service and entirely undecorated. The strap is a black leather NATO from S.B. Foot Tanning Co. with a steel pin buckle.

The Fender x Timex Automatic (ref. TW6A14600) is priced at €479 and available now. It doesn't seem to be a limited edition. See more photos here and the watch on the Timex website.

3/ Buci Writes A Short Story Into The Nouvelle, a 36mm Hand-Wound Watch With Calligraphed Numerals

Most watches built around a literary concept, and there really aren't a lot of them around, end up as a normal watch with a paragraph of backstory attached. Buci, the small Paris brand run by Nousseïma Baraket, takes the brief a bit more seriously: book-page edges on the case, blotting-paper texture on the dial, pen nib shaped hands. Nouvelle is Buci's second collection after Garde-Temps, and the theme this time is the short story.

The steel case measures a pretty nice 36mm wide and 9.88mm thick. The oval, concave bezel carries over from the first collection, now sharper. The mid-case is fluted to look like the stacked edges of book pages. That could have been a gimmick, but I swear it works for me here. A domed, recessed sapphire crystal sits on top, there's a display caseback, and water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is very cool. Its texture is modeled on blotting paper, in Essentiel (warm aged-paper cream) or Contemplation (dark blue). A Parisian calligrapher painted the numerals by hand, deliberately uneven, and their sizes swell and shrink to form a crescent across the dial. Small seconds with crosshairs sit recessed at nine o'clock. Once an hour the hour and minute hands overlap into the shape of a fountain-pen nib. Very cute. Both hands and numerals get Super-LumiNova.

Inside is the Sellita SW219, a hand-wound calibre in Elaboré grade, beating at 4Hz with 42 hours of power reserve. It's a reliable, easily serviced movement and nothing more. Straps are calfskin on quick-release bars, 18mm wide tapering to 16mm, in grained cream, grained blue, smooth brown or grey nubuck, with a brushed and bead-blasted steel buckle. It ships in a book-shaped box with a notebook.

Now, for a bit of a catch. I hardly ever feature Kickstarter projects because I've been burned too many times. However, Buci is a fairly reliable brand so I'm confident this will work out. The Kickstarter campaign started on September 25th and is open until November 15th. Price is set at €1,550 during the presale and goes up to €1,850 after that. The Buci Nouvelle is limited to 300 pieces. See more photos here and the watch on the Buci website.

4/ Chronoswiss Brings Back the Neo Digiteur In Three Pastel Colors At A Lower Price

Chronoswiss surely wasn't the first to separate hours, minutes and seconds, not by a long shot. Regulator layouts, in which the three are separated onto three separate planes, have been around for centuries and watchmakers preferred them as it was easier to set and regulate other clocks by keeping an eye on the large central seconds hand. In the late 80s, Chronoswiss founder Gerd Lang, took the concept, simplified it maximally and got rid of the hands to create the Digiteur. It drops the hands and gives you just tiny openings for the three. The watch was discontinued, but then revived last year, just in time for the jumping hours and window display trend. Now, the collection is getting a pastel colorway with the Pastel Code editions.

The steel case has interesting proportions that measure 30mm wide, 48mm long and 9.7mm thick, unchanged from 2025. It seems a bit on the long side, but it curves along its length to follow the wrist, with brushed top surfaces, polished bevels and sandblasted flanks set back from the edges. Chronoswiss has shrunk its signature onion crown and flattened the underside so it doesn't break the outline. You get sapphire crystals front and back and 50 meters of water resistance. This is a dress watch, and the specs are dress-watch specs.

There are three dial colors: Rose, Mint and Sky. Each is sandblasted and then lacquered, so it appears matte with some depth underneath. Chronoswiss is very well known for its very bright and very metallic colors, so it's nice to see something a bit softer. The hour display sits at noon in a trapezoid shaped opening, the minutes fill a large central arch with a fixed marker, and the seconds sweep through a wide arc below. All of these openings have different shapes and are deeply faceted. The discs are white aluminum with dark blue numerals, and legibility is excellent. The edition number out of 99 is printed under the seconds window, which is an interesting choice.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre C.85757. It uses a Peseux 7001 base with Chronoswiss's own Digiteur module on top, beating at 3Hz and running for 48 hours. The module loads a spring and releases it on the hour, so the hour disc snaps forward while the minutes and seconds drag continuously. The price cut i mentioned in the title comes from the finishing: earlier versions had hand guilloché on the wheel bridge, and this one gets Côtes de Genève. That's a visible step down behind a sapphire caseback, but it's a fair trade. The watch comes on a grey or black textile strap with a steel pin buckle.

The Chronoswiss Neo Digiteur Pastel Code is limited to 99 examples per color., priced at €12,700. See more photos here and the watches on the Chronoswiss website.

5/ Konstantin Chaykin Turns The Atomic Heart Robot Ballerinas Into A Pair Of Special Wristmons

If for anything, Konstantin Chaykin is the best known for his expressive watches. Most of his most recognizable work comes in the form of Wristmons, with skeumorphic dials inspired by faces of monsters, animals and catoon characters. They also have a more... let's call it risqué... variant. One that gets a bit more adult. Now, they're teaming up with the Mundfish video game studio, and their Atomic Heart shooter set in a 1955 Soviet Union that never happened, where two towering robot dancers guard the scientist Dmitry Sechenov. Their movements were modelled on Bolshoi choreography, and their elegant look is replicated on the dial of the new Ballerina Twins.

Both use a titanium case 40mm wide and 12.9mm thick, polished and brushed, with a single crown on the right side. There's anti-reflective sapphire crystals front and back, the caseback window held by six screws. It's rated to 30 meters, which is standard for Chaykin and you won't be swimming with this wild thing. It's an overall elegant case, but no one really cares that much about the case here.

It's all about the dial, despite there not being a traditional dial. Both feature a silhouette of the Twins, each with a very distinct look. The Left Twin is a black figure on red with a fanned grain d'orge pattern below; the Right Twin is silver on graphite, with lines radiating down from behind her head and gold guilloché for the cardigan. The faces of both Twins are a 10.1mm sapphire that shows the moon phase. The heads have a gold-plated braid on top with a ruby star at the center of the braid, and blow the head is Chaykin's logo that hangs at the throat like a pendant. Then, there's the time telling mechanism. Instead of the Twins' breast, you get two turning discs set into the robot's chest, with synthetic rubies doing the pointing, one showing the minutes and the other the hours.

Inside is the self-winding calibre K.18-25, essentially a La Joux-Perret G200, but heavily reworked for Chaykin and topped with his own 68-part display module to move the time indications into the rotating discs. It beats at 4Hz and has a 68 hour power reserve. The watches come on a fabric strap with a pin buckle Chaykin makes in titanium.

The Konstantin Chaykin x Atomic Heart Ballerina Twins are limited to 69 examples of each version, priced at CHF 20,000. I would bet they are all sold out, but you might try reaching out to them to see if any are left. See more photos here and the watches on the Konstantin Chaykin website.

⚙️Watch Worthy

• A review of the Seiko Alpinist GMT HBC007
• Hands on with the Doxa SUB 200 T-Graph II

⏲️End links

• In this story for Dispatch, Lotte Brundle reports on a surprising trend: young women in the UK are pursuing careers in the death care industry. In a time of high unemployment, funeral home apprenticeships offer an alternative to university, where students accumulate significant debt. While the pay is low and the industry needs to do a better job building awareness that the trajectory exists, the young women who speak to Brundle find the work meaningful and rewarding.
• Not long after the death of his father, Derek Askey, a new father himself, is selected as an alternate juror for a murder trial. The experience upends the typical vulnerability and openness of his life: Askey, under court order, cannot speak with his wife about the random violence heaped upon him, yet nevertheless worries about what his infant son “received from me” during his wordless days in the courtroom. He must withstand the gruesome details of the criminal trial, yet will not be allowed to participate in the jury’s deliberations. His personal essay is a challenging exploration of enforced silence, and the ways in which we seek to unburden ourselves through voice.
• Beryl Gilothwest’s grandmother, Sandy “Moose” West, passed away at age 108 in 2021. For The Bitter Southerner, Gilothwest profiles a diminutive woman whose love for Ossabaw, an island off the coast of Georgia, was larger than life. In a world striving for “progress,” West was a staunch advocate for thoughtful preservation; she was a fierce conservationist and environmentalist who embraced the unknown and took pleasure in learning from it.

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What a weird freaking car. It's fascinating to see a brand like BMW rip itself apart in real time.

Thanks for reading

Vuk

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