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Best Super NEWS Watches
Over the last few years, Breitling has invested a tremendous amount of resources into establishing its connection with aviation. From 2003-2019 Breitling even operated a team of seven L-39 Albatros jets. After all, the sole reason for the founding of Breitling was to supply timing instruments to the aviation industry. But in the mid-50s Breitling started producing dive watches alongside their aviation line, and the models were called the SuperOcean. Production has steadily continued since then, with the SuperOcean becoming a big part of Breitling's identity, albeit a secondary one. The design of the SuperOcean line has evolved over time, with designs that are completely contemporary, as wel...
Second Opinions on whether or not the helium escape valve should be used in modern dive watches
Many years ago, brands that were in the pilot's watch business started using what are often called "altimeter-style" date windows C a crescent-shaped cut-out in the dial with a marker pointing to the correct date. At the time, I found them baffling and frustrating C okay, they made my blood boil. A pilot's watch, I felt, ought to be a model of simplicity and legibility and accuracy, without any extraneous bells and whistles, and having a feature which aped a feature of a cockpit instrument panel seemed to betray the integrity of the pilot's watch as a genre, on the most fundamental level. It took me a while to articulate to myself exactly why these date windows b...
Reference Points look at the history and evolution of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak
Top photos: Scott Semler For the 10th issue of HODINKEE Magazine, we did something we've done before: A Reference Points article. However, we did it in a way we'd never done a Reference Points article before. As a general rule, Reference Points focuses on a single model and how it has evolved over the years in which it was (and is) in production, with a very granular look at the details which distinguish one from the other. Classic examples from earlier issues include Reference Points: The Rolex GMT Master and Reference Points: The Rolex Sea-Dweller.? For Volume 10, however, we decided to look at the history and evolution of one of th...
There's never been a better time to indulge in a pre-owned watch. For a limited time, the HODINKEE Shop is offering $1,000 off all pre-owned watches priced $10,000 or more. Below, we've gathered several of our favorite pre-owned picks with regular prices right around the $10K mark to help you make the most of this extraordinary promotion. Santos de Cartier The subtle squared-off figure of the Santos is among the most famous Cartier watch shapes, and likely the best-known Cartier watch that is not a Tank. Some say it's also one of the few watches that looks better in two-tone than in plain steel or plain gold. Luckily, we have a killer two...
The Nicolas G.Hayek Watchmaking School Is Making Watchmaking Education More Accessible Than Ever
The Miami outfit of the Nicolas G. Hayek Watchmaking School has been free for all students since it opened its doors in 2005. That doesn't mean that every student has been free of financial hardship, however. "We've seen lots of young people struggle to maintain their living costs throughout the year of training," Reto Kohli, Head of Apprentices & Nicolas G. Hayek Watchmaking Schools, told me over Zoom recently. "And that's why we've decided to help them, we want to help them flatten the way to success." Beginning in September of this year, every student in the Miami program will not only receive their watchmaking education for free, but the school will...
The Citizen Promaster Dive Automatic NY0155-58X Shine Bright
There's a solitary shaft of light that pierces through a small opening in the 55-foot-high ceiling of the geothermal hot spring known as "The Crater" in Midway, Utah. It's home to a 65-foot-deep pool of calcium-rich bright blue water that stays a constant 95 degrees, year-round. The light reaches the bottom, but just barely. Even when the sun is high, down there it's an ever-lasting twilight. It's bright enough to make out Travertine rock formations and other divers, but dark enough that details get lost in front of you. The bottom of the crater is made up of a pillow-like bed of silt that's constantly stirred up by the flow of the springs that feed the mineral-rich pool.?Between the blue gl...
A Week On The Wrist With The Cartier Crash
The Cartier Crash came about at an interesting moment in the history of the company. In 1967, Cartier London was the last of the three historic Cartier boutiques which were still being run by a member of the family C the boutiques, although connected historically, were independent businesses (Cartier New York was sold in 1962, and Cartier Paris, in 1966). To say it was a time of upheaval for traditional luxury is to say nothing at all. Cartier was the leading representative, bar none, of traditional European and French notions of luxury and had built its business on catering to the needs of royalty, and (especially in America) those aspiring to be royalty. In the 1960s, however, this white-g...
Caitlin Thompson Of Racquet Magazine Discusses Her Grandmother's Helbros
In Watch of the Week, we invite HODINKEE staffers and friends to explain why they love a certain watch. This week's columnist is our friend Caitlin Thompson, the publisher of Racquet, a tennis-focused media company with a flagship quarterly print magazine. Just in time for the second week of Wimbledon, she's written up the story of her grandmother's vintage Helbros wristwatch.? As a complete newcomer to the world of timepieces, it's hard not to get excited about some of the special and highly sought-after watches in this rarefied world. My personal aspiration has always been to own a vintage 1950s Vacheron Constantin, but I wouldn't mind a Royal Oak, of course, a...
Everything You Need To Know About Zelos Watches
Elshan Tang had a side hustle in the early 2010s. While he was studying mechanical engineering at the National University of Singapore he would buy, sell, and trade pre-owned Swiss luxury watches with other students and nearby residents. It was a way for him to engage with his interest in watches, which began when he started collecting Seikos at just 15 years old. The lifestyle of a watch dealer ended up not being the right fit for Tang. "It got kind of boring, selling the same old Rolex and APs," he says. "So I decided to get into designing my own watches and created my own brand." Tang, now 34, started his company in 2014 and named ...
A Hands-On Review Of The Bulgari Aluminium Ducati Special Edition
The only time I've been arrested was for an admittedly absurd accumulation of speeding tickets. I found myself cuffed to a cinderblock wall explaining to the befuddled cop what I was wearing, which included a moth-eaten cashmere turtleneck, a pair of hard-carved tortoise shell eyeglasses, and a vintage Rolex Datejust. He seemed keen, yet ultimately unable, to figure me out. What I didn't tell him was that I was a Caf Racer. Caf Racing emerged after World War II, as disaffected youth around the world began outfitting street-legal motorcycles with racing bodywork, lowered handlebars, and chopped exhaust pipes. Laying horizontally atop their noisy machines, these ...
A Hands-On Review Of The Oris Aquis NY Harbor Limited Edition
Lead image, author.? It's a beautiful day in New York, but I'm sick as a dog in my apartment.?If things had gone according to plan, I would be on Governors Island right about now helping the team at Oris clean up large piles of reclaimed oyster shells as part of their just-announced commitment to and collaboration with New York's "Billion Oyster Project," an organization that's dedicated to rebuilding the population of oysters in the New York Harbor.But instead, I caught COVID. The sun was shining on Oris and all the oysters on Governors Island last Tuesday. Don't worry about me C it's been a relat...
Florent Lecomte loves to teach. The 41-year-old Frenchman, a former professor of industrial design, fell down the rabbit hole of watchmaking in 2006, after accepting a job to teach design at the ??Lyce Edgar Faure school of watchmaking in Morteau, France. Sixteen years later, Lecomte still works at ??Lyce Edgar Faure, except instead of design education, he's in charge of educating the next generation of French watchmakers. You may have heard the names of a few of his former students on HODINKEE. Rising stars such as Remy Cools, Cyril Brivet-Naudot, and Tho Auffret have all spent time as Lecomte's pupils over the past decade. "I lik...
A Hands-On Review Of The Greubel Forsey Tourbillon 24 Secondes Architecture
Greubel Forsey's headquarters and home in La Chaux-de-Fonds is one of the most beguiling buildings in the entire Swiss watch industry. The heart of the facility is a 17th-century farmhouse that was purchased by company founders Robert Greubel and Stephen Forsey in 2007. Throughout the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the pair gradually worked to expand the building to its current form, which features a tall, modernist, glass-walled atelier that swells off the side of the once-quaint wooden home. Greubel Forsey's headquarters in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Image, Greubel Forsey When I visited Greubel Forsey's manufacture a few years ago,...
Grand Seiko's Dive Watches Are The Perfect Size
I love Grand Seiko's dive watches; I don't care who knows it. It's a genre of watchmaking that most don't associate with GS's high-end collection of timepieces. Your average watch collector will generally gravitate toward Grand Seiko's dressier or GMT-laden wristwatches, like the all-time classic Snowflake and SBGM221. But I staunchly believe Grand Seiko's disregarded dive watches are worth a second look. I know the primary complaint that surrounds them, sizing, is divisive, but I'm here to tell you that it's actually what makes these watches special.That's right C?welcome to my completely subjective, utterly biased (and entirely correct) rant about Grand Seiko's...
Tom Hanks Wore This Iconic Omega Speedmaster In 'Apollo 13'
"From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon." In 1995, Ron Howard released his epic space film about heroes acting in the face of disaster and death. Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon is more than just a big-budget Hollywood flick with big marquee names. It's a film about a group of astronauts who believed they would be the third crew to step foot on the Moon only to have their spacecraft malfunction, forcing them to scrap their dreams and attempt to return home despite near-impossible odds. Sure, the effects are dated, but the heart remains intact. What we get is a picture of Ameri...
Chef Douglas Kim's Watch Collection
Though his resume is impressive, having cooked at the likes of Per Se and Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, Douglas Kim never worked in a ramen shop or at a pasta station. All that changed when he opened the popular Jeju Noodle Bar in New York's West Village.?Ramen was one of his go-to cuisines when eating out in New York, and it made the chef think about the prominent instant noodle culture of his home country of Korea, where packs of inexpensive ramyun are a staple. "Why not do a fresh version of ramyun," Kim thought. "I just went for it." The result is far from your typical slurp joint. One of Jeju's signature noodle dishes featu...
Could You Use Hey, HODINKEE's Drinky Bird In A Clock?
In the dog (or dog-adjacent) days of summer the mind of the horological writer, exhausted from an intemperate climate, the general alarming state of the world, and the first half of the year's cornucopia of new releases, finds itself considering questions perhaps further afield than usual from run-of-the-mill horological ruminations. Such questions include, "Is this really a sensible job," "How many more Royal Oaks am I going to have to write about," and "If Rolex makes one million watches a year, how many does it make per minute," and so on. I am Drinky Bird, take me to your liter. One such question I have been knockin' aroun...
Did You Know Aly & AJ Are Watch Collectors?
Webster Hall, New York City. That's where we caught up with the musical duo (and sisters) Aly & AJ just before they were set to take the stage in front of a sold-out audience. The venue was shaking from the soundcheck as we eagerly awaited our sit down with the pair.? Both Aly and AJ Michalka are well known in the entertainment world. Both have spent a considerable amount of their lives acting C both in television and film C while simultaneously building a devoted fan base for their music. Go to any one of their shows and you'll see every last fan dancing jubilantly and mouthing every last lyric to every song. We saw them during their tour in promotion of the...
Hands On with the Rose Carre from Parmigiani Fleurier
The most commonly encountered wristwatches are mass-produced and while it's the norm for enthusiasts to value manual processes, the truth is that watchmaking and watchmakers have been trying to get the human out of the loop as much as possible for at least the last couple of centuries. High-precision manufacturing allows makers like Rolex, Omega, Seiko and Grand Seiko, and many others to produce accurate, reliable mechanical watches in the millions every year. That said, as you ascend the hierarchy of watchmaking, you do get more and more manual processes C especially finishing C to augment what the machines have begun, as well as more and more quality control. T...
Hands-On: The New Vacheron Constantin Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin Skeleton In Pink Gold
It was easy to miss, in the haze of this year's Watches and Wonders releases, that Vacheron Constantin announced a new iteration of their Overseas Perpetual Calendar Ultra-Thin Skeleton in pink gold with blue accents earlier this year. Now here it is, in all its golden glory. It's possible that (in addition to the release of the 222 taking up most of the limelight) the meticulously iterative roadmap Vacheron has followed with the Overseas Perpetual Calendar took a bit of the edge off the announcement of the reference. Watching the near-yearly changes in either dial color or case metal meant that when Vacheron announced an 18k white gold skeletonized ultra-thin pe...