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Hokey shmokes. What is this thing? It’s a dual read-out watch with some sort of massive power plant, shown here. Very clever and potentially very expensive. Note: this is not a dual watch – the other side is this photo trick they like to do where they put a mirror to the back of the watch so you can see the rear glass.

On the dial side the HM1 looks like the command center of a rocket ship. The dial on the right provides a reading for minutes with a massive speedometer needle-like hand. An indication for the watch’s massive four barreled fuel tank is also mounted on this same axis. On the left dial you have a reading for hours. Both dials feature transverse mounted floating sapphire subdials to provide time indication on the left, and on which the power reserve indication is engraved on the right. The hour and minute hands have to communicate with each other across the massive divide between them. This was accomplished with an oversized, ultra-flat, mirror-polished wheel centrally located under the dial. Too thin to support from its axis, this wheel cleverly floats between two layers of precision-adjusted jewels. Because of the artisan minutia involved, only 100 watches will be made in the next three years. Indeed the Horological Machine No.1 is the horological equivalent of a super car. It is a mixture of technical mastery, truly refined traditional finish, and groundbreaking new aesthetics that heralds the arrival of one of the new masters of form and function — a new world collective known as MB&F, spearheaded by one of the watch industry’s most exciting young leaders, a man named Max Büsser.

MB&F Horological Machine No.1 [TimeZone]

ByJohn Biggs

John lives in Brooklyn and has loved watches since he got his first Swatch Irony automatic in 1998. He is the editor of WristWatchReview.

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