"It's something of an experiment," says Stefan Ihnen from the latest tourbillon motion released by IWC. The Tourbillon Hand-Wound, which was recently added to the company's Portuguese watch line, combines high-quality watchmaking with the clean lines collectors desire. But far more importantly for the 36-year-old Ihnen, who has served as head of IWC's movement research and development department given that 2006, the high-precision design and style - still a rarity among tourbillons - represents the company's first step inside a new creative course that he helped to establish.
The movement deployed inside the Tourbillon Hand-Wound ($53,500) is based on a 1930s IWC pocket-watch design and style that was adapted for that original Portuguese wristwatch in 1939 and reproduced, beginning in 1993, for modern day Portuguese reeditions. Ihnen saw inside the mainspring and balance of these movements the prospective to create a modern timepiece. To enhance accuracy, he eliminated the large, slow-beat balance wheel and installed a modern day tourbillon cage that, thanks to a surplus of power, can be driven with the relatively high frequency of 28,800 vibrations per hour. He also replaced the index system - which makes it possible for watchmakers to control the speed in the look at easily - with adjustable screws along the rim in the balance wheel. This so-called free-sprung balance, though more precise than the index system, is a lot a lot more laborious to adjust.
Ihnen's requirements for your Tourbillon Hand-Wound movement reflect many with the modifications he has made to IWC's production of regular in-house movements. The chronograph motion he developed in 2007 also incorporated a free-sprung balance; since then, he has adapted this characteristic to higher-volume movements this kind of as being the 5000 series calibers inside the Big Pilot's View. This shift is significant for a company that manufactures a relatively large quantity of watches. (IWC's all round manufacturing is rumored to approach the six-figure mark.) An entire department is now dedicated to adjusting these mechanisms for greater precision.
Please keep the address reproduced:Watch Manual For Ihnen, this new direction also has personal implications. His predecessor, Kurt Klaus, achieved recognition as an industry giant by democratizing high-level complications. Klaus created a never-before-seen combination when he attached an ingeniously simple perpetual-calendar mechanism to the rugged and widely available ETA 7750 chronograph movement. The resulting Da Vinci view, for its performance and beautiful price, brought fame (and some notoriety in purist circles) to IWC. Ihnen's upgrades to in-house calibers mark a 180-degree alteration of program for the company - one particular he believes is particularly suited towards the times. "Kurt Klaus produced great [mechanical watchmaking] solutions after the quartz crisis," notes Ihnen. "Today collectors are considerably more sophisticated, and we are adding value and precision to our own movements accordingly."
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