- It's About Time
- Posts
- Hamilton Releases Perfect 36mm Titanium Field Watch, Proceeds To Make It A Limited Edition; Farer Always Has Great Colors; Tissot Expands The PR516 Collection; A Green SpaceOne; An Impossible CvdK
Hamilton Releases Perfect 36mm Titanium Field Watch, Proceeds To Make It A Limited Edition; Farer Always Has Great Colors; Tissot Expands The PR516 Collection; A Green SpaceOne; An Impossible CvdK
Limited editions need to be outlawed!
Vuk Radic
October 17, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes
Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Christian van der Klaauw is quickly becoming one of my favorite watchmakers out there. It’s ridiculous, but so amazing.
Oh, and if you could do me a favor, read the short call for help right below. It would really mean a lot.
I need your help…
We’re at a crossroads and I need your help to decide what to do. I really want to keep this newsletter ad-free with the generous support of you, the readers. However…
I have some great news and some not so great news. The great news is that this newsletter is growing so fast and so large that I couldn’t have imagined this in my wildest dreams. The bad news is that these large numbers mean more cost for the email service I’m using. While email is free, sending thousands of them per day gets very expensive very fast. We’re looking at $2,000+ per year this year and more in the coming years.
If you would like to help me put all of this together, for less than a cup of (admitedly, very fancy) coffee per month, you can support me on Patreon or subscribe to the Watch Club right here if you don’t want the hassle of Patreon membership. Both of these give you unlimited access to 5 additional longform posts per week which include an overview of interesting watches for sale, early access to reviews, a watch school, a look back at a forgotten watch, and a weekend read that looks at the history of horology.
In this issue:
Hamilton Releases The Perfect 36mm Titanium Field Watch, Proceeds To Make It A Limited Edition
Farer Introduces Second Generation Field Collection With Dial Colors Only They Can Pull Off
Tissot Expands The New PR516 Collection With An Automatic Time And Date Quartet
SpaceOne Teams Up With Middle East Retailer Perpetuel For A Beautiful Green Futuristic Time Machine
Christian van der Klaauw Introduces The Only Mechanical Planetarium Watch With All 8 Planets
Today’s reading time: 9 minutes
👂What’s new
1/
The Khaki Field collection from Hamilton is surely place where one would look for the most diverse collection of field watches. They have it all in all sizes, ranging from 33mm to 42mm, and a number of material and dial combinations. But there was one thing that was perhaps missing — a minimalist approach to a small field watch, measuring 36mm at the most, just like the field watches that inspired the genre, but rendered in a modern material like titanium. Well, Hamilton just fixed that and released what might be the perfect bare bones field watch. But don’t get your hopes up too much. They did so in collaboration with New York-based design house Engineered Garments. Which means that it’s limited. Sure, a lot of them will be made — 1,999 pieces, which is the date of Engineered Garments’ founding — but this is a watch that could sell more. Here’s hoping that Hamilton releases a regular edition as well.
Just looking at pictures of the case, you would be hard pressed to see any major changes. It measures 36mm wide, 10.8mm thick, but instead of steel it’s made out titanium. Sure, there are other Filed Khaki models made in titanium, but I believe this is the only 36mm version. At least from what I can see on their website. On top is a sapphire crystal, out back is a partial exhibition case back and water resistance is 100 meters.
The dial pushes this super close to the perfect package — it’s fully black, with nothing but a minute/seconds scale, oversized white Arabic numerals, white text that reads “Hamilton” and “Khaki Automatic” and black hands filled with stark white Super-LumiNova. It’s as simple as can get. In fact, I think that this might be the simplest Khaki Field dial available, save for the quartz collection which features the old Khaki logo.
Inside, you know exactly what to expect — it’s the Hamilton H-10, which is just a Swatch Group Powermatic 80. It beats at 3Hz and has an 80 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a 18mm wide three-link bracelet in matching titanium and with a folding buckle that has three micro-adjust holes.
The Hamilton x Engineered Garments Khaki Field Titanium 36mm is, like I said, limited to 1,999 pieces and priced at €1,225. Come on, Hamilton, do a regular release of this. See more on the Hamilton website.
2/
There is no other watch brand in the world that is as good with utilising color in their collection as the British indie Farer is. It’s not just the base colors of the dials, it’s the entire package — the straps, the dials and the incredible details. Now, they are introducing a second generation to their Field collection and you know that the three watches are going to have spectacular dials.
While the previous Field collection wasn’t huge by a long shot (38.5×12.3×45mm), the chunky bezel made it look like a much, much larger watch. The new watch has a much better ratio of dial to case, despite the case not being much smaller. Made out of stainless steel, it measures 38mm wide, 11.7mm thick and has the same and very nice 45mm lug-to-lug. The larger aperture for the dial was achieved by slimming down the bezel to a very fine ring. The bezel and the case get an all brushed finish and on the right side is just a slightly protected crown.
The dials are pretty freaking amazing, there’s no better way to say it. The only thing the three share is the pointer date and the hand shape. Starting with the Pembroke, it gets a rough grained surface in a sand tone with a bunch of blue details. The blue is on the lollipop tip of the seconds hand, the pointer date scale and the text in the centre. The the last four days of the month aren’t blue but red instead as a reminder that you might need to adjust the date at the end of the month. The numerals are heavily lumed with beige lume that matches the dial and made up of Arabic numerals with triangles or rectangles at the cardinal points.
Then, there’s the Lomond, which gets its dark blue dial from the many lakes of the Lomond national parks. It has the same grain as the Pembroke, with white details on the date scae. The indices and numerals are now beige, and inverted from the Pembroke with numerals at 3, 6 and 9, bars at the rest and a triangle at 12. Lastly, the Exmoor has a deep, deep green dial, contrasted with an orange hand for the pointer date and white scale. This one also gets white numerals all around.
Inside, you guessed it, is a Sellita movement. It’s the pointer date equipped SE221 which beats at 4Hz and has a 41 hour power reserve. And like other Farer model, this one comes on some spectacular straps. You get a sailcloth strap in green, blue or brown, as well as a three-link bracelet that features a tooless micro-adjustment licensed from Nodus, the NodeX.
The Farer Field Collection is available now and priced very well at €1,295. See more on the Farer website.
3/
So, earlier in the year, Tissot launched a brand new collection that was somewhat compelling, the PR516. It came in an interesting vintage-inspired case with either a quartz or mechanical movement. I always wondered how this collection panned out for Tissot, as you don’t see much of these watches in the wild. Well, it seems it’s doing well, as they just added four new watches to the collection. Only, they are expanding beyond the chronograph and adding time and date models, all powered by the Powermatic 80.
So, the new time and date models come in a slightly smaller case, which is more appropriate for the vintage inspiration visible in the dull lugs, deeply brushed surdaces and faceted edges. The case measures 38mm wide and 11.2mm thick, which is just fine. Water resistance is 100 meters. There will be a total of four watches, three of which will have a silver finish and black bezel on top — one with a jubilee-style bracelet and two on perforated leather straps — and one bi-color model which will have yellow gold PVD on the bezel and the central links of the jubilee-style bracelet.
There are also four different dials. Two have black bases, one with a red and one with yellow seconds hand, one is a gradient blue and one is a cream white. What they have in common are the baton hour markers, baton hour hand and syringe minute hand, a date window at 3 o’clock and the same text. Inside, you’ll find the Powermatic 80, a continuation of the ETA2824 which beats at 3Hz and has an 80 hour power reserve.
Best off all are the prices, which are much more acceptable than the mechanical chronograph. The models on leather strap are priced at €675, the steel on steel is priced at €745 and the two-tone at €825. See more on the Tissot website.
4/
We haven’t seen much from SpaceOne in a while and just as I was going to ask what’s up, here they are, with what I think might be their first collaborative watch. And what a collaboration it is. Just a quick reminder, SpaceOne is a collaboration between Guillaume Laidet of Nivada Grenchen, Excelsior Park and Vulcain and Théo Auffret, a young Paris-based independent watchmaker who won the Journe watchmaking award. Their first watch, the Jumping Hour smashed through their Kickstarter goal in minutes and went on to sell almost a million dollars worth of futuristic watches. Since then they’ve introduced another model, but now they’re doing a limited release with Hamdan Al Hudaidi’s Perpetuel retailer based in Dubai. And what a cool watch it is.
It’s technically the same watch on the outside and the inside, with a couple of Perpetuel touches. The case is bold, original, and futuristic yet with a certain vintage, 1950s flair. It’s a huge watch, but photos make it look very wearable. The case is elongated, with a width of 51.67mm. However, the lug-to-lug measurement is only 42mm and the height of the case, at the highest point in the middle, is 12.61mm. But whereas the original came in either polished steel, brushed steel, brushed titanium, brushed and blue-coated titanium or forged carbon, this one gets a titanium case in green, a color that is important in the Middle East.
The watch does not have a traditional dial, but rather a window through which you can see three concentric discs, displaying the seconds (centre), the hours (middle, and also the only jumping disc) and the minutes (periphery). The disc have a black base onto which orange eastern Arabic digits are printed.
To keep the price low, Argon uses an off-the-shelves automatic base movement – the Swiss-made Soprod P024, an alternative to the ETA 2824. In order to bring the jumping hour complication, Auffret has developed a 9-part module, which is connected to the base movement and supports a spring and an intermediate wheel. The watch comes on a green rubber strap.
Now, for two pieces of unfortunate news. First, this is a limited edition and only 25 pieces will be made. Second, it’s already sold out. I very rarely feature sold out watches on here, as it’s not fair to show people what they can’t get. But I make an exception when the watch is soo good looking I can’t resist. And this is one of them. Those who got one paid €3,265. See more on the Perpetuel website.
5/
I wasn’t a fan of Christiaan van der Klaauw (CvdK) watches. I didn’t dislike them, they just never tugged at my heartstrings. It happens. Only, as it turns out, I completely misjudged CvdK. It wasn’t until I got my hands on one for a couple of weeks (review incoming), did I realise how amazingly cool the pieces are. And now, their collection is getting even cooler with the CVDK Grand Planetarium Eccentric Manufacture. There are wristwatches out there that feature planetariums, so this is not a new thing. What is radical is the fact that the Grand Planetarium Eccentric Manufacture shows all eight planets, showing in real time their eccentric orbits. And that’s just incredible.
You would think that something as complex as this would have at least a 55mm diameter (looking at you, Jacob), but no. The CvdK actually comes in at a reasonable size. You can have the watch in either 950 platinum or 18k rose gold, in a case that measures 44mm wide and just 14.3mm thick. Just, I say? Yes, just. There are brands out there that can’t get a chronograph movement under 15mm, and these folks built an entire planetarium under 15.
The dial is made out of Aventurine glass, which just makes sense as it mimics the starry sky on which the stars travel. I assume that the construction of this dial must be incredibly difficult, as it’s not one piece — it’s 9 different pieces of glass, cut in irregular shapes, to accommodate the eccentric orbits of the planets that are moved by wheels over the dial. Time is indicated by thin Breguet-style hands that have moon-like bumps at the top, while the rotating sun logo in the centre shows the seconds. The domed sapphire crystal has engraved Roman numerals on the inner face to mark the hours.
The Grand Planetarium Eccentric mimics the orbits of Mercury (87.97 days), Venus (224.70 days), Earth (365.24 days), Mars (686.98 days), Jupiter (11.86 years), Saturn (29.46 years), and this could have been found on other planetarium watches, including those from CvdK. But the last two planets, Uranus and Neputne are often left out because of their incredible long orbits. Uranus takes 84.02 years, while Neptune takes 164.8 years. And CvdK managed to build this into the watch, meaning you will have a small planet on your dial which makes a full circle once every 164 years. That’s incredibly cool.
To do this, the movement features a staggering number of gears, with a total of 3,338 teeth. Those are powered by an in-house self-winding manufacture movement, wound by a skeletonized rose-gold-plated brass rotor shaped like the CVDK logo with a rhodium-plated tungsten weight on the outer edge of the rotor, running at 3Hz, with a power reserve of 60 hours. The watch comes on a blue leather strap with a folding buckle.
Best of all, this is not a limited edition. Sure, it will be limited by production capacity, but you will be able to get one if you want. Or if you can afford the €208,000 price tag for the rose gold or €227,000 for the platinum. See more on the Christiaan van der Klaauw website.
🫳On hand
Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon
1/
2/
3/
⚙️Watch Worthy
A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like
Overall, I found the Camp Fieldtimer convincingly evokes a pre-war ethos. It doesn’t look like any particular historical watch, and it’s a bit large for that period, but if you were to tell me that it was a replica, I might just believe you.
“It’s just like the 1936 Butterworth Hobo-Timer,” you’d explain. “That red lume was originally a mix of uranium and strychnine applied by orphans.”
“Oh, yeah,” I’d reply, nodding sagely, “that totally tracks.”
⏲️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
Only five years after a fire nearly destroyed the majestic Notre-Dame de Paris, an army of artisans beat an ambitious deadline by raising the cathedral from the ashes and restoring its centuries-old glory. Joshua Hammer tells an incredible, inspirational story of grit and love.
A different kind of whodunnit. This mystery is the provenance of the biggest estate-tax payment in modern history: Who died and left the United States $7 billion? At a time when paying the estate tax is almost optional, the mammoth payment was the largest-ever—by a factor of seven. As Tim Fernholz reveals, an anonymous tipster identified one man.
After watching from the sidelines for many years, Silicon Valley has joined the political game. It’s in large part thanks to former Clinton White House lawyer Chris Lehane, a swashbuckling type who’s worked for just about every tech company on the block—he’s nothing more than a “genius,” say some. Since then, Lehane has become so good at the game “that others [can] now mimic his gambits,” making already influential organizations even more so. His next target? AI.
👀Watch this
One video you have to watch today
Hey, hold up. The Lonely Island boys are back? Finally, some good news in the world! This one is, obviously, rated R, so proceed with caution.
💵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 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
What did you think of this newsletterYour feedback will make future issues better |
-Vuk
Reply