Archive for the ‘New This Week’ Category:
Esquisses – A l’origine des légendes (Troisième partie)
C’est à nouveau l’heure du ‘Wow Watch Wednesday’, et hier, à l’occasion de le deuxième partie de notre reportage consacré aux origines des plus belles créations horlogères, nous vous promettions quelque chose de différent aujourd’hui. Vous avez déjà pu apprécier dans nos colonnes les réalisations hors du commun d’Urwerk (rendez-vous ici pour faire connaissance avec l’incroyable UR-CC1 Black Cobra si ce n’est pas déjà fait); aujourd’hui nous allons vous montrer où tout à commencé : la planche à dessins.
Assez parlé, voici la collection Urwerk.
UR-103 – Early Model
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
UR-103
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
UR-201
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
©Urwerk
1 Excellent Comment | Filed under New This Week, Recommended Reading, Special Features
URWERK UR-CC1 – The Black Cobra Strikes
As if you needed another reason to be completely enthralled by Swiss watch-maker Urwerk. Be careful though, this one bites! Officially announced yesterday the mind-blowing UR-CC1 has shed its grey gold skin to unveil a lethal black cobra beneath. As dark as it is mesmerizing, the UR-CC1 in black AlTiN will entrance you with its aggressive style and baffling mechanical complexity. Not for the faint hearted, this is one timepiece that must be approached with respect and caution.
Superbly Complex
The stealth-like styling and relatively simple display of this truly sensational piece from Urwerk mask just how superbly complex the mechanism actually is. Holding the piece face on you confronted with two very unusual but nonetheless simplistic looking indications: jumping hours and retrograde minutes. You see, on the UR-CC1 the hours and minutes count down the time by moving linearly.
To the uninformed that sounds like a rather unremarkable statement. Right now you’re probably looking at the clean, yellow dials and thinking “sure, it looks cool, but should I really be that impressed?” The answer is a resounding yes because the mechanism you see in front of you is so deceptively complex that it took the brilliant team at Urwerk more than three years of research and development and ten prototypes to overcome the technical challenges involved in indicating the hours and minutes in a linear fashion.
Why?
We’re glad you asked!
There were three main engineering challenges standing in the way:
- The movement could develop enough energy to operate the imposing minute cylinder, which is much heavier than a traditional hand, but where to find the additional energy to function the jumping hour cylinder?
- A toothed rack moves vertically to rotate the minutes, but how to ensure that it operates smoothly in all positions, despite the varying effects of the immutable laws of gravity?
- Having solved the power issues related to operating the jumping hours, how to ensure that there is enough energy available for the world-premiere digital seconds?
Still, these seemingly insurmountable challenges were not enough to deter the team from achieving their goal, and here’s how they did it.
Let’s Get Technical
A toothed rack/lever, visible through a display panel on the side of the “Black Cobra” transfers energy from the movement to the minute cylinder. The honeycomb structure of the lever offers the two seemingly contradictory properties of lightness and rigidity. Rigidity to accurately convey the profile of the triple cam to the minute cylinder, and extremely light/low mass so as to consume as little energy as possible and so that position, gravity and shocks have minimal effect.
The mechanism used is reminiscent of those seen in automata. A toothed segment at the end of a rack exactly moves up and down following the path drawn by the triple cam – a path that has been plotted from 104 reference points. Each of the three cams drives the rack for exactly 60 minutes. At precisely 60 minutes the rack drops on the cam provoking the opposite tooth-end of the rack to fall, which triggers the retrograde mechanism and rotates the minute cylinder. And all of this happens in just 1/10th of a second!
The energy released by the retrograde mechanism is recovered and used to power the rotation of the jumping hour cylinder. Visible through a display panel in the side of the case, a 12 pointed star and positioning spring are the only distinguishable components of this innovative mechanism for recycling energy.
Two essential elements, the disk for the digital seconds and the honeycombed rack, anchor the “Black Cobra” in cutting-edge technology. Photolithography was the only method able to provide the degree of accuracy and low mass required by these two critical components – the seconds’ disk weighs just 0.09 of a gram!
The Final Word
Felix Baumgartner, Urwerk’s ingenious Master watch-maker sums it up by saying; “We have created a monster that is hungry (for energy) so we have ensured that all forces can be recycled and reused. It is a very delicate balance as we work within fixed constraints, i.e. available force, mass, and current production technology, and then we go beyond our capabilities.”
…wow.
A special thanks to Urwerk for making all this excellent technical information available to us so that we could share it with you. Make sure you jump on their Facebook Page to get all the latest updates from this truly amazing company!
The Origin Of Legends – The Sketch Book Series (Part. 2)
This article is also available in French. Please click here.
Welcome to Part.2 of our special insight on the origins of some the world’s most amazing watches. If you missed Part.1 be sure to check it out here. Today we present to you the original sketches of two exceptional pieces; the DualTow by Christophe Claret and the Jules Audemars by Audemars Piguet. Looking at these images (the first set especially) it really is hard to believe just how superb the final results are!
However, as they say, the creative process isn’t always pretty but it’s the results that count.
Christophe Claret – The DualTow
©Christophe Claret
©Christophe Claret
©Christophe Claret
Audemars Piguet – Jules Audemars
©Audemars Piguet
©Audemars Piguet
©Audemars Piguet
In keeping with The Watch Lounge’s tradition of “Wow Watch Wednesday” the sketches to be published tomorrow in Part.3 of this multi-part series will be something a little out of the ordinary which we think you’re going to enjoy!
Esquisses – A l’origine des légendes (Deuxième partie)
Aujourd’hui nous présentons la deuxième partie de notre dossier consacré aux origines de quelques unes des plus belle montres. Si vous avez manqué la partie ici, vous pouvez la retrouver ici.
Aujourd’hui nous présentons les esquisses de deux pièces exceptionnelles, que sont la Dual Tow de Christophe Claret, et la Jules Audemars, d’Audemars Piguet. A la vue de ces esquisses, le résultat atteint par les pièces finies est époustouflant – mais peu importe la beauté du processus créatif, seul le résultat compte.
Christophe Claret – The DualTow
©Christophe Claret
©Christophe Claret
©Christophe Claret
Audemars Piguet – Jules Audemars
©Audemars Piguet
©Audemars Piguet
©Audemars Piguet
The Origin Of Legends – The Sketch Book Series (Part. 1)
This article is also available in French. Please click here.
If you’re anything like us than at on at least one occasion you’ve looked at the exceptional timepiece on your wrist and wondered where it all began. We think you’ll agree that watch-making is as much about practical application as it is about aesthetical beauty, with the best examples achieving a stunning blend of both. And so it is then that the design of a fine timepiece is almost, if not as important as the tiny engine that beats within it.
As we sometimes find ourselves fortunate enough to share the precious time of the world’s great watchmakers through the year, we had the tremendous opportunity on several occasions to see some of the very first sketches of their creations.
Some confessed they are very bad draftsmen while others told us that they were always innately skilled in the design of beautiful watches. Some never draw without proper pens and a clear space, while some express their creative mind on the corner of tablecloths, or even on post-its, with the very first pen they find sketching as fast as they can, before The Big Idea flies away (Editor’s note: For anyone who has been fortunate enough to dine with the exceptionally talented Roland Iten you will know all to well that he falls into the latter category, drawing the most amazing sketches all over any surface, including the table!)
Still, we recognize that there is only so much that can be said with words and so we are not going to write long paragraphs about all these beautiful sketches which, in the end, speak for themselves.
We won’t tell you that Ludovic Ballouard always has a notebook by his side, where he scribbles down ideas that only he can decipher; or that Jean-Claude Biver, as he draws, already has a rough idea of what the final product will look like; that Christophe Claret elucidated in just a few minutes the core essence of the amazing Dual Tow; that Jaeger Le Coultre draws sketches that are so perfect that they almost compete with automated software design.
Instead, we will just let you enjoy these beautiful pieces over the coming week. Make sure you check each day to discover where it all began and to learn just a little more about the timepieces you know and love (and maybe even some you’re meeting for the first time!)
Montblanc Metamorphosis
©Montblanc
©Montblanc
©Montblanc
©Montblanc
©Montblanc
Ludovic Ballouard – Upside Down Watch
©Ludovic Ballouard
©Ludovic Ballouard
©Ludovic Ballouard
©Ludovic Ballouard
©Wai Shan Lam
©Wai Shan Lam
Linde Werdelin – The One
©Linde Werdelin
©Linde Werdelin
Be sure to check back tomorrow as we bring you Part.2 of the Sketch Book Series!
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- Nick Orloff: Beautiful piece, regrettably a little (?) out of my price range. I’d love to...
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