With mechanical watches, you’d be forgiven for thinking that making the movement is the hard part and that everything else just clicks into place. Sometimes that’s true, and Swiss brands certainly place a lot of emphasis on the rotating combination of gears and springs that tell the time.
But when the rest of the watch must also be held to the same quality level, even the ostensibly most inconspicuous components can be surprisingly complicated to get right, as Blancpain experienced when it set out to develop a ceramic bracelet for the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe.
Photo: Blancpain
Developed over many years, the bracelet is featured for the first time on the latest collection of Bathyscaphe diver’s watches, the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe Quantième Complement Phase de Lune, a complete calendar with moonphase that displays the day, date, month and lunar cycle, but must be manually adjusted at the end of each month.
It is a well-made watch with a silicon escapement, a 3-day power reserve and a distinctive diving bezel with a “liquid metal” inlay for the text.
But what Blancpain is really excited about is that, for the first time, the Bathyscaphe, which has been available in a ceramic case since 2015, is now available with a matching bracelet.
This could have been achieved years ago – Blancpain’s parent company, the Swatch Group, owns Commadure SA, a specialist company that produces ceramic bracelets for sister brands Omega and Rado – but as one of the group’s most prestigious brands, Blancpain’s checklist is so meticulous that it has led to the development of a completely bespoke bracelet, including two new patents.
Top of the list was a bracelet that offered the durability and resilience required for a luxury dive watch: the zirconium oxide used is known for its surface hardness (7.5 on the Mohs scale, less than 10 for diamond and more than 6 for titanium) and excellent strength-to-weight ratio, but can also be brittle.
According to the Blancpain team, a multi-link bracelet design is prone to failure if the links are spaced too closely together and the parts rub against each other, but spacing it too loosely not only makes the bracelet look cheap and less stable, but also allows the links to clash in other ways.
The answer was a complex system of links connected by titanium bars. Each bar is screwed into place by hand. Each bar in the bracelet has a patented cam-shaped section that fits within a widened recess in the side of the central link. As the bracelet flexes, the titanium cams can move within the recesses, but not beyond them, meaning the bracelet is flexible within a controlled range.
