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Nomos Integrates a Sporty Bracelet and Blues a Dial

As Nomos carefully expanded its sports watch offerings in recent years, the German watchmaker has deftly balanced its traditional minimalist tenets with enhanced water-resistance and anti-shock requirements.

The Nomos Club Sport Neomatik 42 and especially the Tangente Sport Neomatik 42 Date Marine, seen first in 2019, offered both those features while also hosting the first-ever Nomos steel bracelet.

Collectors welcomed those sports models with open wrists. Nomos had finally combined its clean dial design spirit with a tougher and larger case design that sported a serious 300 meters of water resistance – all with a sleek steel bracelet.

The new Nomos Club Sport Neomatik 42 Date Blue.

This week Nomos expands its sports offerings with a new Club Sport Neomatik 42 Date Blue. As the name hints, the watch features a new, galvanized blue sunburst dial, which adds a new option to the black-dialed original.

But perhaps more critically, the debut highlights a new integrated steel bracelet that is not only more traditional in style than the first steel bracelet, it also likely enhances its acceptance to sports enthusiasts possibly wary of the original’s open lug design.

Nomos adds a new sunburst finish to the dial of Club Sport Neomatik 42 Date.

Nomos customized the bracelet for this debut, creating a classic brushed and polished three-link design with a folding safety clasp that sits right up against the case. Unlike the earlier bracelet, this one doesn’t allow any wrist to show between the case and the links.

A signal-red ring around the stem of the crown alerts the wearer if the crown is not screwed tight.

The handsome sunburst dial is set with white hands that glow blue and bold in the dark. As on the earlier models, Nomos equips the stem with a red ring that alerts the wearer if the crown is not tightened. Inside Nomos places its patented DUW 6101 date caliber from the Nomos Glashütte neomatik series. In part due to its thinness (at 3.6mm), it is well protected by the case, even with the clear sapphire caseback.

Price: $3,960.

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Watch Of The Day

Ball Watch’s Newest NEDU Goes Deep

The newest Ball Watch Engineer Hydrocarbon NEDU design enhances the dive watch’s existing, rugged construction with a revamped bezel and the addition of a new feature that underscores the NEDU’s solid dive-watch credentials.

The newest Ball Watch Engineer Hydrocarbon NEDU.

On this new NEDU, a collection Ball Watch introduced in 2012, Ball has cut two chamfers into the case flange that supports the bezel. These cuts act as a drain for any water retained between these components during a dive.  As a result, the NEDU will offer virtually no opportunity for corrosion to take root under the bezel.

This feature expands the NEDU’s nautical readiness, which also includes a full –and impressive ­– 600-meters of water resistance, alongside Ball Watch extras like shock resistance to 7,500Gs and resistance to magnetic fields to an intensity of 4,800A/m. 

Dive survival

Dive readiness is the original argument for this particular Ball collection, which is named after the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU), the unit of the United States Navy responsible for rolling out operational diving and decompression rules for the United States Armed Forces. It assesses the systems and procedures involved in surviving hyperbaric and diving environments.

This origin story is partly why Ball has built the collection with an unusually thick case, which at 17.3mm is among the thickest we’ve seen for a watch that measures 42mm in diameter.

To assist the watch’s impressive water resistance rating Ball directly incorporated a (patented) automatic helium release valve directly into the crown. This is the same design Ball incorporates into all its Engineer Hydrocarbon models.

And of course the dial of the Ball Watch Engineer Hydrocarbon NEDU lights up like few others in the dark with the famed Ball Watch luminous microtubes of H₃ gas fitted into the dial’s indexes and hands.

Chronometer-certified

Inside the watch Ball places a COSC-certified ETA Valjoux-based caliber RR1402-C automatic movement to measure and indicate elapsed time for up to twelve hours.

On the caseback Ball has stamped a diver motif to honor the NEDU’s official emblem.

The new Ball Watch Engineer Hydrocarbon NEDU comes with a black dial, a blue dial or the brand-new gradient blue dial. On the caseback Ball has stamped a diver motif to honor the NEDU’s official emblem. In addition to a rubber strap, Ball offers a stainless steel and titanium bracelet alongside a patented triple folding buckle. This extension system allows the wearer top place the watch easily over a diving suit.

 

Price: The Ball Watch Engineer Hydrocarbon NEDU on a stainless steel and titanium bracelet is $4,499 or $4,399 on a rubber strap. The new watch is available now on the Ball Watch online store and through the Ball Watch retailer network.

 

Specifications: The Ball Watch Engineer Hydrocarbon NEDU

Movement: Automatic caliber BALL RR1402-C (ETA Valjoux-based), chronometer certified COSC

Case: 42mm x 17.3mm titanium with top ceramic luminous unidirectional rotating bezel, 3.7mm anti-reflective sapphire crystal, patented crown protection system, helium release system, shock resistance to 7,500 Gs, anti-magnetic to 4,800A/m, water resistant to 600 meters.

Dial: Gradient blue, black or blue, 21 micro gas tubes on hour, minute, second hands, markers. Indicators for hours, minutes, subsidiary seconds, day and date.

Bracelet: Tapered titanium and stainless steel with patented folding buckle & extension system or rubber strap with standard buckle.

Prices: $4,499 (stainless steel and titanium bracelet) or $4,399 (rubber strap.)

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Alpina

Alpina Launches Eco-Friendly Dive Collection

Alpina Watches has partnered with the Netherlands-based Gyre Watch to create the new Alpina Seastrong Diver Gyre Automatic collection featuring watchcases crafted from recycled materials. Sales of the watch, with its case forged from a mixture of fiberglass (30%) and plastic debris (70%) caught in fishing nets in the Indian Ocean, will support the National Park Foundation.

The new Alpina Seastrong Diver Gyre Automatic collection is composed of five models and is being officially launched to support World Oceans Day (June 8th). Alpina will donate $100 for every watch purchased through us.AlpinaWatches.com in order to help maintain the U.S. parks, both inland and coastal.

The collection

The full Seastrong Diver Gyre Automatic range includes three men’s models (44 mm, $1,395) and two models designed for women (36mm, $1,295).

All five watches share blue-shaded dials, including turquoise and dyed mother-of-pearl, and luminescent hands. Inside each watch Alpina places its Sellita-based AL-525 automatic movement.

In addition, as a dive model, the watch features the requisite unidirectional bezel and water-resistance to 300 meters.

The Alpina Seastrong Gyre Diver Automatic, 36mm size. Each case is made using recycled materials.

Alpina will ship all the new watches with one of three two-tone NATO-style straps made from recycled plastic bottles. In addition, Alpina will include a black vegetable leather strap made of recycled apple waste with every 44mm watch.

Gyre origins

Alpina explains that the word Gyre is a reference to giant circular ocean currents. The Geneva-based watchmaker adds that the new collection represents the start of a long-term collaboration with Gyre Watch.

Gyre Watch, founded in The Netherlands in 2017, makes watches from recycled ocean plastic. Local fishermen along the Indian Ocean earn a fee collecting fishing nets from the sea for recycling, which means Gyre also contributes to local economies.

Alpina will make the Seastrong Diver Gyre Automatic as a limited series of 1,883 pieces of each model, in reference to the year of Alpina’s founding. Each watch will be sold in an eco-friendly gift set made of recycled plastic and recycled plastic bottles.

To further enhance the collection’s ecological profile, Alpina is printing each watch’s guarantee and certificate of authenticity on one page of recycled paper and will utilize a paperless user manual, accessible via a QR code. The code will direct buyers to a dedicated site for the Gyre collection as well as the instruction and maintenance manual.

 

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Watch Of The Day

Ball Re-Lights its Engineer Hydrocarbon Original

 

    Ball Watch earlier this year announced that it released its Engineer Hydrocarbon Original ($3,199) in a special fifteenth Anniversary edition that sports larger H3 gas microcapsules – for the first time under the dial – and three of Ball’s patented anti-shock systems, namely the Amortiser, SpringLOCK and SpringSEAL.

For the 15th Anniversary Ball Engineer
Hydrocarbon Original Ball for the first time
places extra-wide tritium self-powered
luminescent tubes underneath the dial,
flooding the ‘hour holes’ with light.

      For this anniversary model, Ball places its micro-gas tubes on hands and utilizes those larger tubes under – not on top of – the dial on the hour apertures. This changes the look of the Hydrocarbon dial considerably.

Nighttime view of the new Ball Engineer Hydrocarbon Original dial.

    The 40mm steel watch is fitted with a graduated and notched unidirectional bezel and is water-resistant to 200 meters (660 feet). Powered by a COSC-certified BALL RR1102-CSL automatic caliber, the watch also displays the day and date functions on its black dial.

The solid caseback, showing diver engraving.

Like all watches in the Hydrocarbon Collection, Ball protects its crown with a protection valve to insure that it’s securely bolted down and inaccessible while diving. And, true to its name, the Engineer Hydrocarbon Original is made to be shock resistant to 7,500 Gs and anti-magnetic to 80,000 A/m, thanks to mu-metal magnetic shielding.

Ball secures the crown with its own patented protector.

 

SPECIFICATIONS: Ball Watch 15th Anniversary Engineer Hydrocarbon Original

Movement: Automatic caliber BALL RR1102-CSL, COSC-chronometer certified with SpringLOCK

patented anti-shock system and SpringSEAL, patented regulator anti-shock system

Dial: Black with thirty micro gas tubes on hour, minute, and second hands, as well as under the dial (for the first time) and bezel; hours, minutes, sweep seconds, day and date

Case: 40mm x 14.55mm stainless steel, Mu-metal shield, unidirectional rotating curved sapphire bezel with micro gas tubes, Amortiser patented anti-shock system, anti-reflective sapphire crystal,

patented crown protection system, anti-magnetic to 80,000A/m, water resistant to 200 meters, shock resistant to 7,500Gs.

Bracelet: Tapered stainless steel with patented folding buckle and extension system

Price: $3,199

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