independent watch projects

Hat tip to OceanicTime editor Tlex for pointing out to his May 2010 article for precisions.

This year, Italian watchmaker Anonimo unveiled Drass, a spinoff of their eponymous brand. Anonymo has been building watches since 1939, and its history is linked to that of more prestigious Officine Panerai.

In activity since 1927, DRASS is the oldest supplier of commercial diving equipment. After a collaboration with Anonymo, DRASS was left to develop its own watches.

Drass uses a bronze copper alloy called Tungum for some bezels and cases, and all their watches are powered with SW200 calibres supplied by Selitta.

Based in Bologna, Italy, North Eagle Military Watches sells Italian armed forces-themed watches. They offer the possibility of using custom dials and their automatic range starts with a Miyota automatic at EUR 220 up to a Dubois-Dépraz modular chronograph for EUR 850.

Watches can be ordered directly from their Website at www.northeagles.com.

Azimuth somehow managed to source new old stock vintage movements such as the Fontainemelon 96 and a Marvin/Election hand-wound calibre. They took extreme care in designing limited series of military watch homages that met great success. Featuring vintage movements or modified contemporary UNITAS calibres, those timepieces boast a good reputation and now count amongst the very few watches that sell with an added value on the second-hand market.

credit: www.righttime.com

From there, Azimuth started working on more conceptual timepieces:

source: www.TimeZone.com

The brand also started using a Chinese full calendar module on Swiss ETA movements:

Their prices  are between USD 1,000 and 5,000, which is a bit steep, but the collection is worth taking a look at.
Ariel Adams has recently published an article about their new diving watch Sea-Hum and saturation diving watch Deep Diver on aBlogToread.com. The latter has already been discussed by Tlex on OceanicTime.com.

Since our first presentation of the brand, Benarus has been beefing up its collections with new chunky models.

Watch collectors were able to get their hands on the Megalodon, which like the prehistoric shark it takes the name from, is resistant to the strong pressure of deep waters. Two hundred and fifty BAR to be accurate, the same pressure found at 2,500 meters under sea water.

photo credit Uwe Willert, Germany

The Moray and the Remora collections are now available in a plethora of case finish and Super-Luminova prints and colours. The brand released the GMT Worldiver before Summer 2010.

They are now working on a bronze version of the Moray. On a technical note, Benarus developers have chosen UNI 5275 aluminium bronze, which is an alloy based on copper with added aluminium, nickel and iron.
Bronze alloys (and UNI 5275 in particular) are extremely resistant to corrosion, which makes them the perfect material for building a saturation diving watch that will endure the salinity of sea water and body sweat.

Copper and aluminium are metals that let their surface oxydize to create a protection “skin”. When they are combined in a bronze alloy, the resulting material takes a natural patina over time.

Steel is such a hard metal that it must be stamped a couple of dozen times to take form. Bronze has a Young’s modulus worth roughly half of that of steel, so it is a little bit easier to work with. As a consequence, the Moray 2 Bronze cases do not necessarily have to be mass-produces. Benarus has the cases and bezel lathed and hand-finished, which might explain why they chose to produce only 20 pieces.

Due to a trade mark conflict, Zinex has had to change its name. They reordered the letter to come up with ZIXEN and a new eponomous Web site. In the meantime, the brand has released more watches than one can shake a stick at. And they keep it coming…

In the Special Edition collections, they have an exclusive 24h model based on the vintage Hamilton caliber 4992 B.

TLex of OceanicTime published exclusive pictures of Zenton Instruments’ first collection. The case is rated at 200 BAR (static depth of 2000 meters) and called M45. which I assume is referring to the 45 mm in diameter. The photos published on OceanicTime show three different bezel designs: brushed steel, Pepsi-cola (black & red) and blue. The watch features a saturation diving valve and comes on a stainless steel bracelet or a rubber strap.

Check out the exclusive pictures in the OceanicTime.com entry.

Editor TLex of prominent diving watch blog OceanicTime has some exclusive information about Essex, a new watch company offering two saturation-diving watches using Swiss ETa movements and built in Germany.

«A technical engineer with an eye for style, Rainer Brändlein founded Essex in 2007 as an exclusive watch brand for today’s active gentleman.» Read more at OceanicTime.com

OceanicTime is currently giving away Dwatch discount vouchers. Within a year, Oceanictime  editor TLex singlehandedly became a reference  in the niche market of professional and saturation diving watches; and this voucher is a result of the many contacts TLex now has with the industry.

Through this special offer, Dwatch is promoting their new Numeric dial with fat Arabic numerals (I suggest to call it “jumbo“), which is either available on new pieces or can be obtained as a replacement part. Their custom watch building interface shows that the numbers can either have an Azure blue edge or a white one. The date window has been put at six o’clock to create a symmetry, but I feel the missing number “6″ leaves a visual gap.

I never picked it up before, but their Reef hands set is reminiscent of that of a Girard-Perregaux Sea Hawk, which itself uses a case design reminiscent of a vintage Tudor. Like many companies, Dwatch tries to pick the best ideas to implement them in something new.

Check out the OceanicTime post to see preview shots of the new models and to find out about benefiting from the discount voucher.

OceanicTime just celebrated their 1^rst birthday last week. Editor tLex does a lot of research and he has managed to gain the trust of small diving watches companies, who regularly keep him updated with exclusive informations. If you’re passionate about independent diving watches companies, we can only recomment to subscribe to OceanicTime’s RSS feed or to bookmark their homepage.

OceanicTime has exclusive pictures of the upcoming Kazimon saturation diving watch, the Kazimon 1500. Judging by the shots unveiled to editor tLex, the case design will feature a double bezel, a concept similar to that used by Doxa on their diving watch from the 1960′s. The fixed part of the bezel features an etched minute track, while the rotating part has graduations for the 15 first minutes, and then markings for the remaining three quarters. Check out the OceanicTime article to see what it looks like “In Persona”.