It’s not every day you find a watch that can feasibly kill a man. The Rogue Warrior Red Cell is just such a watch.

The watch, designed by Richard “Dick” Marcinko AKA the Rogue Warrior, chairman of Red Cell International Corp., a security consulting firm. Mr. Marcinko (you call this guy “Mister” and “Sir”) has a Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat, and founded SEAL Team SIX, the Navy’s counter terrorist command and Red Cell, a group that could… heck. I’ll just paste this from his website:

Marcinko later was named commanding officer and founder of a second counter-terrorism unit, Red Cell. Commanding Red Cell, Marcinko was directed to use his team to test the Navy’s anti-terrorist capabilities. As a result he was able to infiltrate seemingly impenetrable, highly-secured bases, nuclear submarines, ships and other purported “secure areas”, including the U.S. Presidential plane Air Force One. In doing so he reportedly embarrassed several superior officers, whom he accuses of involvement in his subsequent conviction for misappropriation of funds and resources under his command.

Homeboy could sneak on board Air Force One. That is badass.
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The look of the Bell & Ross BR-01 92 is based on the simple, clean design used on airplane instrumentation panels. The hands and numeral markers on these watches are recognizable as those on analog altimeters or airspeed indicators. The infamous square case of the BRs, with its four visible fastening screws, reflects the way the airplane instruments are affixed to the panel via four screws in order to make their removal and installation quick and easy. With the BR-01 92 Heritage, Bell & Ross captures the allure of vintage watches and applies it to the square BR “Instrument” concept.
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I’m going to apologize in advance for this review. There are some who may be offended by its content in that I am discussing, in relative depth, an erotic watch of the type made popular by randy potentates in the 18th and 19th centuries along with one aspect that I find utterly vile and revolting. It is important to state that I do not condone this aspect of the watch and I find it highly offensive to boot.

The bile is rising even as I write this, friends, for this $34 watch from eBay advertises itself as a tourbillon yet is as far from a tourbillon as humanly possible. If tourbillon were the sun and this watch were a meteorite, the meteorite would be five million light years from the sun. And exploded already. And in little pieces in some distant star field. That’s how distant this is from a tourbillon.

Note: This is kind of NSFW.
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The i-Toc is really what you would call a “mystery watch.” It has two overlapping disks that are graduated from light to dark and the point of absolute black – or whatever color you’ve bought – marks the hour and minutes hand. Pretty sly, right?

Designed by CG reader Sean, the i-Toc is a mere $99 and comes in six colors including silver, blue, purple, red, and orange. It has a 41mm case and has a silicone strap with butterfly clasp. Heck, they even have a screen saver so you can add a pink i-Toc to your PC or Mac.
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Italo Fontana created the original U-Boat watches as a designer. The watches were mostly regarded as fashion accessories rather then high-end watches thanks to the use of Japanese quartz movements and K1 mineral crystals. Today, the company and their timepieces have evolved. While one of their most appealing aspects is still their look, this aspect is backed by all the features of high-end watch production, including modified mechanical ETA movements, sapphire crystals, hand-made straps, and sturdy well designed cases. I can attest to the quality of today’s U-Boat models, and will demonstrate it by examining U-Boat’s Classico series.
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Starting your own watch company is hard. Unlike, say, hiring a factory in Taiwan to make a bunch of MP3 players for you, creating a watch takes patience, an understanding of the history of horology, and a willingness to risk failure. Thankfully, Buscum Ducis’ Svan van Der Zande has all of these attributes.

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Serket, formerly Scorpion, makes really nice dive watches. They’re not very flashy but they’re well-made and use real Swiss Movements inside an American-designed case. I’ve reviewed the 1.0 version of this watch and I really liked it.

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OK. I just suffered a fairly hair-raising situation with my new baby. Due to my own carelessness, I dinged the Jaeger a few times and wanted to polish them out. I got a few types of polish including one designed for delicate metals and tried to do it by hand. BAD IDEA. This created a fog of fine scratches that only I could really see but that drove me crazy nonetheless. So I tried Flitz by hand. More scratches. I was at wits end.
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You know me and my watch fetish. Well, there’s one rarified section of the watch industry where mere mortals dare not tread. While you and I can’t “go there,” MB&F certainly went, producing the Horological Machine #3, a dual read-out crazy clock with a large date wheel and an odd inverted power transmission system using bearings and disks.
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Click to see it in more detail. This is the watch I’m writing about and it might be the most beautiful watch I’ve ever seen. To look at it up close is amazing – all of the complications are hidden, like a Mac. It actually couldn’t be set by hand. In fact, a master watchmaker had to set it if it wound down, which means this wasn’t a sports watch. The rock crystal is striking and that riot of gears was recreated, piece by piece, from only a few images and a description of the watch by an English collector. I’ve got some more images but I thought I’d put this one up as a treat to you guys. It was actually an honor to be in the same room with the old girl.

I pulled the trigger, friends, and I think I found a nice match between form, function, and tradition. I bought the Jaeger LeCoultre Master Compressor Extreme World Chronograph – a review is forthcoming – and I think I found the right balance here. I was constantly going back to watches like Glashütte Original and even, dare I say it, Breguet but they just didn’t seem like watches I’d wear on a regular basis, unlike this monster. Even the Panerai I was eying would end up being relegated to the winder.

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A pet peeve of mine – using the words accuracy and precision incorrectly, and failing to make a distinction between the two.

Accuracy;
“degree of conformity of a measure to a standard or a true value”
accuracy. (2008). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accuracy

Precision;
“the degree of refinement with which an operation is performed or a measurement stated”
precision. (2008). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
Retrieved October 6, 2008, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/precision

In watches, accuracy is how well the watch keeps time and reflects the time according to an accepted standard. That is to say, how many seconds the watch gains or loses in a given period and how close it is to the Observatory clock. A Movado with no markings may be as accurate as an Omega with a similar movement, if they gain or lose time similarly (so many seconds a week, for example) and are set correctly.
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All around nice guy Sven from Buscum Ducis is reporting that he just got his first shipment in of his first watch line and one is winging its way over to the US as we speak. As you’ll recall, Sven van der Zande is a 21-year-old horologist with a dream: he wanted to make his own watch. The resulting beefster, as we see here in this mock-up, looks like a monster. Look for it in the next few weeks and please pop over to his site if you’d like to pre-order a timepiece.

I’m a mechanical man, but sometimes you need a sports watch to withstand the hard knocks associated with heavy activity like “drinking at a bar” and “sitting on the back porch with a beer.”

I’ve worn Pathfinders for years now – my first one was a large titanium model with that is basically a cousin to this one. Pathfinders are part of Casio’s outdoor line, designed for hiking and skiing. This model has a compass, barometer, thermometer, altimeter, and stopwatch built in along with a tide graph. It is water resistant to 200 meters.

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I received a TX World Time for review last week. Wow. This is definitely not your dad’s Timex. I think it is fair to say that TX is to Timex what Tissot is to Swatch. Yes, Swatch group makes Tissot, but a Tissot is not a Swatch, and a TX is not Timex. It’s big, it’s dramatic, and it’s a little too much for me.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the TX is big. 45mm on my slim wrists is a little much. But for its size, it is light, but feels solid. I know this sounds like a contradiction, but watches this size are either rocks, or feel like they’ll snap between your fingers. The TX feels remarkably well made for being so light. Fit and finish were immaculate. All edges and corners are clean and sharp. Surfaces had mirror finishes and flats are flat. The black finish is beautiful. The element I liked best was the use of rose gold for the hands and hour markings. The rose gold added a touch of class that the usual yellow gold finish does not. The TX logo is enamelled on the crown and worked into the end of the second hand. The hands and hour markings are luminescent, as are the retrograde hands. The retrograde hands threw me for a loop the first time I saw them in the dark, as there are no reference markings, just mysterious glowing hands floating on the dial. Once you know to look for them, they’ll stop distracting. What I mistook for a blur in the finish was a nicely executed little world map on the dial. This adds up to a rich and dramatic appearance.

The dial is busy, but that is a reflection of the functionality and this adds to its charm. In addition to the customary HH:mm:ss, and date, you have a second time zone. The time zone is indicated by the hand with the crescent at the end, and it points to cities, and countries named along the inside of the bezel for each time zone, and is controlled with the two buttons flanking the crown. Time in the second time zone is indicated on a retrograde hand in the upper right of the dial. The other retrograde style hand indicates standard or daylight savings time, and is controlled by the button on the left side of the dial.

I really like the functionality, I get a lot of use out of a second time zone, and the zone markings relieve me of the need to think through which way is which and how many hours. Put an alarm on this puppy, and it would be a dream come true.

The TX World Time is a beautiful watch, but a bit much for a guy like me, who usually wears an Ollech & Wajs M-65. For what it is, an initial entry into the luxury watch market, it is great. It would be an excellent first up-scale watch for a young man, and a great watch for someone who enjoys the dramatic appearance.