Hamilton Releases Three Summer Ready Khaki Navy Scubas; Hanhart Pays Homage To Tornado Jet; Atowak Is At It Again; Schofield Has Some Amazing Tricks; F.P. Journe Shows First Manual Chrono

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Like I already said this week, summer is right upon us. But the biggest star of today is the Atowak, I apologise once again for not telling you about it earlier, maybe you could have gotten one in less than 20 minutes it took to sell out.

In this issue:

• Hamilton Releases Three Summer-Ready Brightly Colored Khaki Navy Scuba Autos

• Hanhart Pays Homage To One Of The Coolest Jets Ever With The 417 ES Tornado Maiden Flight

• Atowak Launches Core Model With Flying Tourbillon At An Incredible Price

• Schofield Introduces A Funky Damascus Pattern For Their Very Strange Obscura Model

• The Chronograph FB Is F.P. Journe’s First Manually Wound Chronograph And Last Limited Edition

Today’s reading time: 11 minutes and 11 seconds

👂What’s new

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Hamilton Releases Three Summer-Ready Brightly Colored Khaki Navy Scuba Autos

The world of diving watches with interesting colors is not a small one. Whether you want a Seiko, a Zodiac, something more adventurous like the new MING, or head on up to the Ulysse Nardin price range, you will find a watch for you. So, why then, should we add more watches to this category? Why not, I ask you? We will never tire of colorful divers. Never. And Hamilton knows this. So, just ahead of summer they gave their Khaki Navy Scuba Auto three new colors - yellow, pink and orange. Good on them!

Nothing has changed about the case of the Khaki Navy Scuba Auto, which means you get a fairly traditional stainless steel watch that measures 40mm wide and 12.95mm thick. Hamilton doesn’t give out a lug-to-lug measurement, and I suspect it could be significant thanks to the long and thin lugs. The entire case gets a brushed finish with a prominent crown guards on the right side. Interestingly, for a watch that looks so much like a hard-core dive watch, it only gets 100 meters of water resistance, but I suppose that’s all anyone really needs. On top is a sapphire crystal surrounded by a unidirectional bezel with a black aluminium (I believe… I could be wrong and it could also be sapphire) insert that has a 60 minute scale. Hamilton didn’t take the opportunity to include color on the bezel, but instead relegated it to just the strap and a ring on the dial. It works.

All three versions have a black dial with a prominent peripheral minute track which holds all the color. The colors are yellow, orange and pink, with the same color appearing on the tip of the seconds hand. The track is. interrupted with prominent lumed hour markers and the dagger hands are also plenty lumed. The watches also, unfortunately, have a date aperture at the 4:30 position which really doesn’t fit in with a white date wheel on a black dial.

Inside, to no surprise, is the H-10 movement, which is just Hamilton’s version of the Swatch Group Powermatic 80. This means that it beats at 21,600vph and has the great 80 hour power reserve. Each of the watches comes with a color matching chunky rubber strap which gives it the most color and allows you to modulate how much color you want to display by switching out for another strap.

The trio of new Hamilton Khaki Navy Scuba Auto watches is available now and priced at CHF795. See more on the Hamilton website.

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Hanhart Pays Homage To One Of The Coolest Jets Ever With The 417 ES Tornado Maiden Flight

Way back in 1974, the Panavia Tornado prototype took off from Manching, Germany for the first time. Sure, it doesn’t get romanticised like the F-14 or F-16, but with its narrow and tall fuselage, angular intakes, swing-out wings and great reconnaissance as well as fighter capabilities, it is one of the coolest jets to ever fly. And this August will see the 50th anniversary of the maiden flight, which prompted Hanhart, the legendary German pilot’s watch producer, to team up with Panavia and release the limited edition Hanhart 417 ES Tornado Maiden Flight Flyback Chronograph.

The LE is housed in the form of the 417 ES pilot’s chronograph, which gives it a lot of flying heritage, seeing how the watch is based on the actual 417 ES that the German military used between 1955 and 1963. It measures 39mm wide 13.3mm thick and with a 46mm lug-to-lug. On top is a domed crystal on top that’s surrounded with a bidirectional fluted bezel that has no markings other than the Hanhart-characteristic red strip at what’s supposed to be 12 o’clock. The case has a mix of brushed and polished surfaces, and water resistance is 100 meters.

The first reference to the Tornado comes on the screwed-down stainless steel caseback, with a polished image of a Tornado coming out of the completely satin background, and the Tornado logo underneath. Additionally, the caseback is inscribed with the date and duration of the maiden flight, the registration number of the plane and the limited number of the watch. The other major Tornado reference can be seen on the dial, where the Tornado logo is set above the 6 o’clock position. Additionally, the 9 o’clock sub-dial features a cocarde (one of those bullseye looking things you can find on a plane) that sports the colors of Germany, Italy and the UK, the partner countries that worked on the Tornado.

The rest of the dial is the same 417 ES you know. It has a bi-compax layout with a 30-minute chronograph counter at 3 o’clock and running seconds at 9. The watch has large and lumed Arabic numerals, along with pencil shaped hands, both of which have beige old Radium Super-LumiNova. The minute and central chronograph seconds hands are bent at the tips to follow the domed sapphire crystal’s shape.

Inside is the quite rare Sellita AMT 5100 M which we recently saw in the new Oak & Oscar chronographs. These hand wound movements feature a column wheel and a flyback function. It beats at 28,800vph and has a 58 hour power reserve.. The watch comes on a black calfskin strap with white stitching with an alcantara inside.

The Hanhart 417 ES Tornado Maiden Flight is limited to 148 pieces - a reference to August 14 when the maiden flight happened - and is priced at €2,590. See more on the Hanhart website.

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Atowak Launches Core Model With Flying Tourbillon At An Incredible Price

It’s not above me to admit when I mess up. And I done messed up. I saw the announcement for the new Atowak Core Tourbillon and liked the watch. But I set it aside for a while as there were always watches I should write about before I got around to Atowak, thinking the piece will be around for a while. Oh boy, did I underestimate the success of Atowak. Two colorways of the Core Tourbillon, limited to 99 pieces each, sold out in 20 minutes when they launched last Wednesday. 20 minutes! And it’s pretty clear why. Not only is it an interesting looking watch, it features a flying tourbillon at an unbeatable price.

Atowak is a Chinese watch brand specialising in interesting movement complications and before you frown on the Chinese origin, keep in mind that the age of looking down at Chinese watches is way behind us. Not only are brands like CIGA design, Atelier Wen and Celadon HH making high-end watches at great prices, but they’re also manufacturing a huge number of watches that carry the Swiss Made brand.

The latest Core Tourbillon comes in a very interesting looking case made out of stainless steel and measuring 42mm wide, 13.5mm thick and with a lug-to-lug of 49mm. You can’t really call it a lug-to-lug, as there are no lugs, giving the entire case a cushion shape. On top is a prominent double domed sapphire crystal that’s not held down by a bezel, but rather the entire top side of the case which is deeply brushed and screw down in all four corners with visible screws. There are two models of the watch, one called Icy Silver which gets an untreated silver case, and the other Blazing Red which comes in a black PVD coated case. Water resistance is 50 meters.

Underneath the crystal is what can be described as a dial, but surely not a traditional one. At the center is a large flying tourbillon, which is surrounded by four rings, two of which are fixed and hold the hour and minute markers, and two of which are rings that have an arrow and rotate to point towards the correct time. The rotating rings are made out of aluminium and blue on the Icy Silver and red on the Blazing Red. Everything you see in white is actually filled with LumiNova, giving it a lot of glow.

Inside is Atowak’s in-house 33-jewel AK-T01 movement which has a central flying tourbillon and a pretty great 120 hour power reserve. Both watches come with two rubber straps, one black and one in either blue or red, depending on the edition, with a quick release strap buckle.

Like I said, each of the Atowak Core Tourbillon colorways was limited to 99 pieces and, since I failed you and didn’t let you know beforehand, sold out in 20 minutes. I still wanted to write about it because I think Atowak is a brand you should keep an eye out on. Especially since the Core Tourbillon watch was priced at $2,699. See more on the Atowak website.

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Schofield Introduces A Funky Damascus Pattern For Their Very Strange Obscura Model

While I deeply respected everything that the UK based Schofield Watch Company has done over the past decade or so of making watches, I could never really get into their watches. They always came in the same 44mm chunky case with prominent lugs and I couldn’t fall in love with them. But thing seem to be changing. I really liked their Schofield Light which they introduced a couple of months ago, and now they’re showing the new Obscura. It’s hard to describe this watch, and that is always a good thing.

On their website for the Obscura, Schofield writes: “it was designed specifically within all the normal watch constraints, i.e. a round watch that tells the time with central hour and minute hands but manipulated to look less conventional and more like a mysterious timing device”. And this is exactly what we got. It’s a huge watch, measuring 44mm wide at the base of the watch and tapering to 42mm at the bezel. It’s 15mm thick, but this doesn’t include the curved lugs, and it has a lug-to-lug length of 52.7mm. But you can’t fault it for being large, once you take into account how it’s made and of what.

This is the same case shape that Schofield uses on its other watches, but this one is made out of Damascus steel made by Vegas Forge in the United States. They use enormous Nazel Hammers to smash the different steels together, but does so in a way to completely avoid the traditional organic and random wave pattern of Damascus steel and gets a more grid-like pattern. The case is then machined and finished in Sussex by acid etching the surface to give it a rougher texture. The caseback has three smoked sapphire crystals in the centre that give you a view of the movement, but you know the guys at Schofield are cool when they say this was partially inspired by the Predators tri-beam laser sight or a UFO undercarriage.

At first glance, the dial might seem like a simple gray piece with a few colors. But look at it again. and you’ll see it’s made out of multiple layers and runnels of Super-LumiNova in different colours and different glow colors. The base dial is dark grey rhodium-plated with a fine matt texture, with details in bright signal orange. The hour and minute hands have a strange shape that can best be described as that tool you get with your phone to extract the sim card, one skeletonized and the other filled with lume. At 12 o’clock the hands align to reveal the lume strip of the hour hand through the window of the minute hand. At 6 o’clock you’ll find a super minimalist subdial - just a tiny white dot - with a blue seconds hand that has a red dot at its top. Schofield points out that this red, white and blue combination is a nod to their British manufacture.

Inside things are just as obscure, with the manually wound Unitas 6498-2. It beats at 18,000vph and has a power reserve of 46 hours. The movement is decorated with Geneva stripes and blued screws which can be glimpsed through the three openings on the caseback. The watch comes on grey leather strap with a bead blasted buckle.

The Schofield Obscura is an incredibly unique watch, one that is definitely not for everyone. In fact, it is intended for only 40 people, as production is limited to this number. The price might seem steep, but considering the work that goes in to it, £9,558 doesn’t even sound that bad. See more on the Schofield website.

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The Chronograph FB Is F.P. Journe’s First Manually Wound Chronograph And Last Limited Edition  

Towards the end of last year, the watch world was ablaze with rumors of F.P. Journe’s downfall. Supposedly, there was a dinner held for a couple of prominent collectors and Journe himself had made some remarks that were not acceptable. Everybody predicted that Journe would be socially canceled, there were claims of collectors dumping their collections of Journe watches on the market and the future was grim. Well, it would be so, if it was Journe’s first such rodeo. He avoided the social kiss of death once again and is back to making truly special watches. Their latest is the F.P. Journe Chronograph FB, introduced to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the brand’s first boutique, the one in Tokyo. It is also their first hand-wound chronograph (they had manually wound split chronos and automatic regular chronos, but never a manually wound regular chronograph) and the last time they will be doing a limited edition.

This watch is also the sixth release in the Boutique Anniversaire Series in which Journe payed homage to the various boutiques. But, while other brands just take a watch they already have and give it a new colorway, F. P. Journe simply creates a brand new watch for the occasion. Like the other watches in the series, this one also comes in a polished grade 5 titanium case with a very traditional round shape that measures 40mm wide and 10.4mm thick. There are sapphire crystals on top and bottom, while the crown and pushers are made out of 18k 6N gold.

The dial is made out of silver with a clou de Paris guilloché centre and then ruthenium-toned. There’s an applied and screwed steel element frames the partially opened sub-dials that house the running seconds and the 60 minute totaliser. At 6 o’clock is a large date and around the perimeter of the dark part of the dial you’ll find salmon colored Arabic numerals. Around the perimeter of the dial is a tachymeter scale with a white backround and Journe made it easier to use with a base of 1,000 meters using the chronograph seconds hand, which makes one complete revolution in 2 minutes, with a scale graduated from 300 to 30, instead of the classic 60 and a rotating once per minute.

Inside, and visible through the caseback, is the calibre 1518.2 which is just stunningly beautiful. It has a column-wheel and oscillating pinion and beats at 3Hz with a power reserve of 80 hours. Journe says this movement has been made specifically for this edition and will not be used in a regular-edition piece. The watch comes on a burgundy colored alligator strap with a gold folding clasp.

The F.P. Journe Chronograph FB is limited to 200 pieces and the company has announced that there will be no more limited series from them. A welcomed choice. This watch is priced at CHF 90,000, without taxes. See more on F.P. Journe’s website.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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A review of the platinum Rolex Perpetual 1908

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Hands on with the Grand Seiko SLGW002 and SLGW003

3/

A review of the Fortis Novonaut AMADEE-24 Mars Analog Mission Timer

⚙️Watch Worthy

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

SpaceOne Tellurium has a sense of drama and spectacle that few watches can match

As wild and stylized as the SpaceOne Tellurium’s case is, the dial is where this watch’s spectacle truly lies. The glossy midnight blue aventurine base surface sets the tone strongly here, with a glittering galaxy of flecks that echo the look of the night sky. Of course, the real star of the show here is the dramatic, sculptural tellurion complication. For those unfamiliar, a tellurion is essentially a simplified orrery, tracking the relative movements of the sun, the moon, and the Earth. Represented by a trio of polished titanium spheres, this otherworldly three-dimensional display is connected to the date and month complication, with the sphere representing the Earth making a full circuit of the dial once a year and the moon sphere advancing one position each day to make an orbit around the “Earth” once every 29.5 days.

Read the whole review on A Blog To Watch

⏲️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

• Zach Horwitz was a struggling actor until he started preying on boring, wealthy midwestern professionals who had a dream of having a toe in the entertainment world. In the end, Horwitz created the largest ponzi scheme in Hollywood history.

• I only got halfway through this piece in the New York Times before I knew I had to throw it in here. It is a portrait of Abdul Raziq, an Afghan Chief of Police, a ruthless monster who eliminated everyone who even hovered in the vicinity of his path, while controlling the trade of thousands of tons of drugs. He was also one of the closest allies the US had in the war in Afghanistan. Incredible reporting.

• Anthony Bourdain’s tell-all Kitchen Confidential came out in 2000 and prompted a series of copycat books and articles. Some were betters, some worse. But I always liked this one from the New Yorker about what it’s like to be a short-order cook in Las Vegas.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

The Porsche 930, nicknamed the widowmaker, was the top of the line Porsche you could buy in 1989 and it had about 330 horsepower. The top of the line in the 996 model range was the incredible GT2 which pushed out 484 horsepower. In the 997 family, the GT2 made 523 hp. And if you don’t take into account the insane 991 model of the GT2 which made up to 700hp from the factory, the most powerful 991 line of the 911 you could buy in 2019 was the Turbo S with 552 horsepower. Journalists and customers were in awe of this power and the way it transformed the 911 into a rocket. And yet, not even a full five years later, Porsche just announced the 992.2 generation of the 911 with the base Carrera and the GTS. It’s that GTS that will bend minds, with its very clever hybrid system that’s not there to help with fuel consumption. It’s there for raw power. The new 911 GTS develops 533hp, just 19 horsepower less than the top of the line Turbo S from five years ago, while supposedly weighing 40 kilograms less. This just might be the craziest car they’ve ever built.

💵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 

• LOOKING TO BUY: Here’s a crazy request. One of you is looking to buy the Ōtsuka Lotēc No. 7.5. Sure, it’s a big ask, but if any of you have one and want to sell, reach out to and I’ll put you in touch

• SOLD: 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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-Vuk