While the down-to-earth pricing of Moonswatch quickly went stratospheric after launch thanks to the extreme disparity between supply and demand, CIGA Design's Blue Planet remains available and affordable. With a domed sapphire crystal that mimics the atmosphere and a three-dimensional rendition of the earth that serves as the hour hand, coupled with a novel indicator for the minutes, the Blue Planet watch provides laudable design and horological value. At $929 USD for the stainless steel version, this just might be the least expensive way to get into a Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève winning timepiece that is still available for sale.

It's also worth noting that this timepiece is the first ever made in China to win the Swiss GPHG Challenge prize.

A fellow watchmaker once asked me if I knew what the slits in a riveting stake were for. I finally found a good answer—while crafting my horological arch-nemesis, no less.

Turns out, they're great for supporting the slender steel peninsula, which holds the regulating pins on a pin regulator, when securely affixing the pins in place. After slipping both pins through their respective holes, nest the pins into an appropriately-sized slot and drive them home.

Thankfully, most of the timepieces that cross my bench have no need for a pin regulator at all, let alone require making a replacement, as they are generally free-sprung. So the use case is rare. However, every so often a historically important timepiece comes along that warrants the work.

This fully-encapsulated OLED display inside of a run-of-the-mill-looking 2x2 sloped Lego brick, powered by a standard 9V Lego battery brick, is remarkable.

Created by James Brown using a slightly modified STM32F030F4P6 Cortex M0 processor, with 16K of flash memory and 4K of RAM, paired with a 0.42" QT1306P82 OLED panel. The final brick form itself is achieved through a combination of 3D printing and what appears to be a polyurethane casting technique (using Lego molds, no less) popularized by Keymacs.

The official spec from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 1112).

As one might expect from German engineering, the quick-adjust clasp on Lange & Söhne's Odysseus bracelet is robust and well thought through.

Add up to 7mm of length at the push of a button or ratchet things back in for a snugger fit simply by squeezing the bracelet—all while on the wrist.

A pioneer in the use of both titanium and ceramics in its timepieces over the decades, IWC provides an overview of how it fuses the two to form Ceratanium in this photo-rich advertorial for Hypebeast.

Real in aesthetics, not quite (yet) in function. The official Dick Tracy watch, designed by Nick Mathis and produced by Longio Watch Co.

In a partnership between Phillips, LVMH-owned Zenith, and renowned independent watchmaker, Kari Voutilainen, a never-before-sold series of vintage Zenith 135-O movements (regulated by Charles Fleck and René Gygax in the mid-twentieth century for observatory trials) are being expertly finished, cased, and brought to market.

Featuring a stunted escape wheel to accommodate a larger balance wheel for improved rate stability, the movement architecture is akin to the Peseux 260, another vintage, observatory-grade chronometer, which Voutilainen based his own series of Observatoire timepieces on. However, unlike the Peseux 260, the Zenith 135 has an extra pinion in the gear train for a center-seconds hand, and can readily be set up to indicate either central seconds or subsidiary seconds. Whereas the Peseux 260 is architected specifically for a sub-seconds layout. That said, like Voutilainen's Observatoire timepieces and as with the Zenith 135-equipped timepieces that have preceded this set, Zenith has opted to go with sub-seconds.

It's also worth noting that, while Voutilainen converted the Peseux 260 to a free-sprung balance system for improved isochronism, he was very intentional about his team leaving the regulating components in the Zenith 135-O calibers they received exactly as they found them:

“The persons working on these movements were the best watchmakers at the time. They had the know-how to make things precise. That precision doesn’t disappear after 70 years. Our duty was not to touch that performance.”

An impressive build, with a Harry Winston Opus Series vibe and Richard Mille aesthetic, crafted entirely from Lego.

Nice, clean repair of a worn center wheel, using a steel sleeve, by James Harris.

With a movement developed by Stephen McDonnell, MB&F doubles down on the chronograph—in their first-ever chronograph—the Legacy Machine Sequential EVO, featuring a novel "Twinverter" mechanism to fluidly couple and decouple the two chronograph mechanisms.

The original Chronomètre Contemporain by Rexhep Rexhepi, which debuted in 2018, was a masterclass in movement layout and finishing. The follow-up from Rexhepi packs greater complexity under the hood, while retaining its visual identity on the dial side.

Surpassing the movement that preceded it in specs on paper, that increased complexity lends the new movement an altogether different visual appeal that falls a stride short of the supreme elegance of its forebearer. The supersized breadth of the anglage and oversized spokes on the balance wheel seem almost caricature-like when posed next to the original.

I would be interested to hear more from Rexhepi himself about the thinking that went into bifurcating power delivery and, in particular, the changes to the balance wheel. In addition to the unusually large spokes, the modifications to the variable-inertia weights on the balance render it moderately more tedious to make precise timing adjustments in such tight quarters. Robin Nooy, over at Monochrome, has reported that the balance screws are responsible for the 60% increase in inertia at the balance wheel. However, it is clearly the increased girth of those spokes that account for the majority of that increase. Ideally, though, you want to move as much of that weight as possible to the outer rim, or felloe, of the balance wheel to optimize rate stability. Time will tell if this new balance design has staying power or whether it will mirror the trajectory of Voutilainen's Carbontime Fused Quartz Balance in the Rexhepi timeline.

At the end of the day, the execution of the finishing remains world class and it retains a free-sprung balance, so it's still got it where it counts.

Miniature, 80/20-style aluminum extrusions.