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Thanks you for following our reviews.
Francis J.
I recently visited the Stølås web site and found out that the company is releasing a great-looking naval model, available to pre-order. Here is the teaser featured on their revamped Website at the time of writing:
Back in June 2010, I wrote an introduction piece about Stølås, a young and fresh micro-brand named in honour of the founder’s Scandinavian heritage. Being an avid collector of timepieces, Curtis Stolaas decided to set up his own watch brand and open a small workshop where the timepieces could be assembled and tested.
At the time, I was a bit weary of their Harbormaster model looking too much like a Ulysse Nardin, but this detail should not overshadow the hard work that entrepreneurs Curtis and Christina Stolaas have been putting behind their horological endeavour. I particularly like the fact that in response to the disasters in Japan, they chose to create a limited edition of 10 watches and donate 50% of the proceedings to charity.
The Harbormaster collection has actually been expanded into three variations: the Genoa, the Spinnaker and the Gennaker. The biggest difference between those models lies in the dial material and the colour of luminous compound. The Genoa features a white embossed dial while other models use a carbon fibre texture. The Gennaker is the only one to feature a PVD coating on the case and bezel.
Besides their demanding customers interested in Swiss made automatics or clones, Stølås also have customers who are pretty content with a battery-powered watch. To cater for that clientele, Curtis and Christina Stolaas have been working on a design that makes reference to naval aviation.
Named after the radio transmission for safe carrier approach, the “BallCall” uses the same frame as the Harbormaster, but the luminous bezel is replaced by a much simpler design that instantly reminded me of a bronze diving helmet. The bezel features 6 screws, of which one serves as the index.
The hands are hollowed so that even though they may overlap each other, everything remains easy to read. This layout is extremely simple, but at the same time it offers all the information one needs. Inside is a Ronda 6004D calibre with small second and date. Ronda is possibly Switzerland’s #2 top quartz movement maker right after ETA.
The BallCall has been developped in a special version that commemorates the year when women where first granted their wings in the US Navy. Besides the entry-price quartz version, the team has also developped automatic models in a wide array of dial and luminous compound colours.
Interestingly, Stølås is the second company I know to offer ETA 2824 clones alongside the Swiss movement. The first micro-brand to do this was the Orange Watch Company. The most obvious consequence for the consumer is the price difference: where the Stølås Genoa costs about USD 1499, the company is able to offer a clone-powered alternative at USD 609.
Chinese movements are not all that bad. I recently tested an ST1901-powered Alpha chronograph on my watch timer, and it ran as nice as any Swiss movement. For some reason, Chinese manufacturers are now in a position to offer very good clones of the 25 years-old Swiss calibres: ETA 2824-2, ETA 2892-A2 or ETA 7750, you name it! One might even wonder if the Swiss didn’t want to outsource so badly that strategic tooling ended up in the “wrong” hands. I am also aware of at least 2 Chinese companies that have established factories in Switzerland, where Chinese blanks are assembled in perfect “Swiss Made”-compliance.
From a technical standpoint, the SMC clone chosen by Stølås after extensive testing has the same fitting as the Swiss ETA 2824-2: when mainenance will be performed on the watches, the workshop will be free to use the same case, dial and hands on either calibre. The calibres can also be swapped, so if one start with the SMC clone and for some reason decidse to move on to the Swiss ETA, Stølås also sells spare Swiss movements for the upgrade.
Prices for the BallCall collection range from USD 373.75 to USD 1740.05 in pre-order. Prices will be higher once they have all the watches in stock. Check the gallery below for some of the versions available:
As the editor, I would like to wish the reader a Happy New Year, and thank them for their support throughout the year 2011, either by visiting our posts or by linking to them on horological forums. WatchProjects.com consistently started publishing news about boutique brands in July 2009 and the site traffic almost doubled between December 2010 and December 2011.
Based on Alexa.com, WatchProjects.com is visited more frequently by males who are in the age range 35-44, have no children and are graduate school educated. I don’t know if you feel like you fit this description… Although the blog is English-speaking, we have visitors from Germany, Spain and Italy. People mostly find us through Google or their favorite horological forum.
Francis J.
Here are the top ten posts that you visited in 2011 on WatchProjects.com:
Again, thanks a lot for following us and discussing our blog entries and dissertations on horological forums. I wish you lots of watch collecting and customizing fun to 2012!
If you are European like me, the name “Burlington” unmistakably brings to mind the iconic and colorful “diamond harlequin” cotton blend socks adorned by the upper class of the continent.
To be fair, the name Burlington may refer to many a thing besides a company of the Kayser-Roth Corporation. In case of the Burlington Watch Company, there are actually traces of an earlier mail order trade company which supplied pocket watches mostly manufactured by the Illinois Watch Company, which was sold to the Hamilton Watch Company around 1927. The Burlington tradinc company also imported and signed Swiss watches manufactured by H. Moser & Cie.
Now I know not if the Burlington Watch Company discussed here has any ties with the Burlington Watch Co. of yester, but I really like the branding and product design of the new company.
Assembled by hand in the US, the watches use state-of-the-Art components: cases are made in Germany, dials are made by Lüm-Tec™ and the UNITAS movements are made by ETA in Switzerland.
Take the watch pictured above, the Mustang MK: there is a myriad of watches inpired by German aviator timepieces, yet the Burlington designer managed to give a new twist to the original look. The minutes and hours hands are see-through and coated with luminous compound (I’m guessing some A-grade Super-Luminova™), and the counter for seconds has tiny lookalike screws that make it look like the part of an aircraft dashboard.
The piece pictured below, the Avro RL, features 3 big numeral indexes. I find it more reminiscent of race cars dashboards than aircrafts.
Limited to 100 pieces per collection, these watches can be bought between USD 699 and USD 779, depending on the choice of strap or bracelet.
Based in the German metalsmithing Mecca of Pforzheim, SK Watches sells pare parts for standard Swiss mechanical movements: ETA 2824-2, Unitas 6497, Unitas 6498, Valjoux 7750 and Valjoux 7751.
For orders of 10 dials or more, it is possible to have a personal brand printed on the dial. For orders of 75 dials or more, one can even have one’s own dial design printed. Forum watches anyone?
Starting at 200 Euro in total it is possible to get a full kit, including mechanical movement.
After two weeks of research, the editor of Watchproject.com is proud to present the Internet’s first list of affordable manufactures watches: Selection of 21 Affordable Manufacture Watches. Listed in ascending order from 500 to 5000 Euro, this list is based on a broader and more accurate definition of the term ”manufacture“; that takes in account the historical, geographical and industrial realities.
Click here for the full review.
Founded by Brigitte and Olaf Vockerodt, the brand Uhren Forum aims at providing collectors with affordable watches focused on quality, design and functionality. The name is rather odd, because it is easily mistaken by Internet search engines for German-speaking “Watch Forum”.
Sold at 1’780 EUR, Their flagship is a full calendar chronograph based on the Valjoux 7751. The design is a clever mix of classical and modern cues. The German-built stainless steel case is sized at 41 mm and is resistant to 10 bar. It is available with a standard or a coin-edge bezel, and the designer managed to fit various information on the dial without making it feel crammed: hour an minutes, synchronized 24 hours, weekday, month and date, moonphase, seconds register and tachymetric scale.
The movement Valjoux 7751 comes with the highest finishing and undergoes C.O.S.C certification. The calendar windows for weekday and month benefits from custom-printed disks, with white text on a black background.
The watch is available on a black leather strap, but a stainless steel bracelet can also be fitted.
The Calendar collection has also been simplified to release the Grand Prix, a simpler calendar chronograph based on the Valjoux 7750:
They also kept most elements of the dial to create a four-hands, dual-time automatic watch that is sold for 813 EUR:
As always, the visual elements are quite nicely balanced and allow a smooth reading of informations.
After several weeks of mystery, Blancpain finally unveiled their new watch on October 25th 2011 at the Dubai Mall Aquarium. Christened “X Fathoms”, this 55,6 mm novelty titanium timepiece is a sophisticate mechanical diving computer accurate to 30 centimeter down to 15 meter of depth. Only a handful of brands has achieved to produce watches with analog aneroid pressure indication, but the X Fathoms pushes the envelope in terms of diving measurement and readings.
The history of Blancpain diving watches is closely tied to that of SCUBA diving. Contrary to popular belief it was Blancpain, not some other Geneva-based company, who was first in supplying reliable diving watches to the earliest experimental divers. Throughout the history of watchmaking, brands like Officine Panerai, Favre-Leuba, IWC and Jaeger-leCoultre have all worked to perfect the analog depth gauge watch using modern manufacturing processes. With a watchmaker of the caliber of Vincent Calabrese on board since 2008, it looks like Blancpain felt they had to pay tribute to their diving heritage and plunge deeper into the technology to release a “tour de force” (French for: A feat demonstrating brilliance or mastery in a field).
Being closely integrated with the movement manufacture Frédéric Piguet, Blancpain added Vica Sarl to its assets in 2008. Vica was purchased from Master Watchmaker and AHCI co-founder Vincent Calabrese, who came to join Blancpain as a consultant.
A self-taught watchmaker, Vincent Calabrese is one of the few people in his trade capable of building a timepiece from the ground up “by hand” (without computerized machines). Having engineered complications for the most prestigious Swiss manufactures, Mister Calabrese is mostly known for his custom-made in-line tourbillons, which count amongst the earliest wrist tourbillons of the 20th century. In 2002, Bell & Ross unveiled a collection of mechanical complications developed with the help of the Master Watchmaker.
Since his early days in the field, Vincent Calabrese has always advocated for a down-to earth and equitable watchmaking, that would give credits to the craftspersons behind a masterpiece. This creed led him to co-found the prestigious AHCI with the most prominent of his peers.
Now operating within the Blancpain manufacture, Vincent Calabrese has been serving collectors with a new breed of mechanical complications that bear his unmistakable touch. The Carrousel Volant in particular, is a wink from Mister Calabrese to confound those horological marketers over-confident in their understanding of high-end watchmaking: the watch perfectly fits the consensual description of a Tourbillon, yet its creator insists on calling it a Carrousel.
But I digress. As the video reveals, the X Fathoms is designed for use as a depth gauge:
Like the rest of the watches discussed below, the X Fathoms is another implementation based on the aneroid barometer.
Invented by 19th century French engineer and inventor Lucien Vidi, the aneroid barometer is pretty much straightforward: changes in surrounding temperature and pressure lead Vidi Chamber (sealing a gas) to contract or expand. A mechanical system amplifies those variations into readable information. By the way,
would the reader be curious in building a simplified aneroid barometer at home, the bottle barometer is great to begin with, as it only requires basic objects as parts.
Needless to say, thanks to the invention of Lucien Vidi, altimeters and barometers have been mass-produced
through the 19th and 20th centuries.
Instead of building a mechanism to display atmospheric pressure change, Swiss-Romand engineer Jean-Léon Reutter managed in 1928 to use the motion of the Vidi Chamber to wind a clock. Commercial production started in France the following year until the design was perfected and production overtaken by Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-leCoultre.
Most of all, manufacturing of the Vidi Chamber prooved very tricky: the sealing is not virtually perfect, the gas eventually escapes and leaves the chamber to be refilled.
With the invention of aviation, engineers started to work on adapting the barometer for measuring altitude, to create an instrument that was vital for night navigation. Paul Kollsman eventually managed to design the first reliable example of a barometric altimeter in 1929.
Specialized in Military instruments, the Officine Panerai of Florence, Italy, did build one of the earliest wrist depth gauges based on the aneroid barometer principle.
One of the earliest integration of the aneroid barometer within a time-indicating instrument could be the Bivouac, released by Favre-Leuba around 1962-1963. The watch used the aneroid barometer to provide a reading of altitude.
In 1966 the brand released the Bathy, which was the diving version of the mechanism. The display mechanism was modified to handle much stronger pressure changes, while offering a reading of depth.
The piezoelectricity of quartz crystals allowed to use them as a tuning fork in watches, but reversely they could also be used to measure pressure change. In consequence, instruments makers eventually managed to replace the cumbersome Vidi Chamber by a piezoelectric quartz crystal that didn’t require maintenance and made for a rugged instrument. Still, the barometer of most electronic watches is very sensitive to temperature change and the altitude or depth gauge must be slightly adjusted every day. The Global Positioning System solved the problem
once and for all: with subsequent improvements GPS devices can now measure altitude with a precision of of 10 centimetres.
With the Renaissance of mechanical watchmaking in the late 20th century, a handful of brands decided to take advantage to the progess in manufacturing processes to create modern mechanical aneroid barometers.
In the mid 1990′s, Revue Thommen designed the Altiland, an double-cased instrument hiding an analog altimeter under the watch. In 1998, the brand unveiled the Airspeed Altimeter, a hand-wound
watch integrated with the altimeter much like the 1962 Bivouac from Favre-Leuba.
The International Watch Company unveiled its first aneroid depth gauge watch in 1999, the Aquatimer Deep One; and followed suit with the Aquatimer Deep Two, unveiled 10 years later.
In 2007, the revived Officine Panerai issued the PAM193, an aneroid depth gauge that paid tribute to the brand’s early depths gauges. In the meantime, Jaeger-leCoultre, who still manufacture the Atmos
clock, was busy developing their own aneroid depth gauge watch, which was unveiled in 2008.
With all that in mind, the Blancpain R&D team decided to push the envelope: their mechanical diving computer features twin depth gauges (reading from 0 to 15 meter and from 0 to 90 meter), maximal depth indication and a retrograde 5 minutes counter for decompression stops.
Like all its predecessors, the X Fathoms relies upon a Vidi Chamber, but the Blancpain R&D team manage to pull ahead with the complexity of the mechanism surrounding it.
For further reading on the watch features, I recommend the articles of aBlogtoRead.com and OceanicTime.com.
I have already introduced the Swiss Made brand Steinhard on several occasions. This German-based watch company is worthy of interest on many counts: all their watches feature Swiss movements and are assembled in the Swiss Jura mountains. Steinhard watches mostly sells through Direct Marketing, which allows them to cut the middleman and offer very reasonable prices.
The latest installment from this young confidential brand is the Nav.B-Chronno II Black DLC, which could be included in my list of XXI Flieger chronographs.
The new model is an iteration of their already-existing Nav B-Chrono II, which received a special Diamond-Like Carbon coating and a crown shaped like a Spinning Top.
Watchmakers have been experimenting with surface blackening since the 1970′s: black chrome plating was one of the earliest solutions, but the added layer would slowly be bitten off by th acidity of the skin. There were attempts to use powder coatings, but those would easily chip off. Polytetrafluoroethylene, also known under the trademark Teflon, was experimented with on Military Watches, but it scratches off very easily.
Throughout the 1990′s, brands like Longines borrowed the Titanium Carbide coating from tools manufacturers to apply it to watches. The process helps to harden the surface, but it can still be scratched relatively easily and it is impossible to restore. The first decade of the XXIst century saw drastic improvements in Physical Vapour Deposition, which helped spread the technology. Almost every watch company now relies upon PVD coatings to change the surface colour of their stainless steel: yellow, pink, grey or black.
The latest cutting-edge in surface finish is something called Diamond-Like Carbon. As in the case of Titanium Carbide, the technology comes from tool manufacturing processes. A thin layer of the compound can make the surface of a drill or a blade almost as hard as diamond. The process was introduce on high-end watches, but it eventually percolated to entry-price watches from Seiko and Citizen.
In terms of looks, the Steinhart designers have opted for an “aged” colour palette, a trend that was tastefully implemented earlier this year by Bell & Ross chief designer:
The DLC Steinhard chronograph is sold at EUR 820, just EUR 40 more than the basic steel version.
I guess the demise of the Lemania 5100 can be attributed to a somehow related string of facts: Lemania’s lack of focus on low-cost movements prior to the Quartz Crisis made them ill-prepared to facing competition and to undergoing restructuration. No matter how good their movements from the 1970′s might have been, those did not match with the Valjoux 7750 in terms of modularity, scalability and profitability, which spelled their doom. My essay titled Modifying the 7750 to substitute the 5100 out tries to explain in details the reasons that led to the demise of the Lemania 5100:
Founded by German pilot and flight instructor Helmut Sinn in 1961, Frankfurt-based company Sinn Spezialuhren GmbH gained respect amongst military and civil aviation professionals thanks to its functional designs, direct marketing prices and outstanding quality.
In 1994 Mr. Sinn sold the company to Engineer (of applied sciences) Lothar Schmidt, who had previously been responsible for manufacturing titanium watch for Porsche-Design in the 1970s and rebuilding the brand A. Lange & Söhne.
It was also at that time that Sinn’s management agreed to manufacturing watches for two your French entrepreneurs: M.M. Carlos A. Rosillo and Bruno Belamich. Their fresh brand Bell & Ross had an exclusivity on the French market, therefore forbidding Sinn from arvertizind and selling its products in that specific territory.
After selling his first watch company, Herr Sinn eventually set up a new watch manufacture, Guinand, which enjoys a solid reputation in Japan for their military designs and mechanical complications.
An aviation parts manufacturer turned watch manufacturer in 1994, Damasko Uhrenmanufactur founders Petra and Konrad Damasko rapidly made a name for themselves in the watchmaking realm with their high-tech military mechanical watches mostly distributed through direct manufacturing. Besides their functional design, Damasko has taken the habit of redesigning parts or components of their watches to improve durability. Instead of resting on their laurels and using mass-produced technology, they invest time and resources in finding ways of improving existing components.
Both Damasko and Sinn have been making mention of a similar calibre, and the rumor is it has been in the works for the last 5 year. I’m not sure about the nature of their competitiveness, but its seems that the two brands are clever enough to share intellectual property like the Diapal escapement, which was patented by Damasko.
Ironically, the easiest way to obtain a central minutes counter like on the Lemanias 1340 and 5100 consists of modifying the very caliber that spelled their doom: the Valjoux 7750. The main 3 reasons being that:
I would thus expect either watches from the two respective manufacturers to come close in terms of specifications. The main differences are in dimensions: for their EZN 10, Sinn chose to fit the calibre in a 46.5 mm titanium case. Damasko opted for a more reasonable diameter of 42.0 mm for their DC 86.
Both watches are announced for early 2012, so I will try to supply the reader with detailed informations on the calibre as they become available.
I already introduced the reader to French brand MAT in December 2009. The trade mark MAT is the accronym for Mer Air Terre (Sea, Air, Land), the 3 types of armed forces.
TLex of Oceanictime recently published renderings, followed by pictures of the brand’s new collections AG5 and AG6.
This new collection comes with a 44 mm case in 316L stainless steel with black PVD coating, 15.5 mm of thickness including a 4.4 mm thick sapphire crystal, and a whopping 9 mm winding crown. Inside runs an ETA 2824-2, with the date unfortunately concealed by the lack of calendar window.
These are all pictures of the prototypes that were published by French-speaking forum Passion Horlogère‘s admin. Starting price was announced at EUR 950.
The watch comes with a set of 3 straps: black leather, synthetic rubber and tactical nylon canvas strap.
In the meantime, the brand has refine the bezel’s design by having an orange triangle edge for the bezel’s 60 indication and by having minutes marks all over the bezel. Go to Oceanic time for all details about those new collections.
