Sinn Releases Three New 356 Pilot Chronographs, Brew Has A Trio Of Funky And Colorful Regulators, The Seiko 5 GMT Gets A Space Theme From IFL, New Watches From Horage And H. Moser/MB&F

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Starting off with an apology. I was rushing yesterday and said that “the 904L is a tougher alloy”. This, of course, is not true. It’s equally as hard as 316L steel, it’s just more corrosion resistant. Sorry for that, but I’m glad so many of you pointed it out! On with some new news from Sinn, Brew, Seiko and others.

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In this issue:

• Sinn Celebrates 25 Years Of The 356 Pilot Chronograph With Three New Models

• Brew Teams Up With Worn And Wound For A Trio Of Some Very Funky And Colorful Regulator Chronographs

• The Seiko 5 GMT Gets A Space Themed Dial From IFL Watches

• Horage Introduces New Supersede Date Collection With In-House Micro-Rotor And An Even Better Price Than The GMT

• H. Moser Collaborates With MB&F For Only Watch Stunning Piece Unique Pandamonium Streamliner

Today’s reading time: 8 minutes and 54 seconds

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👂What’s new

1/

Sinn Celebrates 25 Years Of The 356 Pilot Chronograph With Three New Models

You either love Sinn, or you’re completely indifferent towards it. This is the sentiment I got from most watch enthusiast. If Sinn’s don’t do anything for you, you most likely see them as very teutonic military-inspired watches. On the other hand, if you like them, there’s an incredible segmentation of models to dive into with divers, field watches, pilot’s watches and chronos abound. Among the fan favorites is the 356, Sinn’s most compact automatic chronograph. And now Sinn is releasing three new models to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the model.

Not only is the 356 the most compact auto chronograph Sinn makes, it’s one of the rare ones on the market at 38.5mm wide and with a 46mm lug-to-lug. The line has received a number of variations of the years, including different crystal options, a 12-hour UTC model and even a salmon stamped-guilloche dial, but in recent times it hasn’t gotten as much love.

The new 356 have a truly vintage feel with a bi-compax layout with the same case as the original 356. Of the three models, two will be non-limited while one will be a limited edition of just 500 pieces. The two non-limited editions can be had with a choice of acrylic or sapphire front crystals with solid case backs and bead-blast finishing. The LE has sapphire crystals on front and back, and a brushed case

First of the non-limited editions is called the 356 PILOT Classic W, where the W in the name stands for white. As in, a white dial with black subdials. This will surely be the most popular model, with solid black numerals, markings, and hands. The other model, the 356 PILOT Classic AS E, skews more vintage with a gradient “matt-silk” dial with a warm, anthracite grey center darkening to black at the edge. The numerals and hands are rendered in an orange lume, while the subdials are black.

The third model is a limited edition called the 356 PILOT Classic Anniversary. This is my absolute favorite (the one in the cover image of this post), but I understand why most people will go for the white variant. The dial on this anniversary edition comes in a very dark anthracite with what looks like a very fine texture. The subdials are silver, while the markings and hands are white lume. This is the only of the three models that comes with an applied Sinn logo at 12. And this version also comes in a special box with two leather straps, one dark brown, the other a tan nubuck, as well as a strap changing tool.

The Sinn 356 was notably powered by the legendary Valjoux 7750 when it was introduced, but this movement is becoming increasingly hard to obtain. So all three of these watches are powered by it’s closest alternative, the ita SW 510 automatic chronograph.

Both the 356 PILOT Classic W and the 356 PILOT Classic AS E are available on either a leather strap or steel bracelet with acrylic crystals for $2,640 and $2,850 respectively. If you want sapphire crystals, you will have to pay $3,140 and $3,350. The limited edition 356 PILOT Classic Anniversary will set you back $3,340. See more details on the Sinn website.

2/

Brew Teams Up With Worn And Wound For A Trio Of Some Very Funky And Colorful Regulator Chronographs

In no time at all Brew Watch Co. has amassed a cult following with their super affordable, retro-styled watches. Helping them in this ascent were several notable collaborations with established watch media, like their early pairing with the Worn & Wound blog way back in 2017. Now the two are coming together again to release their second collaboration, the Metric Chrono Regulator. It comes in three fantastic colors, is limited to just 200 pieces each and have a regulator layout, which is definitely not something you see often on a watch at this price range.

Despite all the changes, this is still a Brew Metric Chronograph case, meaning you get a slight 36mm wide, 41.5mm lug-to-lug and 10.75mm thick watch that comes on a full steel bracelet with a sapphire crystal and a water resistance of 50 meters. Bit this is where the similarities stop. Brew did something amazing with this watch and turned it into a regulator, meaning that the minute hands remains in its regular central place, while the hours are displayed on the 24-hour register at two o'clock and the seconds are on the subdial at 6. The chronograph uses the central seconds hand and the subdial at 10 o'clock.

The dial is finished with an array of concentric circles expanding from hour indicator on the dial. And the dial is finished in incredible colors - moss green, sky blue, and ruby red. There are also color highlights all over the watch, including the start/stop and reset buttons for the chronograph.

the central point of the subdial that shows the hour. As both Brew and Worn & Wound seldom shy away from bright and fun colors, all three colorways feature a collection of contrasts and highlights – including the start/stop and reset buttons for the chronograph.

Just as the past versions of the Brew Metric, these Worn & Wound collaboration editions use the Seiko Instruments VK-68 Meca-Quartz movement, and the price is set at $549. At the time of writing, all three versions were available for pre order with delivery in November, despite being limited to just 200 pieces each. Check them out on the Worn & Wound website.

3/

The Seiko 5 GMT Gets A Space Themed Dial From IFL Watches

Modifying watches is a tricky game. Take an expensive Nautilus 40th Anniversary and drill into it hundreds of small holes to place diamonds in and you ruined a highly-limited and sought after watch. Take, on the other hand, a readily available and affordable Seiko 5 GMT and paint it’s dial and you created something very cool. IFL Watches knows how to walk this line and stays on the right side of it, having made a name for themselves by tweaking CasiOaks and PRXs. For their latest watch, they give the Seiko SSK001 a unique enameled dial depicting Earth from space as a tribute to world travelers.

IFL has perfected working on super-popular, very affordable watches, like the PRX. And the Seiko 5 Sports GMT is exactly that, with a price point under €500 and the coveted GMT complication, it’s been a darling in the Seiko lineup. So IFL ripped out the dial and hand painted it using UV-resistant enamel paint, displaying Earth on the lower half and a starry sky on the top. The standard Seiko SSK001 comes with a black and gray GMT bezel and a black dial. Because of the dark aesthetic, it turns out to be the perfect canvas for adding vibrant colors to make an artsy dial come to life. The watch also features a 100m-water-resistant stainless steel case that is 42.5mm in diameter, 13.6mm thick, and 46mm from lug to lug. It has a 22mm lug spacing and comes on a very comfortable Jubilee-style bracelet with a folding clasp and a flip-lock for extra safety.

Inside is the caliber 4R34, an automatic GMT movement with 24 jewels and a 41-hour power reserve. It is an office GMT, meaning you can independently set the bright red GMT hand in one-hour increments.

Only 150 pieces of this watch have been made and in the day after release, and before I could put it in the very next issue of the newsletter, all of them have already been sold out. Which might shock some when you consider the price of €1,290. As soon as the watch was released, there have been murmurings of the price being to high, considering the SSK001 sells for €490, and it quite a markup, but do keep in mind that this is a hand-painted dial. See more of the watch on the IFL website.

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Horage Introduces New Supersede Date Collection With In-House Micro-Rotor And An Even Better Price Than The GMT

The debate on what makes an in-house movement is a tiring one and I’m not particularly interested in one side or the other of the argument. If the movement is good, do we really care where it was made? Sure, I wouldn’t want ETA to make the movement for a $200,000+ watch, but beyond that, the discussion can be tedious. However, when a brand comes out with a movement that they call in-house, with details and functions you see only on much more expensive pieces, then the in-house movement thing becomes very cool.

I’m talking, of course, about Horage, a Swiss indie that is messing with the industry by putting out watches with in-house developed movements that feature tourbillons and micro-rotors at one fifth of the price of what other brands are charging. Last year’s Supersede GMT integrated sports watch delivered a micro-rotor movement with four complications in a case just 10mm thick, at a price of just CHF 5,500. The watch sold out instantly, of course.

This year, Horage is introducing the Horage Supersede Date, a simpler version of the GMT, with just a date function, while still retaining the micro-rotor movement. The case and bracelet are 904L stainless steel. Hey, look, it’s the second day in a row that I’m mentioning 904L steel. I’ll say it again - I messed up yesterday and said that 904L is a tougher alloy than 316L that is used by most watchmakers. That’s not true, but what is true is that 904L is more resistant to corrosion, especially when exposed to salt water.

And you will need that corrosion resistance, because this was built as a sports watch, with a rotating bezel with a 15-minute scale and a dual-knurled pattern for grip, as well as a 200-metre water resistance rating. And it comes in a great size - 39.5mm wide and 10.28mm thick with a lug-to-lug of 46.29mm. It comes on an integrated bracelet that tapers from 22 to 16mm with polished or brushed centre links and a low profile micro-adjusting folding clasp. You can also get it on a rubber strap that comes in six colors - blue, grey, black, red, purple and orange.

And speaking of colors, the dial of the new Supersede comes in two colors: CEntore Blue with a sunray finish and Black Coral. Applied indices and the partially open-worked hour and minute hands have X1 Super-LumiNova, as does the diamond aperture of the orange seconds hand. The large date window is at 3 o’clock and is color matched on the black dial, but white on the blue.

Inside the watch is the in-house K2 micro-rotor calibre. It’s a modular movement and the same as in the GMT variant, so complications can be added or removed without external modules. Horage claims that 98% of their movement is Swiss made and it beats at 25,200vph (3.5Hz) with a 72-hour power reserve. There is a silicon escapement and hairspring, and decorations include Côtes de Genève, anglage, brushing and chasing on the micro-rotor. The micro-rotor itself is gold-plated tungsten, but a PT950 platinum rotor is available as a CHF 1,200 upgrade. The movement is also COSC-certified.

Preorders for this watch start on September 12. The first 30 orders will ship within 7-10 days, while the remaining orders will ship in November. Early Bird preorders start at just CHF 4,900 with a retail price of CHF 5,500. The platinum micro-rotor adds CHF 1,200 to both. That seems like an amazing price. See more on the Horage website.

5/

H. Moser Collaborates With MB&F For Only Watch Stunning Piece Unique Pandamonium Streamliner

A couple of weeks ago I did a huge list of all the watches that will appear at Only Watch, the charity event that happens only every other year and at which pretty much every relevant name in the industry contributes a unique timepiece - hence the name Only Watch - to be auctioned off to raise funds for research on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and neuromuscular diseases. A couple of brands at the time announced they will be participating but did not unveil a watch. Well, two of those brands were H. Moser & Cie and MB&F. Turns out, they decided to team up and create one watch, the incredibly good looking H. Moser x MB&F Streamliner Pandamonium.

This is not the first time the two avant-garde brands are working together. But the Streamliner Pandamonium just might be their greatest creation. It’s a 42mm wide watch rendered in steel for a good chime, as it is a minute repeater, and comes on one of the best integrated bracelets on the market. It features a unique, one-off movement that sets a minute repeater around MB&F’s flying buttress, with the hammers of the chiming mechanism being ‘operated’ by a small, hand-crafted panda DJ figure. To display the time the watch uses the small hands at 2 o’clock.

The estimate for this watch is CHF 300,00 – 400,000, but this seems to be way too low, considering the fact that the two watchmakers basically made a completely unique movement that will be used for only one watch. The watch will be auctioned off on the 5th of November. See more on the H. Moser & Cie website.

🫳On hand

Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon

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Hands-On With The Yema Rallygraf Meca-Quartz Alpine Endurance Team

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A review of the Seiko Astron GPS Solar SSJ013 in titanium

⚙️Watch Worthy

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

Sheffield Allsport 1, a modern incarnation of a popular late 60s model

If you are even remotely interested in vintage watches, you probably already know the original Sheffield Allsport. If you type “vintage Swiss watch” or vintage dive watch” into your eBay search, I guarantee several will pop up for sale. There were a few variants, but the most common was a handsome skin diver with a pronounced arrowhead hour hand, outward-pointing dart-shaped markers, Arabic numbers at the cardinal points, and a cyclops date. It ran a one-jewel, pin lever movement, and its chrome-plated, 36mm case (in the men’s version) was sealed for an impressive 100m water resistance.

⏲️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

• OpenAI sent shock waves around the world when it released ChatGPT. But that was just the start. As this article from Wired claims, Open AI wants to change everything. Yes, everything. And there’s nothing scarier than a tech company convinced that they can, indeed, change everything.

• The poorly understood Rodnovery pagan religion is at the heart of Wagner’s most notorious unit of fighters who want vengeance for their murdered leaders. But this secret belief means Wagner’s most dangerous men won’t back down.

• Just yesterday I posted an incredible interactive infographic piece from the New York Times on near misses in airplane traffic. Well, looks like they’re all about the interactive telling of stories these days - this is a story about the war the US has been waging against Native American children through schools.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

One of the main reasons why I included a video recommendation section is because there are millions of videos uploaded to YouTube and it’s impossible to keep track of them all. Which means you miss some pretty brilliant stuff. Like, for example, the work of Regular Car Reviews. Yeah, it’s just a review of an old Boxster. But is it? See for yourself.

💵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: 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

• FOR SALE: Longines Heritage Skin Diver, box and papers. €1400. Reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch

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