HK Chords: Star Star Chord [星星Chord譜] Introducing The Future Of Watches

Friday, 20 July 2012

Star Star Chord [星星Chord譜] Introducing The Future Of Watches

The Basics

Company: Christophe Claret
Price: $294,400-321,300
Official Site: http://www.christopheclaret.com/en/
Release Date: March 2012

94 The AskMen Take

High-performance watches? Yes, high-performance watches! Think of the Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Aston Martins and Bugattis of the watch industry. Like high-performance supercars, they’re mostly handmade, highly technical, innovative and push the frontier of what’s possible.

A high-performance supercar brings you from A to B, just like your own Ford Fiesta or Citroen C1. The same goes for high-performance watches. They indicate time like any other watch. However, they are as cool, beautiful, innovative, desirable and admirable as the high-performance supercars, and created by the very best watchmakers. Let’s take a look at Christophe Claret’s new X-TREM-1, a breathtaking example of high-performance watchmaking.

98 Uniqueness

A watch is a small mechanical wonder. In order to function properly, its tiny parts work together within the tiniest tolerances. Not surprisingly, many of those tiny metal parts are sensitive to magnetism. Naturally, the last thing you want to do is to hold your watch next to a magnet. Christophe Claret disagrees on this point, however. He even uses magnets to indicate the time in his newest timepiece, the X-TREM-1.

All mechanical watches work in more or less the same way. First of all, there’s a power source, called the main spring, that resides inside the main spring barrel. Due to its nature, the spring wants to unwind as fast as it can -- kind of like the wind-up cars you played with when you were a kid.

Connected to the main spring barrel is a gear, and after that, some more gears, called the gear train, and, ultimately, the escapement. The escapement is incredibly important in mechanical watches, as it prevents the main spring from unwinding all at once. It also determines to a large degree how precise a watch is.

When the escapement is inside a rotating cage, it is called a tourbillon. A tourbillon was developed to overcome gravitational influences on the incredibly tiny and fragile parts of the escapement. Despite the reality that a tourbillon has no real function in a wristwatch, it is still considered to be a pinnacle of watchmaking. The X-TREM-1 is more than a tourbillon watch.

While normal watches have an hour and minute hand to indicate the time, the Christophe Claret has no hands at all. Time is indicated by two small hollow metal balls (spheres) that move up and down in sapphire crystal tubes. Inside the watch are two magnets, moving up and down to make sure the metal balls move inside these sapphire crystal tubes. Yes, magnets in a mechanical movement! The one thing that every watchmaker thought was impossible has been realized by Christophe Claret.

The two magnets are focused outward toward the metal balls in the sapphire crystal tubes. The gears in the movement move the magnets up and down to indicate the correct time. Because the spheres are hollow, they are much lighter and the magnet doesn’t have to be too strong to keep them aside the magnets.

The hour can be read from the indication track beside the sapphire crystal tube with the metal sphere on the left, while the minutes are on the right side of the watch. The tourbillon can be used as second hand, because it also makes one full rotation a minute.

90 Durability

Taken as a whole, this watch does what a watch should do: It indicates the time. The engine that makes time telling happen is so far from any run-of-the-mill mechanical movement that it has been made in extreme limited numbers and mainly by hand. Like a Ferrari or a Bugatti, it takes a lot of time to build one by hand, and only a few of them are being made. The Christophe Claret X-TREM-1 is an example of a true high-performance watch.

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