Urwerk Makes the UR-300 Time Quantum’s Hours Take Themselves Apart on the Hour

Urwerk’s wandering hours usually work like this: hour numerals ride on a rotating carousel and point to the minutes as they pass along a curved track. It's a wonderful animation of passing time, unlike pretty much anything else in the business. Now we have the new UR-300 Time Quantum which keeps the same idea in mind, but shows it in a more static way. That's to say, there's no more carousel. Its hours sit on a T-shaped frame, and at the top of each hour the frame jumps, swaps its arms and turns every numeral at once. It seems like a simpler way to show the time, but the more you look at it, the more complex and original it looks.

The case is made out of Grade 5 titanium, 45.2mm wide, 58.8mm long and 18.25mm thick. Don't let those dimension deter you. Sure, it's a huge watch, but thanks to its unusual shape, it wears much smaller than you would expect. The crown sits at 12, set into the case and guarded by it. Crystals are AR-coated sapphire, and water resistance is 30 meters. There are two versions: plain titanium, called Titan, and one with an AlTiN coating applied by PE-CVD.

The T-frame is made of two arms, with a triangular prism at each end of each arm. Four prisms with three faces each give you 12 hours. Whichever prism sits at the foot of the T shows the current hour and travels across an arc of 108 degrees marked 0 to 60 for the minutes, with running seconds on a separate 120-degree track. When the hour ends, the frame jumps 72 degrees, the crossbar pivots to become the new stem, the old stem becomes the crossbar, and all four prisms rotate to show fresh numerals. That sounds incredibly complicated when I try to explain it. So here's a video of it in action on their Instagram. A retractable lever lifts the cam follower clear if you wind the hands back, so setting the watch can’t damage the mechanism. Once you understand it, reading the time is simple and not that much different from their other work: the numeral is the hour, its position on the ark is the minutes.

The calibre UR-30.01V is automatic, built on a Vaucher base with Urwerk’s own module for the display. It beats at 4Hz, has 40 jewels, a monometallic balance and two mainspring barrels, with Urwerk’s Dual Flow Turbines regulating the winding. It runs for 40 hours, which is short, but moving that much metal requires a lot of energy. The display parts use beryllium copper, brass, anodised aluminium, ARCAP AP1D, titanium and LIGA nickel, chosen for weight and rigidity part by part. Finishing includes Côtes de Genève, circular and straight graining, and polished, chamfered screw heads. It comes on a NATO-style textile strap, but, of course, executed at the highest level.