Grand Seiko Mashes Up Classics Into Ultimate Dress Watch, Patek's Minute Repeater Alarm Homage To Philippe Stern, Ming's First Gold Watch, Cringy New Bamford x seconde/seconde/ And New Unimatic

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I just looked over the five pieces I wrote for today and I kind of come off as a hater, to use the less vulgar word. Am I though? Am I wrong on the Patek and the Bamford?

If you like this newsletter, you might consider supporting it directly through Patreon. If you were subscribed, you could have already read my lengthy piece on Only Watch and it potentially being the biggest scam of the watch world. Other subscriber-only articles include the Completely Sterile Secret Watches Of MACV-SOG and my choice of 11 vintage Heuer watches that would make the perfect basis for new TAG Heuer recreations, including a possible MoonSwatch type watch that could actually break the internet.

In this issue:

• Grand Seiko Puts Together All Classic Elements Of Their Watches To Create The Ultimate Elegant Manual Wind Watch

• Patek Philippe Celebrates 85th Birthday Of Former Company President Philippe Stern With Minute Repeater Alarm 1938P

• MING Introduces Its First Precious Metal Watch, The Jaw-Dropping 37.04 Monopusher in Rose Gold

• Bamford London Teams Up With seconde/seconde/ For A Very Cringy Version Of The B347 BAD MOF'R

• Unimatic Teams Up With Royal Enfield For A Limited Edition Modello Quattro U4-RE

Today’s reading time: 10 minutes and 54 seconds

👂What’s new

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Grand Seiko Puts Together All Classic Elements Of Their Watches To Create The Ultimate Elegant Manual Wind Watch

Many times over just the past month have I poked fun at Grand Seiko. They really do make fantastic watches, but suffer from a bit of repetitiveness. You can only see so many lake Suwa at a particular time of day dials before you get a bit bored. But Grand Seiko, of course, knows what they are doing. And among the very wide lineup of watches to match every single desire, Grand Seiko has just decided to take the best parts of all of their dress-oriented watches to make the ultimate manual wind watch with the legendary GS beads-of-rice steel bracelet that was incredibly hard to get outside of Japan. This is the new Grand Seiko Elegance SBGW305.

Grand Seiko had a couple of watches that could be considered really great dress watches, with the the best examples being the ubiquitous SBGW231, but also the SBGW237 and the SBGW235 with an incredibly good looking beads-of-rice steel bracelet. GS nerds already know where this is going - the SBGW237 and the SBGW235, while fantastic dress watches, were available pretty much only in Japan with very few being sold through GS boutiques around the world.

After a series of limited editions, be it in number of geographical availability, Grand Seiko now seems to be righting this wrong trend and takes all the best elements of their dress watches to create the ultimate hand-wound Grand Seiko, available worldwide as part of the permanent collection. The new SBGW305 gets the same case and movement as the SBGW231, 235 and 237, the silver dial of the SBGW237, the hands and markers of the SBGW231 and the bracelet of the SBGW235.

Being a dress watch you get somewhat decent proportions - 37.3mm width and a 44.3mm lug-to-lug. Unfortunately, thickness is not as great at 11.6mm. It’s a dress watch, but a bit more than 30 meters of water resistance would have also been nice. Other than that, you get the box-shaped sapphire crystal, a see-through caseback and a round case with scalloped lugs and a smooth bezel. Of course, the case is polished with the Zaratsu technique.

The dial comes with a sunray brushed silver dial with a monochromatic silver addition of pretty much all other hardware. The applied markers, the hands and the logo are all rendered in silver and don’t attract much attention. Just like a good dress watch shouldn’t. What does attract attention is the somewhat extravagant 19mm wide beads-of-rice bracelet with a row of links on the outside and the beads-of-rice in the centre. It’s closed by a folding clasp with a push-button release.

Inside the watch is the hand-wound calibre 9S64. It beats at 4Hz, has a 72 hour power reserve and is ratted to be accurate at +5/-3 seconds/day.

The Grand Seiko SBGW305 will be available from Grand Seiko Boutiques and selected retailers worldwide from 1 December 2023. Price is set at €5,800. See more on the Grand Seiko website.

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Patek Philippe Celebrates 85th Birthday Of Former Company President Philippe Stern With Minute Repeater Alarm 1938P

Back in July, when most watchmakers who were going to participate in the now embarrassed and “postponed” Only Watch auction, Patek Philippe hinted that they will be participating with something truly unique. After all, it was personally created by Thierry Stern, the fourth generation of the Stern family, appointed president in 2009, as an homage to his father Philippe Stern, who ran the company from 1993 to 2009. They said they would be making Philippe Stern's "favorite grand complication, which will feature an entirely new movement. This movement, designed and produced exclusively for this tribute watch, will never be used again." While the hype might have been a bit overblown at the time, everybody expected the watch to really be something special.

Now that the Only Watch has been canceled this year over their financing shenanigans and potential misappropriation of funds, on Philippe Stern's 85th birthday, Patek Philippe has shown the watch that was supposed to take part in Only Watch and will now be made in a series of 30. The reference 1938P, named for Philippe Stern's birth year, is a platinum minute repeater with an alarm and features a Grand Feu enamel portrait of Philippe Stern on the dial. Yeah, it will definitely leave you speechless. Not necessarily in a good way.

The watch comes in a 41mm wide platinum case that’s 14.2mm thick and has a 49.4mm lug-to-lug. It’s an officer's-style case, meaning that the back opens to show the movement but also, rather unfortunately, an engraving on the inside of the caseback that reads “À mon père, 85 ans de passion horlogère”, or, translated “To my father, 85 years of watchmaking passion”. You can also see Philippe’s signature on the rotor.

It’s widely known that Philippe Stern loves minute repeaters and under his guidance Patek became the biggest producers of this complication in the entire industry. The new watch is equipped with a brand new movement, the caliber R AL 27 PS. Well, not exactly new. In 1989, for Patek’s 150th anniversary, the announced the self-winding minute-repeater caliber "R 27" while in 2014, for the 175th anniversary they unveiled the most complicated Patek Philippe wristwatch, equipped with the manually wound caliber 300 "GS AL 36-750 QIS FUS IRM". That watch combined five acoustic functions, including an alarm chiming the time. The new R AL 27 PS is built on the R 27 and combines a minute repeater and alarm. The chime has two gongs that serve both the repeater and the alarm. It’s a self-winding movement with a 48 hours of power reserve.

The dial is Grand Feu black enamel and features Breguet numerals and hands in white gold and a rose gold railroad track scale on the edge of the dial. There’s a small seconds subdial at 6 o’clock and an additional Breguet-style rose gold hand that is used to set the alarm with a nifty mechanism that allows the hand to be set in 15 minute increments. Also on the dial is a rather large portrait of Philippe Stern that takes up the left side of the dial and replaces the 9, 10 and 11 o’clock numerals.

Had this been a one off watch, maybe two pieces, a touching homage to a father from a son, two watches they could forever share, this might have been a truly spectacular watch. Without the overbearing face on the dial, this would have been a modern classic - a truly unique movement, made in only thirty pieces and with a promise to never reuse it again. While Patek claims that they will offer the 30 pieces to friends of the brand who, presumably, known the Sterns, it is still a bit tacky to sell a watch with your father’s portrait for almost a million euros. Call me a pleb.

Not that it matters to pretty much everyone on this planet, the watch will cost CHF 890.000. See more on the Patek website.

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MING Introduces Its First Precious Metal Watch, The Jaw-Dropping 37.04 Monopusher in Rose Gold

To be a good journalist, or an imagined ideal of one, you should strive to be as impartial a possible, keep your emotions out of the story and report the facts. I am not that. I am flawed and I am biased. Because every time I see a new MING watch I get weak at the knees and melt into a puddle out of which you will find just a hand sticking out with a credit card and a set of lips screaming: TAKE MY MONEY NOW! Sure, I realise that tastes vary and that MING might not be your thing, but it is my thing and I would like to thank Mr. Ming Thein for creating them.

Back in 2022, Ming was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the brand with a very interesting monopusher chronograph in titanium. Now, MING is releasing the 37.04, basically the same watch, but this time in a rose gold case, the first time they have done a precious metal case, and with a spectacular double guilloché pattern on the rose gold dial. And this first for a case material comes only two weeks after they introduced a plethora of new materials to create the lightest watch in the world.

Carrying the 37.04 name means that this watch has the same case shape as ll the other 37 watches. This, a bit confusingly, means that you get a 38mm wide watch with a 11.9mm thickness and those beautiful twisted lugs. Of course, this case is very much different, as it’s made out of 18k rose gold and it has the pusher integrated into the crown, which you don’t really see on a MING.

The face of the watch is typically MING, to an extent. You get all the relevant marks printed on the underside of the domed sapphire crystal, one of my favorite aspects of a MING watch, and here they include the minute track, hour indices, along with tachymetre and pulsometer scales. Underneath the dial is a 18k rose gold dial with a deep guilloché that spreads out from two sides of the recessed and sandblasted 30-minute sub-dial. The dial is made by Comblemine, Kari Voutilainen’s dial-making company. Like all other MING watches, the lume is just fantastic.

Inside the watch is the La Joux-Perret 5000, called here the LJP 5000.M1, but heavily reworked by La Joux-Perret and the movement is assembled by Manufacture Schwarz-Etienne. It has skeletonised bridges and plates finished with a sandblasted rose gold coating. The monopusher chronograph has a lateral clutch and the movement delivers a 38-hour power reserve. The watch comes on a curved leather strap with a rose gold buckle.

The Ming 37.04 RG is a limited edition of 20 pieces and retails for CHF 48,000. Delivery is scheduled for Q2 2024. See more on the MING website.

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Bamford London Teams Up With seconde/seconde/ For A Very Cringy Version Of The B347 BAD MOF'R

While this is a much broader discussion with multiple arguments for and against, I would say that I am in general opposed to observing the world around us through the lens of identity politics. While there are numerous instances in which this approach is warranted, to see everything through identity is too simplistic. Why write about a new watch and mention identity politics? Well, because I’m going to employ some in these opening paragraphs because it’s just impossible not to mention the social identity of our two main characters. It just ties into the story perfectly.

In one corner we have seconde/seconde/ or Romaric André, a former financial auditor who has made a name for himself by vandalising extremely expensive watches, replacing the hands on vintage Pateks with 8-bit swords. In the other we have George Bamford, son of Lord Anthony Bamford and heir to the multibillion JCB heavy equipment empire, who has started off by modifying extremely expensive watches and offering what OEMs didn’t - matte black Rolexes and new dials on Franck Mullers.

Both André and Bamford are trying to embrace the punk rock ethos to the maximum. Hell, even the New York Times profiled Bamford with the title “The Watch Industry Has Embraced Its Rebel”. However, it’s kind of hard to be a punk rebel when you are billionaire, come from a cushy financial job and work with pieces worth thousands. You end up being… I don’t know… a poser that’s just trying to hard? I’m not saying that I’m a punk rocker in the watch world. At least no more than seconde/seconde/ and Bamford.

Now the two have come together again to create their second “rude watch”, because nothing screams punk more than being vulgar. They first created the BAD FORM GMT which featured a Churchillian two-fingered salute in place of a second hand. Their new watch is called the B347 BAD MOF’R and it’s as corny as you would imagine from that name. Hell, I remember having a Bad M’effer wallet from Pulp Fiction. When I was 16. But it gets worse. They’re releasing it today, on World Kindness Day. Get it? They’re rude on World Kindness Day. There’s so much edge there you should be careful not to cut yourself while reading.

The watch is based on Bamford London’s B347 Titanium Monopusher Chronograph, meaning that it comes in a sandblasted titanium case that measures 41.5mm wide and 14.5mm thick. There’s a single pusher at 2 o’clock that actually looks great and that powers the central red chronograph hand that’s connected to the familiar Sellita SW510 MPa movement. The dial gets a blue fumé and a large silver running seconds subdial. That’s where the affluent boys stick a literal middle finger to the consumerism of the watch world, or the stuffiness of the industry, or the gates that keep fun out of watches, or everyone taking things too seriously, or whatever other reason a teenager would come up with. In case you haven’t picked up on it already, there’s an illustration of a hand with a middle finger that spins around acting as the seconds hand.

The Bamford London x seconde/seconde/ B347 BAD MOF’R is a limited edition of 50 pieces and it goes on sale today, November 13th, World Kindness Day (I have to cringe again), at 13:00 GMT. It’s priced at £2,600. That’s a premium of £500 over the regular B347, so you really do get a nice middle finger. See more on the Bamford website.

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Unimatic Teams Up With Royal Enfield For A Limited Edition Modello Quattro U4-RE

The Italian microbrand Unimatic burst onto the scene with their minimalistic military-inspired watches. They offered great designs at very fair prices and have in the past several years grown into a cultural powerhouse. Part of their appeal are their fantastic collaborations. The made a fully bronze watch with Massena LAB, a brilliant all white GMT with the Rake, embraced great shades of green in their collaboration with Huckberry. Now they’re introducing a new collaboration, this time with Royal Enfield, one of the oldest motorcycle companies in the world, to create the Royal Enfield X Unimatic Modello Quattro U4-RE.

The limited edition is based on the Unimatic U4 model, with a 40mm-wide and 13.9mm thick stainless steel case (with a lug-to-lug of 49mm) that is now heavilly sandblasted to resemble the finish of Royal Enfield’s engine. You still get 300 meters of water resistance.

The major hint of a collaboration comes on the dial where you can see the red Royal Enfield logo. The dial has a glossy black finish with horizontal indexes at 3, 6 and 9 and a triangle marker at 12 o’clock. The other indices are round and like the sword-shaped hands for the hours and minutes are painted in Super-LumiNova GL old radium lume for that fauxtina look.

Inside is the humble but reliable Seiko NH35A automatic movement which has hacking seconds, beats at 21,600 vph and has a 41 hour power reserve. Just don’t expect too much precision here. The watch comes on a heavy-duty nylon strap with black DLC brushed hardware engraved with the Unimatic logo and a cognac two-piece calfskin leather strap.

The Royal Enfield X Unimatic Modello Quattro U4-RE is limited to 122 pieces, that’s how long Royal Enfield has been making bikes, and to buy one you will need to enter a lottery system. The draw started on November 9th and closes on November 16th, 6:00 PM CET. The watch is priced at €550. See more on the Unimatic website.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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A review of the BR 03-94 BLACKTRACK 

⚙️Watch Worthy

A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like

The Karl-Leimon Majesty is a Japanese microbrand that remixes the greats

One thing is for certain – it’s a geometric, integrated-bracelet sports watch. That’s hardly novel. Its shape isn’t quite the continuation of the Nautilus inspiration like the Majesty Triple Calendar Moonphase that preceded it, but rather a melange of some of the greatest watches of this type. The steel case is surprisingly compact – something that is often overlooked on more budget-oriented pieces. With a diameter of 40mm and a thickness of just 9.8mm, it’s actually squarely in the ballpark of the high-end counterparts it’s honouring with its design – that ain’t too shabby. The rounded-edge square dial opening is a bit of Polo, the sharp case contours are a bit Royal Oak, and the H-link bracelet and case ears are a bit Nauti (see what I did there?). Read the whole story on Time & Tide.

⏲️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

• If the U.S. ends up the next great empire to fail, and if it happens soon, there will be several images baked into public consciousness forever as the symbols of the great American Downfall. One of these will be Rudy Giuliani screaming about voter fraud in a parking lot between a sex shop and a crematorium in Philadelphia, in front of Seasons Landscaping, thinking that it’s the Fours Seasons hotel. This is a man who led one of the biggest RICO cases against the New York Five Families and was mayor of New York. Now, he spends his nights ranting in front of a webcam and trying to sell you supplements.

• Legendary college basketball coach Bob Knight died a couple of days ago. Chances are you didn’t read Kevin Koenig’s profile of him. Mostly because it was published in 2015 in Anglers Journal. Angling, as in fishing. After Knight’s death GQ syndicated the piece and it’s an absolute must read.

• Dorothy Wickenden’s case study of Sally Snowman, the last lighthouse keeper in America, is the starting point of her journey into the history of the lighthouse keeper. A dangerous and lonely profession, it’s a fascinating one to honor before it finally goes extinct.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Behind the baffling title of this video is an 1984 British Army Information Film on the SAS, the British special forces. An incredible look at one of the most elite units in the world.

💵Pre-loved precision

Buy and sell your watches. Think of this section like old school classifieds - i don’t guarantee anything except that a bunch of people will see your ad and I’ll put the buyer and seller in touch. Want to advertise your watch? Contact us 

• NEW WATCH FOR SALE: Well, not really new. It’s a great looking mid-90s Tudor Submariner 75090, offered for sale by a member of the It’s About Time reader crew. I love the way it looks and seems to be in great condition. Check it out over on Chrono24.

• LOOKING TO BUY: One of our readers is looking to purchase three very specific watches: an Islander ISL-133 Mother of Pearl, a Sinn 556 Mother of Pearl or a Zelos 300m GMT Mosaic Mother of Pearl. If you’re selling any of these, reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch

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