On the subject of representing novel methods to point the time, few manufacturers can beat the creativity, ingenuity, and technical wizardry of URWERK. Since 1997, grasp watchmaker Felix Baumgartner and creative director Martin Frei have provide you with modern variations of shows like wandering hours and retrograde minutes to represent the passing hours. Immediately, Urwerk’s Particular Venture assortment welcomes the brand new UR-112 Aggregat, a compendium of complexity, technicality and radical design. In a departure from the model’s signature wandering hours, the UR-112 is provided with double flying carrousels with leaping triangular prisms to carry you the digital hours and minutes in a novel but quintessential 3D Urwerk format. Housed in a streamlined black and gray titanium case, the key seconds are hidden beneath a hunter-style case.
The advanced design of the UR-112 Aggregat
Formally often known as the UR-112, the Aggregat appellation refers back to the approach the watch aggregates disparate parts to make a complete. “The sources of inspiration for this UR-112 Aggregat” explains Frei, “are many and diffuse. The grille of the Bugatti Atlantique is the obvious. An distinctive vehicle whose contrasting backbone emphasizes absolute symmetry“. It’s fascinating he ought to point out the uncommon Bugatti Atlantic automobile, a good looking vehicle constructed by Ettore Bugatti and impressed by his earlier 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe Idea. Mixed with its streamlined physique, the Bugatti Atlantic of 1936 was constructed of aluminium, a light-weight materials designed to reinforce velocity. Curvaceous and aerodynamic, the Bugatti Atlantic had a seam working down the central physique to exalt its symmetry and a vertical grille with velocity traces so usually featured on objects made through the Streamline Moderne interval of the mid-Thirties.
Just like the Atlantic, the UR-112 Aggregat reveals a streamlined physique with elegant sweeping and rounded curves. And just like the Atlantic, it’s fabricated from a light-weight materials – titanium – and even includes a central seam traversing the case from one finish to a different. The scale of the case (42mm width x 51mm size x 16mm thickness) don’t reveal the advanced structure of the case that’s fabricated from black and gunmetal PVD-coated titanium. Seen on the wrist, the rounded rectangular physique of the case shows the hours and minutes horizontally (a bit like a driver’s watch) and the tapers and reduces its peak in the direction of the tip. Even the reverse facet of the case options the central seam that transforms into the floating lugs when it reaches the extremity of the case.
The digital hour and minute indications are housed in two cylindrical sapphire crystal containers separated by the central seam. On the left is the digital hour show; on the best are the minutes. Every indication depends on triangular-shaped prisms that transfer in sharp, exact jumps nearly like outdated airport split-flap (Solari) shows (with out truncating the numerals). All of the 12-hour numerals and the minutes, which advance in 5-minute intervals, are engraved on the prisms and full of Tremendous-LumiNova that glows blue at nighttime. The operation of the leaping hours show is pushed by the advancing minutes. On the 60th minute, the drive gathered through the earlier 3,600 seconds is deployed to alter the hour.
Nevertheless, to seek the advice of the seconds, the hunter case must be lifted utilizing the 2 lateral pushers on the facet of the case. Adorned with horizontal velocity traces to echo the grille of the Bugatti Atlantic, the hinged titanium bonnet reveals the digital seconds show, additionally calibrated at 5-second intervals. Etched on miniature wafer-thin silicon discs, the tiny numerals on the best advance beneath a magnifying lens and are framed by a shiny purple plaque with a white arrow. Completely symmetrical, the left facet of the watch’s anatomy includes a energy reserve indicator, the one analogue show onboard the UR-112 Aggregat.
Heavyweight mechanics
Though the watch solely weighs 25.2 grams, it’s a heavyweight mechanical prodigy with eight titanium planetary gears. To transmit the facility required by the leaping hours, minutes and seconds, the UR-112 Aggregat depends on an extended, skinny rod often known as a cardan shaft spanning horizontally throughout the central space between the seconds and energy reserve gauge. Though it’s hidden by the seam, the transmission shaft has double gearing – one at every finish – and transmits all of the power required via a posh set of cogs and gears.
As Felix Baumgartner explains: “From a single supply of power, we energy all shows and mechanisms of this UR-112. This drive is distributed sparingly, some even ‘recycled’ in order that from the digital second on the prime of the dial to the dragging minutes and the leaping hours on the reverse excessive, every show receives exactly its required dose of power.”
Regardless of its radical structure, the finishings of the watch are extremely conventional with round and straight graining, Côtes de Genève and polished screw heads.
Availability and Value
The Urwerk UR-112 Aggregat is restricted to 25 items and can retail for CHF 250,000. For extra data, please go to Urwerk’s website.
The New URWERK UR-112 Aggregat initially appeared by way of monochrome-watches.com