Baltic Launches New Scalegraph Chronograph; Maurice Lacroix Celebrates 50 Years With New Dress Watch Collection; A Wild Worldtimer From Byrne; A Wonderful Singer; And A Complicated Armin Strom

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. This issue of the newsletter was written on the night train from Zagreb to Geneva, which can mean only one thing — Watches and Wonders is about to kick off (tomorrow, officially), and I’m here to cover it. I have dozens and dozens of meetings setup and it will be super fun. Can’t wait to tell you

In this issue:

• Baltic Launches New Scalegraph Big-Eye Chronograph In Time For A Very Cool Race

• Maurice Lacroix Celebrates 50 Years With The New 1975 Collection Of Dress Watches

• The New Byrne Star Has A Brand New Take On The Worldtimer Genre

• The New Singer Heritage Collection Chronograph Comes With Fully Restored Valjoux 236 Movements

• Armin Strom Plays With Resonance On Their Dual Time GMT Manufacture Black Edition

👂What’s new

1/

Baltic Launches New Scalegraph Big-Eye Chronograph In Time For A Very Cool Race

The Tour Auto is one of those rallies that you know if you are really nerdy about racing. I learned about it last year, and that’s only because of Baltic’s collaboration with the rally. The Tour Auto is inspired by the Tour de France Automobile, created in 1899 by the Automobile Club de France. It takes almost 300 crews, all driving pre-1985 cars, on a 2000+ kilometer tour from Paris to Nice, with stops at iconic racetracks where the teams will race for real. And for the third time in a row, Baltic, the very French brand, is serving as the official timekeeper of the race. To mark this occasion, they are launching a limited edition Scalegraph, a very cool racing chronograph.

Sure, Baltic already makes a chronograph that’s might similar to this one, so are we sure that this is a new model, you might ask. Oh, yeah, it’s new. With some very welcomed updates. The stainless steel case measures 39.5mm wide, a hefty 14.1mm thick and has a lug-to-lug of 47mm. Sure, this is a thick watch, but there are two things that should be noted. That’s including the double domed sapphire crystal and it has a very, very interesting side profile that seems to help with cutting down on visual thickness with a bowl-like shape. Check it out on their website. Around the crystal is an aluminum blue bezel that has a Tachymeter scale on it. The major update over the existing chronographs comes in water resistance, which is now a comfortable 100 meters.

The dial gets a light blue satin finish with a darker blue on the periphery. It’s technically a tri-compax layout, with some very cool details. At 3 and 9 you get two off white azurage subdials with metal surrounds, with running seconds displayed at 9 and the 30 minute totalizer at 3. But that sub-dial at three is also oversized, giving it the big-eye look, with segments marked out in red, dark blue and light blue. At 6, you’ll find the 12 hour totalizer, but that’s rendered as just a hand over some markings on the blue of the dial, with no surround. AT 12 you get an applied Arabic numeral, while all the other hours are indicated with applied horizontally oriented batons. The hands are dauphine shaped, polished and filled with Super-Luminova, while the central chrono hand and big eye totalizer hand are rendered in a metallic blue.

Inside is the very familiar and robust Sellita SW510-M, a mechanical hand-wound chronograph movement. It beats at 28,800 Vph and has a respectable 60 hours of power reserve. The watch comes on a beads of rice or flat-link steel bracelet, along with a navy blue alcantara strap.

The Baltic Scalegraph Tour Auto is a limited edition of 400 peices and will go on sale on April 7th at 4PM CET, the exact time that the Tour Auto race starts. The price is set at €1,750 without VAT. See more on the Baltic website.

2/

Maurice Lacroix Celebrates 50 Years With The New 1975 Collection Of Dress Watches

Over the past several years, Maurice Lacroix has been pretty good at making some very interesting sports watches. It was all about the Aikon collection of integrated bracelet watches that came in a myriad of materials, colors and price points. What we haven’t seen much from them are more dressy options. It’s not like they don’t do have them. It’s just that they’ve been focusing on the sportier stuff recently. As it happens, Maurice Lacroix is celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, and as part of the celebration they are launching the new 1975 Collection of elegant, slightly retro, dress watches.

The 1975 is available in three sizes, either 36mm, 39mm or 40mm, both measuring 10mm thick and with an overall polished finish. On top you’ll find a flat sapphire crystal, surrounded by a rounded fixed bezel. On the side you’ll find a small knurled crown at 3 o’clock. Water resistance is a surprisingly high 100 meters.

Aside from the two sizes, you can choose from three dial colors — silver, black and blue. All three versions are very classic, with the black getting a solid gloss treatment and the blue and silver having a sunray brushed finish. The dauphine shaped hands point to fairly long applied hour markers. If you get the mechanical version, you’ll find a framed date window at 3, and the quartz version has a date at 6.

Yeah, that’s right. The new 1975 comes in either mechanical or quartz. There’s not a lot of info on the quartz movement, other than it’s paired with the 39mm wide case. The 36 and 40, on the other hand, come with what ML calls the Calibre ML 115, which is basically just a Sellita SW200. And like all SW200s, it beats at 4Hz and has a 38 hour power reserve. The watches can be had on either a 5-row, brushed and polished stainless steel bracelet with a folding clasp or a color matching leather strap.

The new Maurice Lacroix 1975 Collection is available now, priced at CHF 650 for the quartz model on leather and CHF 750 on the bracelet, or CHF 1,200 for the mechanical versions regardless of size on leather and CHF 1,300 on steel. See more on the Maurice Lacroix website.

3/

The New Byrne Star Has A Brand New Take On The Worldtimer Genre

I fear that Byrne is not getting the attention that they deserve. I adore their playful approach to indicating time with their Gyro Dial complication. It’s something that I think only they are doing and it’s using cuboid indices that can rotate. This gives them a whole load of canvas to play with. They can use different numerals, indicate 24-hour time with a switch at midnight or whatever they please. Their latest use of the cuboid indices is exhibited in the new Byrne Star a worldtimer that has some really cool tricks up its sleeve.

The watch comes in a grade 5 polished titanium case that measures 38mm wide and 11.4mm thick. The sides of the case get a slightly darker grained finish and there are sapphire crystals on top and bottom. Water resistance is 50 meters, but this watch is so delightfully complicated you might not want to go swimming with it lest it confuse you into drowning. In the best possible way,.

Let’s try to unpack that dial. It has rotating cubes at the cardinal positions, surrounded by a sunray brushed ring that has exposed screws that act as indices. In the middle of the dial is a time zone locations disc in a turquoise color. So, how does this whole thing work? Byrne calls it the Time Flow” complication. The central disc has six cities on the outer ring—London, Athens, Abu Dhabi, Dhaka, Macau, and Brisbane—alongside six more in the inner section, including Midway, Juneau, La Paz, Havana, Brasília, and the Azores. The cities of Brisbane and Midway are highlighted in gold to indicate the reading sequence.

The four rotating cubes at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock displaying four cities, one per face. These include Hanoi, Paris, Rome, and New York at 12 o’clock; Malé, Tokyo, Baku, and Rio at 3 o’clock; Taipei, Hong Kong, Oslo, and Bern at 6 o’clock; and Doha, Sydney, Nouméa, and Dubai at 9 o’clock. Rather than showing local times, these cubes depict the phase of the day through background hues: blue for morning, turquoise for noon, dark blue for evening, and a starry sky for night. I’m not at all sure I understand how it works, but I love it.

All of this is powered by a proprietary movement they call the Caliber 5558. It beats at 4Hz and has a 66 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a blue alligator leather strap, with an optional folding clasp.

The new Byrne Star is priced at CHF 32,500, without tax. It’s still not up on the Byrne website, but it should be there this week.

4/

The New Singer Heritage Collection Chronograph Comes With Fully Restored Valjoux 236 Movements

If you were to ask what’s one watch from last year that I would do unspeakable things for, it would easily be the Singer Divetrack, one of the coolest dive watches I’ve ever seen. It’s also knocking at €100,000, so it’s not exactly in the budget right now. What could be in a more reasonable budget, while still expensive, is the new release from Singer, the Heritage Collection chronograph that not just look sensational, it also has a 1974, new old stock, completely revamped Valjoux 236 movement. There’s lots to love here.

The first thing we will all love are the dimensions. The stainless steel case measures 38,8mm wide and 11.75mm thick. Sure, this isn’t an automatic chronograph, but it’s always good to see chronos under 12mm, which is a rare sight. The case has a satin finish with mirror-polished chamfers. On top is a box-style sapphire crystal with almost no bezel and on the side are polished pushers and a very flat crown. There is an irresistible sense of nostalgia about this watch, as it looks like a 1970s watch with the short lugs and deliberate brushing. Water resistance is 50 meters.

There are two dial options — a green or a black version, both lacquered and both set up as bi-compax chronographs, with sunken sub-dials, a running seconds at 9 o’clock and a 30-minute counter at 3 o’clock. Around either is a golden flange with teeth cut into it, and both have applied faceted hour markers. You get those very cool Singer-style broad sword hour and minute hands, filled with orange Super-LumiNova, and a bright orange chronograph seconds hand with a gold-colored brushed central topper.

Then, we have those movements. Singer calls them the SR2361, but they are the Valjoux 236. They were never used, which also means that they have 50-year old oils inside of them. That’s why Singer disassembles them for a service, but also refnishes them with frosted bridges, hand-polished chamfers, and rhodium plating, engraving them with “Restored by Singer”. The movement beats at 21,600vph and has a 48 hour power reserve. The watches come on straps matched to the color of the dial in grained leather.

Like I said, the new Singer Heritage Collection chronograph is not cheap, but it’s much more affordable than the Divetrack. They are limited to 100 pieces in total, as the limitation comes from the number of NOS movements, and are priced at CHF 16,700. See more on the Singer website (the watches are not up yet, but I assume they will be soon).

5/

Armin Strom Plays With Resonance On Their Dual Time GMT Manufacture Black Edition

The resonance in the name of the new watch from Armin Strom, the Dual Time GMT Resonance Manufacture Black Edition doesn’t refer to a sound a watch might make, like in a chiming watch. But any confusion might be excused because resonance is a term originally derived from the field of acoustics. It occurs when two close vibrating frequencies synchronize, mutually absorbing each other’s energy and eventually arriving at the same frequency. It is also one of the most elusive phenomena in watchmaking, one that Armin Strom is very well known for making use of. It was Armin Strom co-founders Serge Michel and master watchmaker Claude Greisler who invented a way of connecting two independent balance wheels to have them synchronize, as a way of protecting from gravity, temperature and motion disruptions. In 2018, they used that mechanism and applied it to a dual time watch, in a huge 59mm wide watch, later to be shrunk to 39mm and reproduced in a number of materials. Now, with the new Dual Time GMT Resonance Manufacture Black Edition we get it in steel with a black dial.

The watch comes in a stainless steel case that measures 39mm wide and just 9.05mm thick, with vertically brushed sides and polished bevels. That thickness is particularly interesting since it has the trick movement and an expansive domed sapphire crystal. There’s a lot Armin Strom fans will recognize here, including the lip on the thin bezel at 6 and the crowns at 4 and 8 o’clock, each of which operates one of the two dials.

This is a real dual time watch, with two dials each displaying its own time zone. As the name suggests, there’s a lot of black here. The mainplate is back, the two dials have a hand-grained black surface with a black snailed chapter ring and there’s a black day/night indicator. The two dials are set at 4 and 8, giving you a view of the two 3.5Hz balance wheels connected by the patented resonance clutch spring at noon and the ratchet wheel at 6 o’clock.

These are all part of the ARF22 in-house manual-winding movement which has a 42-hour power reserve capacity. It’s also very beautiful, decorated with Côtes de Genève and you get to see the independent barrels through two round apertures on the bridge. The watch comes on a taupe alligator strap .

The new Dual Time GMT Resonance Manufacture Black Edition is limited to 50 pieces and priced at CHF 95,000. See more on the Armin Strom website.

⏲️Wait a minute

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father. The literary giant’s only child reflects on his father’s devotion in their days together in rural Scotland, his early death, his genius as a writer – and his reputation as a womaniser

• ‘America is more divided than ever — but how is it affecting our love lives? I spent a year dating conservative men to find out’. That title pretty much tells it all.

• In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan villainized a Chicago woman for bilking the government. Her other sins—including possible kidnappings and murders—were far worse.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

My old buddy Paul Thomas Anderson (we had a beer once, practically makes us brothers) has a new movie and it’s quite something, if the trailer is to go off of.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk