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- Seiko Kicks Off 100th Anniversary With A Unique Recreation Of Their First Watch, Zenith And Time+Tide Release Defy Night Surfer, Serica's New Brown GMT Is Beautiful, New URWERK and Ferdinand Barthoud
Seiko Kicks Off 100th Anniversary With A Unique Recreation Of Their First Watch, Zenith And Time+Tide Release Defy Night Surfer, Serica's New Brown GMT Is Beautiful, New URWERK and Ferdinand Barthoud
After quite uninspired colorway updates to decent divers, Seiko shocks with a truly interesting watch
Vuk Radic
November 15, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes
Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. This is likely the latest I have ever sent out the newsletter. Sorry about that, I got hit with the perfect storm of a sick kid that had to stay home from kindergarten, just the two of us and a whole bunch of stuffed animals to have tea parties with, and a power outage that required professionals to come in and fix it.
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:
Seiko Kicks Off 100th Anniversary Celebration With A Truly Unique Recreation Of First Watch With Seiko On The Dial
Zenith Teams Up With Time+Tide Once Again For The Defy Skyline Skeleton Night Surfer
Serica’s New Brown Color On The 8315 GMT Is Stunningly Beautiful
URWERK Debuts The Carbon UR-230 “Eagle” Limited-Edition With A Half Hunter Case And Shock Absorbing Turbines
Ferdinand Berthoud Chronomètre FB 3SPC Celebrates First Anniversary With New Gold Case And Black Movement
Today’s reading time: 7 minutes and 49 seconds
👂What’s new
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After what seem to be countless uninspired limited editions, geographic exclusives and slight colorway updates to watches that are nice, but not exciting, it seems that Seiko is back to show everyone why they are one of the best watchmakers in the game. 2023 and 2024 are important years for the brand and they intend to celebrate them in a really big way. Earlier this year they celebrated 110 years of the company with a limited edition Laurel collection. Now they’re celebrating 100 years of use of the name Seiko with the new, and quite incredible, Seiko Presage Kintaro Hattori SPB441, named after the founder of the company.
While the SPB411 is not a complete recreation of the first watch with Seiko on the dial it is incredibly similar to the vintage 24mm wide round watch with an enamel dial, Breguet numerals, blued hands, and a sub-seconds dial at 6 o’clock. This was still the time when lugs were added to pocket watches to make wristwatches, and the new version reflects this look very much so. It’s slightly bigger than the original at 35mm, has articulating lugs that are attached to an incredible looking original pull-through leather strap and has a fully round case.
Continuing with the antique look are the box-shaped sapphire crystal and a closed caseback engraved with the trademark “S” that Kintaro registered in 1900 as a symbol of the Seikosha factory. It’s a thick watch at 12.3mm, but it suites the look very much so. It has one of the most interesting profiles for a modern watch.
The dial is made of beautiful glossy white enamel which looks very much like the original, as do the blued hands, the Breguet-styled numerals and the font. There’s a slight change to the subdial as it’s no longer used for the seconds, which is now delegated to a central hand, and the subdial is used for a 24 hour indicator. When I first saw the watch I thought how this was a nice way to incorporate a secodn time zone, but no… this just shows the current time in a 24 hour format, letting you know if it’s night or day, basically.
Inside the watch is Seiko’s 6R5H, a new version of the 6R movement that beats at 3Hz and has a power reserve of 72 hours. The watch is delivered in a special presentation box that also evokes antique ones.
The Seiko Presage Kintaro Hattori SPB441 is a limited edition of 1,000 pieces and will be available from January 2024 at Seiko Boutiques and select partners. Price is set at €2,000. See more on the dedicated Seiko website, but also check out their website that marks the 100th anniversary and hints that we are getting nine more watches to celebrate.
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Two years ago, the Australian watch website Time+Tide released an absolute banger of a watch in collaboration with Zenith. Their version of the Defy Classic Night Surfer was a stunning watch that came in a microblasted titanium and with a blued skeletonized movement. Now, the two brands are teaming up once again to release the sequel to the watch with the limited edition Zenith Defy Skyline Skeleton Night Surfer.
The new and cool Night Surfer comes in a 41mm wide case that’s once again rendered in titanium and given a beautiful microblasted finish that looks like a joy to touch. The shape is familiar Zenith, meaning an 8-sided case and a 12-sided bezel on top, also made out of microblasted dark grey titanium. The screw-down crown ensures 100m of water resistance and there’s a sapphire crystal that covers the movement that acts as the dial.
And it’s that movement/dial you will like the most, rendered in a deep blue color. The star-shaped bridge on top is surrounded by a grey-coloured outer flange with applied hour indices. The bridge also gets lines painted on it in white Super-LumiNova, making it glow amazingly at night. The subdial at 6 o’clock acts as the 1/10th of a second indicator.
Powering the watch is the high-frequency El Primero 3620 movement, the same you can find in the regular Defy Skyline Skeleton. It beats at 5Hz, with a power reserve of 60 hours, and has no date complication that can usually be found on the movement. Since it’s skeletonized, you get to see the running gear, the barrel, the winding system, the silicon escape wheel and lever and other details. The watch comes on a microblasted titanium bracelet that integrates into the case and an additional blue rubber strap with a star-embossed pattern and a folding buckle.
The Zenith Defy Skyline Skeleton Night Surfer El Primero x Time+Tide is limited to 200 pieces and price is set at CHF 11,900. See more about the watch on the Time+Tide website.
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Believe it or not, the adored microbrand Serica has been around only since 2019. And in less than 5 years, they managed to not just build a cult following, but also release three very distinct lines - a diver, a GMT and a field watch - all with multiple colorways and fantastic attention to detail. Now they’re introducing a new color for their 8315-2 GMT Chronomètre called “Desert Red”, a spectacular shade of brown.
According to Serica founder Jérôme Burgert, the “Desert Red” color scheme should remind you of the sandstone and red dunes of the Sahara. While I can appreciate a good nature reference, I will never understand why so many brands are afraid to embrace the word brown. In the case of Serica, they can call it whatever they want because it’s beautiful and perfectly matches in tone from the rubber bracelet, to the dial and the bezel, which is quite hard to achieve even for bigger watch brands.
Other than the color, not much has changed. The stainless steel case is 39mm wide, 13.2mm thick and has a very comfortable 46.5mm lug-to-lug. The bezel is made of a single piece of ceramic, so there are no seams between the white and brown portions. Speaking of the bezel, it’s divided into a night and day portion, mimicking when the sun comes out the majority of the year, with the night par here being colored brown.
Not much is new on the dial, either. Other than the beautiful brown color. You still get rectangular hour markers at 3, 6, 9 and 12 and round ones at all the other hours. The markers now have a gilt outline and the text at 6 o’clock is now printed in gold instead of white.
Inside the watch is the automatic Soprod C125, a caller style GMT, which means that you independently adjust the 24-hour hand instead of the hour hand. It runs at 28,800vph, has a 42 hour power reserve and has been certified by COSC as a chronometer, meaning it’s accurate between +6 and -4 seconds a day.
What is new, along with the color, is the new FKM rubber strap. However, to match the vintage vibes, it has been given a texture to make it look like leather, which just looks fantastic. Even better is that Serica addressed the issue of ruber straps not having end-links. They are introducing “guilloché end links”, beautiful pieces of metal that wedge into the lug opening to hide the connection between the watch and the strap, making it look perfectly integrated. According to Serica, these are a pressure fit and are not attached to the strap (meaning you can use it with any other strap), which leads me to ask: how many of these will end up lost?
The Serica 8315-2 GMT Chronomètre is available for pre-order now for €1,890 and the end links are a €100 option. For more information, see the Serica website.
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You can love them or hate them, but Urwerk has been making really interesting watches for years. You might not like their look or their extravagance, and certainly not their price, but the fact is that they are pushing displays of time forward into the future. And now they are introducing a new limited edition, the UR-230 Eagle.
The watch comes in a new black DLC-treated titanium and CTP (carbon thin-ply) carbon case that measures 44.81mm wide, 18.38mm thick and has a lug-to-lug of 53.55mm. Taking inspiration from full hunter case watches, the type of case that has a cover (think pocketwatches), the Eagle has a half-hunter case that protects the sapphire crystal. The cover has a “beak-shaped” edge for easy lifting to view the whole of the dial, and a specially developed braking device ensures gentle closure.
The dial has Urwerks recognizable revolving satellite complication. The three titanium spokes have rotating blocks, each displaying four hours’ numerals, while the minutes are displayed through an aluminium 3D retrograde hand with embedded cubes. Various Super-LumiNova mixes enhance visibility with a yellow, white, green, and red glow for different indicators.
New and improved functions have also been implemented, such as the turbine-driven shock absorbers that are found on the back of the watch case. These turbines are manufactured to attenuate external shock and impact, with “air brakes” to regulate the watch’s winding power. Now geared with shock-proof protection, the UR-7.30 caliber is safely kept inside the case and offers a power reserve of up to 48 hours both automatically and when manually wound. The watch comes on a Vulcarbonised rubber strap by Kiska and closed with a black DLC-treated buckle with Velcro fastening.
Only 35 pieces will be made of the UR-230 Eagle and price is set at CHF 180,000 without tax. See more on the Urwerk website.
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Just a few days ago, the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève awards, the Oscars of the watch world, were awarded to some really amazing watches. Among them was the Chronomètre FB 3SPC from Ferdinand Berthoud which won the Chronometry prize. This incredible watch is the first and only wristwatch with a variable-inertia balance and a cylindrical balance-spring to be officially chronometer-certified by the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute. And now it’s celebrating it’s one year anniversary with a new colorway - a gold case and black movement.
While the FB 1 and FB 2 collections followed in the footsteps of Ferdinand Berthoud's marine chronometers thanks to constant-force mechanisms, the FB 3 collection explores accuracy from a new angle: that of the cylindrical balance-spring. Particularly appreciated for its stability, this type of hairspring was favoured by the master watchmaker and his nephew Louis Berthoud in their precision timepieces.
Besides their hypnotic design, cylindrical hairsprings offer the advantage of breathing concentrically and perfectly on the axis of their pivots. Yet, these are extraordinarily difficult to craft and require more space compared to a regular balance spring. It required the Berthoud watchmakers 2 years to develop and refine a reliable and precise solution. And in the FB 3SPC the cylindrical hairspring ticks inside a beautiful movement. On the dial side you get to see a series of six bridges, with the balance wheel, pallet-lever and escape wheel visible at 9 o’clock. At 12 you’ll find the barrel under an arched bridge.
Just like the previous FB3, this new version comes in a 42,3mm case, but now it comes in a 18-carat white gold case and a movement that’s rendered in black and anthracite tones. The watch comes on an alligator strap with a gold pin buckle. This new model will be presented for the first time at Dubai Watch Week, from 16 to 20 November 2023 and it is priced at CHF 143,000. See more on the Ferdinand Berthoud website.
🫳On hand
Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon
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⚙️Watch Worthy
A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like
While the initial impression might be one of color and shapes, there is a surprisingly high level of detail present in these watches. Let’s start with the case, which gives the Modul collection its name. The modular construction of the case ensures that it can house various movements. The brand wanted to source unused vintage mechanical and quartz movements but wasn’t sure which calibers it could get its hands on, so a modular case was the perfect solution.
The modular construction comes in the form of a water-resistant black steel inner case that holds the crystal, movement, dial, and hands. This inner case is attached to the steel outer case using two screws on both sides. Altogether, the C-shaped case measures 35mm wide, 40mm long, and 8.2mm thick with an 18mm lug spacing. As you can guess, these dimensions amount to a modestly sized watch that wears very well, especially on smaller wrists. Topping it off is a vintage-inspired Hesalite box-shaped crystal and a distinct crown that bears the brand’s “P” logo. A nice design detail is how the bezel of the outer case is open, letting the black inner case flow nicely towards the crown. Read the whole article on Fratello.
⏲️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 you’ve seen video of the people who stormed the Capital a couple of years ago, you would be forgiven for asking: “how did this group organize to leave their houses without professional supervision, let alone attempt a coup?” This is the untold story of how the January 6 riots were planned on Facebook—and how the company missed it.
In 1913 Stalin was exiled to Siberia by the Tzar, and remained in exile until the February Revolution of 1917 led to the overthrow of the Russian Empire. According to Vyacheslav Molotov, who headed the Soviet diplomatic corps, Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins. You can learn crazy stuff like that from this excerpt from a book that promises to be very interesting: What’s Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork
A couple of months ago a number of women came forward and accused the actor Russell Brand of sexual assault. The New York Times now profiles Brand, his completely closed echo chamber, his slipping into his own alternate reality and how he shares this reality with his podcast audience.
👀Watch this
One video you have to watch today
You know I avoid posting watch videos, but this collection from former RAF/RN Pilot Rich Liddle is just so impressive and you get to see one of the rarest military collaboration Rolexes out there. Also, if you wonder how a military pilot can afford multiple Rolexes, a Patek and a Vacheron Constantin along with a smattering of cheaper Omegas, wonder no more, he started an investment fund.
💵Pre-loved precision
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