Seiko Brings Back The Pogue. Sort Of, But Not Really; Squale Marks 40 Years Of Italian Navy Partnership; Laco Has Green Fliegers; Incredibly Stunning Arcanauts; And A Beautiful Sartory Billard

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Seiko has been on quite a roll of recreating their iconic models. Some have been more successful, some less, but nearly all criticised for their price. But this Pogue might be the most controversial yet. But other than that, an interesting lineup today, especially the incredible Arcanauts.

In this issue:

• Seiko Brings Back The Pogue. Sort Of, But Not Really.

• Squale Marks 40 Years Of Supplying Watches To The Italian Navy With The 1521 Marina Militare

• Laco Gives Their Augsburg And Aachen Pilot’s Watches A Very Nice Limited Edition Green Dial

• New Ripple Milled Fordite Dials On The Arcanaut ARC II Are Truly Unlike Anything You’ve Seen Before

• Sartory Billard And Watch Dealer Team Up For Maki-e Lacquer With Mother Of Pearl Dials On The SB07

Today’s reading time: 11 minutes and 12 seconds

👂What’s new

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Seiko Brings Back The Pogue. Sort Of, But Not Really.

Please, before we start, direct your stones you will inevitably throw at Seiko, I am just the messenger. That said, I am perfectly aware that the original Pogue and this watch essentially just share a colorway. But even so, a day when Seiko decides that their Prospex Speedtimer Solar Chronograph deserves to get a Pogue treatment is a very good day. What we have from Seiko is the Prospex Speedtimer ‘Pogue’ Solar Chronograph ref. SSC947P1, a re-interpretation of one of their most important watches.

So, what is the Pogue and why is this such a big deal? Watches that have a connection to space have a special aura around them. Omega has been telling you for decades that the Speedy was the first watch worn on the Moon, Bulova is milking the Lunar Pilot for everything it’s got, but equally romantic stories can be told about the Breitling Cosmonaute, the Fortis Cosmonauts Chronograph and Gagarin’s Sturmanskie. Even the G-Shock DW-5600 has its space story to tell. Seiko has it’s own space watch lore, with many of their watches being worn in space, but the most famous being the Seiko chronograph ref. 6139 6002 from the 1970s worn by Colonel William Pogue in 1973 on his trip to the Skylab Space Station. Nicknamed the Pogue, it was the first automatic chronograph.

Today’s Pogue is a very different watch, but one that takes on the look of the legendary watch. It is built on the basis of the Solar Chronograph, which means that it loses the turtle case of the original and comes in a 41.1mm wide and 13mm thick stainless steel case that has a surprisingly comfortable 45.9mm lug-to-lug measurement. The watch does have the slightly uncommon 21mm lug width. On top is a curved sapphire crystal surrounded with an aluminium bezel that is the first reference to the original Pogue. It features a tachymeter scale (I saw somewhere that his might be a reason why they based a modern Pogue on the Solar Chronograph instead of one of the mechanical chronos, because it head a tachy scale, but this seems a bit far fetched) which has the first quarter painted red and the rest a deep blue. I always loved this look. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is where things go really off the rails. Sure, the bright sunray brushed yellow-gold color looks exactly like the original Pogue, especially in combination with the blue and red on the bezel. The rest is classic Solar Chronograph - a tri compax setup with black dials that display a 24-hour scale, a running seconds and a 60 minute totalizer. And it’s these sub-dials that are used as apertures for solar charging. There’s also a date aperture at 4:30, with a white date disc. Interestingly, the polished and faceted hands are very similar to the original and are filled with lume.

Inside is the V192 Solar Chronograph movement. This quartz movement can be charged with light through the dial and you get a 6 month runtime when fully charged. Accuracy is ± 15 seconds per month. The watch comes on a stainless steel bracelet with a three-fold clasp.

So far, I can see the Seiko Prospex Speedtimer ‘Pogue’ Solar Chronograph ref. SSC947P1 on the international Seiko website, but the only price I see is expressed in British Pounds - £600 or about €700. Seeing as how the old Pogue models are priced at €1,000-1,200, it is a slightly more affordable than the original. But is it worth it? That’s up to you to decide. See more on the Seiko website.

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Squale Marks 40 Years Of Supplying Watches To The Italian Navy With The 1521 Marina Militare

While they aren’t a mainstream household name, Squale has been making pretty cool dive watches for some time. In fact, they are celebrating their 65th birthday this year. But in fact, the brands history dates even before 1959 when founder Charles Von Büren registers the “Squale” trademark to him making diving watches for other Swiss brands. Squale struggled during the quartz crisis, fading a bit but never truly going away. After the retirement of Charles von Büren, the Maggi family which distributed Squale watches in Italy and the former Italian distributors of von Büren watches partnered with one another and in 2005 relaunched the brand. Since the relaunch, Squale continuously releases vintage-inspired and modern divers and they have renewed their partnership with the Italian Navy, to which they first started selling watches 40 years ago. This is the new 1521 Marina Militare model.

The 1521 is a symbolic number for Squale, as that was the first model Squale supplied to the Navy in the 1980s. Only a handful of the original 1521 watches have survived to the present day. This is because the watches were supplied to the divers as military-grade tools, and so, after their use, were returned and destroyed, as per protocol.

The new watch comes in a 316L steel case that measures 42mm wide, 12.5mm thick and has a 48mm lug-to-lug measurement. The case has a brushed finish with highly polished bevels. The same polished bevel can be found on the coin edge bezel which has a matte black aluminium insert with fully graduated 60 minute scale in white, with the first quarter in orange. This is also the first orange color you notice, an important symbol for both the Navy and Squale. The sapphire crystal on top is flat. Being a dive watch for the Italian navy, you know it won’t disappoint when it comes to water resistance - it’s 500 meters, which is quite a feat at just 12.5mm thickness.

The dial is a fairly simple affair, but very nice. It has a deeply brushed finish and a black color, but the shine on that brushing makes it have a brown tint. There are applied indexes for the ours, surrounded by a minute track, and a date window at 3 o’clock. The hands are simple, white for the hours and orange for the minutes, both heavily lumed, as are the indexes. At the 6 o’clock position is the logo of the Italian Navy and the same can be found on the caseback.

Inside is a very familiar movement - the Sellita SW 200-1. The automatic movement comes in the elaborè grade, beats at 4Hz and has a 38 hour power reserve. The movement is known for being mostly reliable and easily servicable thanks to a familiar architecture and readily available parts. The watch come son a water-resistant, black, microfiber strap with orange stitching and an additional Squale-branded, natural rubber black strap.

The new Squale 1521 Marina Militare is a limited edition of just 500 pieces and retails for CHF 1.340, which is with my insanely high VAT included. You will likely be able to get it for cheaper. See more on the Squale website.

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Laco Gives Their Augsburg And Aachen Pilot’s Watches A Very Nice Limited Edition Green Dial

There’s a very specific reason why so many pilot’s watches look very much the same. They have to have large hands, a clean dial and easily readable numerals because they are supposed to be used while flying a plane, obviously. There’s the Type A flieger and the Type B flieger, which differ a bit in complexity (you can read the story of the creation of flieger watches, and their link to Nazi Germany, on my Patreon, I unlocked the post for everyone). That leaves you with two options - either create a completely different looking watch, something like the recent Circula ProFlight Flieger, or use the traditional flieger architecture and play with colors. The latter is what Laco did with their most recent release of their basic pilot watch line. These are the new Laco Augsburg and Aachen that got a matte green dial.

While the Augsburg and the Aachen otherwise come in both 39mm and 42mm sizes, this limited edition comes only in the larger one. This means that the stainless steel case measures 42mm wide, 11.7mm thick and has a 50mm lug-to-lug. This is a large watch, but pilot’s watches are meant to be. The cases have a brushed finish, topped off with a polished bezel. That bezel surrounds a sapphire crystal, which is where we encounter one of Laco’s many quirky customisation options. The crystal comes with no anti-reflective coating, but for €50 more, you can get one. A bit bizarre to offer this an option. Oh, and more customisation is available on the case, as you can engrave either the caseback or the side of the case.

The Augsburg and the Aachen share the case, but differ on the dial. The Augsburg is what is called the Type A flieger which has just the minute track along the edge of the dial and big numerals for the hours, while the Aachen is a Type B, which has large minute numerals on the outside and a inner ring for the hours. There’s also a slight difference in the length of the characteristic sword-shaped hands. But new for the limited edition is the new color. It’s not the first time Laco have altered the colors of the traditional flieger, but this deep forest green might be my favorite.

Inside, more bizarre options to be had. You can get the Laco S2, which is powered by the Miyota 82S0. The movement beats at 21,600vph and has a 42 hour power reserve. But you can also spend €55 more and get the Laco 31, which uses the Miyota 8315, a slightly update movement that has the same beat rate and upgraded power reserve of 60 hours, along with thermally blued screws. The watches come on a gray leather strap with green stitching that matches the color on the dial.

The Laco Augsburg and Aachen are limited to 250 each and priced at €440 for the base watch. Upgrade the crystal and movement, and you’ll be spending €545. Since that’s still a very reasonable price, I don’t really see much sense in not getting the upgrades. See more on the Laco website.

 4/

New Ripple Milled Fordite Dials On The Arcanaut ARC II Are Truly Unlike Anything You’ve Seen Before

The genesis of the pan-Scandinaivan, Danish-based, watch brand Arcanaut is one filled with a couple of interesting twists and turns and a whole lot of lore that would take up a lot of space here. The important bulletpoints are beer, a critical eye of Swiss offerings, traditional Scandinavian design and a strong sense of experimentation. It took years to develop, but Arcanaut - led by chief designer Anders Brand, exotic materials expert James Thompson a.k.a. Black Badger and Rob Nudds as Head of Brand Development - is now consistently putting out the wildest watches the market has seen. Basing everything on a single unique case desing, Arcanaut has become a playground for advancing materials as far as they can go, and they have had an immense amount of success with Fordite. Fordite is a unique material, chipped of the walls of Detroit's automotive paint bays, where it settled in layers and is then machined to reveal the multiple colors in one chunk. While I understood the appeal, I was never a huge fan of the material, as it seems a bit of a gimmick. Unless it was Black Badger working with it. An now Arcanaut is putting out a new series of dials, some of which have a ripple finish to them and when I tell you that this is perhaps the most unique thing you have ever seen, I am not lying.

Let’s cover the case first, and not just to get it out of the way, because it’s incredibly interesting. Made out of micro-blasted (with hand polished highlights) 316L stainless steel, CNC milled north of Copenhagen with tolerances down to a micron, the case measures 40.52mm wide without the Pentablock crown that follows the contours of the case, 12.82mm thick with the crystal and has a 49.06mm lug-to-lug. Sure, this is a large watch, but everyone who has ever worn one has said that it wears much smaller than numbers would suggest. That’s mostly due to the dramatic curve the watch has which contours to the wrist. Water resistance is 100 meters, not that you will do much diving with this thing on your wrist.

Then we get to the Fordite dials. Oh, and when telling you what Arcanaut was, I forgot to tell you that it’s becoming increasingly rare. Due to changes in the paints used, the only way to get great quality Fordite is from these lumps made in the 60s and 70s. That, combined with the fact that turning Fordite into dials is a complex process means that pretty much every Fordite dial Arcanaut is a piece unique and pretty hard to get. Arcanaut figured out three approaches to Fordite dials - Linear, Groovy and Ripple Milling. The Linear variety is particularly challenging to make as the grain of each lump of Fordite has to be identified and then cross-sectioned with unflinching precision to ensure a perfectly linear result, but they are not part of this latest release. So we’re getting new Groovy and Ripple dials.

Groovy is cut cuts straight through the layers, revealing patterns of paints fused together. They end up with stunning blobs of color that you would be hard pressed to replicate without Fordite. But my absolute favorite, and pictured in all three photos above, is the Ripple Mill. The Badger figured out that they can carve topographical patterns into Fordite itself, revealing multiple levels of the material at once and it absolutely mesmerising. Other than the Fordite patter, the dials are completely free of any additions, and the view of them is interrupted only by the also dramatic laser-cut micro-welded steel hands are made and hand-finished in Denmark.

Inside is the Swiss automatic Soprod A10 movement which only displays the time. It beats at 28,800vph and has a 42 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a perfectly integrated rubber strap. The pictured one is black, but I’m sure that you can opt for other colors.

The new release of Arcanaut ARC II watches with Fordite dials is obviously limited as every dial is unique, but there are some 23 watches left in this release. The Groovy variants are priced at €4.493, while the Ripple Milled will run you €5.062, and that’s with my 25% VAT, so your local pricing may vary. See more on the Arcanaut website.

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Sartory Billard And Watch Dealer Team Up For Maki-e Lacquer With Mother Of Pearl Dials On The SB07

A cursory glance at the Sartory Billard website will show you that they make a wide variety of watches, most of which are a combination of retro-avant-garde styles and centuries old craftsmanship. Pretty much every single one of their watches is show stopper, something that needs to be deeply examined to understand all of its nuances. And then they have the SB07, an almost classic Genta-esque integrated bracelet sports watch that still manages to surprise. But now they’re teaming up with watch dealer Martin Pulli to release two limited new versions of the SB07 that are just breathtaking, both with not just maki-e lacquer on the dial, but also inlaid mother of pearl.

The case of the SB07 remains the same, and it’s quite simple, while elegant and sporty. It measures 40mm wide, 10.65mm thick and has a 48.5mm lug-to-lug. There’s a whole range of finishes, including brushing, media blasting and mirror polishing. On top is a fized and unmarked bezel that has two significant cutouts on the side, taking heavy cues from the Vacheron Constantin Overseas and watches that were designed by Gerald Genta. Being a sports watch, water resistance is decent at 100 meters.

But while the case keeps it simple, things are very much not simple on the dials. A total of 10 dials will be made by hand in Japan, five in green and five in blue, with a traditional decorating technique that involves painting lacquer motifs on a surface in multiple layers called maki-e. The layers create a pattern that cannot be achieved without making it by hand. But Sartory doesn’t stop there. Instead, they inlay pieces of mother-of-pearl into the lacquer to create an even wilder effect. The dials are described as green and blue, but there’s so much more going on over here, as both colorways feature bright and dark shades of blue green and grey. It’s really hard to put into words. The base of the dial is unique, but on top of that Sartory Billard places their signature sapphire disc pad-printed with a Super-Lumi-Nova railroad minute track, along with lumed dagger-style hands.

Inside, you might run into a bit of a disappointment. With such a refined case and incredible movement, especially at this price point, I assume many would expect more than the La Joux-Perret calibre G100 which you get. It’s an alternative to the ETA 2824 and the Sellita SW200, beats at 4Hz but gets a much better reserve than the competitors at 68 hours. Sure, Sartory adds a fluted titanium rotor with a hidden tungsten weight, but it’s still quite a basic movement. The watch comes on a integrated bracelet with brushed H-links with mirror-polished center links and a butterfly clasp. Also, on Instagram, Sartory says you will get a “a cache of DeLugs Rubber straps with matching Sartory Billard butterfly buckles”. Pretty cool.

Like I said, only 10 pieces will be made, so good luck trying to get one. Even at their price of €12,000 without tax. This is where I would usually tell you to see more on the Sartory Billard website or the Martin Pulli website, but none of them have the watch yet. You can see them on Instagram, though.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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A review of the Spinnaker Spence 300 Automatic

2/

Hands on with the Longines Legend Diver 39mm

3/

 A review of the Roger Dubuis Excalibur Titanium Monotourbillon

⚙️Watch Worthy

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

Ollech & Wajs have updated a desirable heritage piece in ways that actually improve the original design

Like its ancestor, an aircraft silhouette dominates the M-52B AF’s dial. In this case, it is a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, the longest-serving warplane in history. Is there a good reason to put a design element of this type on a watch dial? No. That white image on the black background is large enough that you can easily confuse the swept wings pointing to 4 and 8 with the blocky, brushed hands. That is precisely the sort of impediment to split-second time-telling that most pilots’ watches strive to avoid. Does this ergonomic hiccup matter? No, it does not. It’s a watch with an airplane on it, originally designed for the people who literally lived and worked and died for that bird. If they could read it for combat missions, then you can certainly time your sortie on the grocery store.

Read the whole review on The Time Bum

⏲️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

• Anthony Bourdain’s suicide in 2018 devastated his fans, many of whom felt they knew the down-to-earth, approachable and eminently quotable chef-turned-bestselling author-turned-TV star. Across social media, Bourdain lives on in the most modern kind of digital afterlife: memes that marry his world-weary image with quotations reflecting his devil-may-care attitude and suck-the-marrow-out-of-life wisdom. Writes Becca Schuh in this smart essay: “Social media can make it feel as if our lost loved ones are still alive beyond the screen, just out of reach; with celebrities we’ve never met, that phenomenon can be even more pronounced. In the age of the parasocial relationship, is it any wonder that people continue to engage with Bourdain’s image?”

• Law-enforcement sources and grieving families allege that the social media giant Snapchat has helped fuel a teen-overdose epidemic across the country. Now, their parents are fighting back

• In this piece, Lukie Winkie asks, “[C]an anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex?” The various “get-your-ex-back coaches” on the internet would have you think so. Winkie questions their advice—which boils down to avoiding contact for a while—and asks whether these notoriously expensive “gurus” are taking advantage of people in an emotional state. Another question to consider: should you get back with your ex?

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I can’t wait for my midlife crisis to hit. I was pretty sure that I will be buying a R129 Mercedes SL. However, this Saab 9-3 Viggen is a pretty compelling idea also.

💵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

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-Vuk