5 posts tagged Ingenieur

While perpetual calendars tend to be very traditional, conservative watches, IWC Schaffhausen has always believed in pushing the complication forward both technically and stylistically. This year with the launch of the new Ingenieur family, we bring you the Ingenieur Perpetual Calendar Digital Date-Month, a new take on what a perpetual calendar can be.

Performance Engineering

You may remember the digital date-month display from last year’s Spitfire Perpetual Calendar Digital Date-Month, but with this Ingenieur we’ve decided to open things up and give you a look inside the amazing calendar mechanism. The subdials below the digital display discs are smoky semi-transparent sapphire that lets you watch the disks rotate as they change at midnight - it also allows the luminous numbers to charge-up before they’re needed.

Digital Date Display

The dual-disc system for each display uses overlapping discs with a cutout to allow two digits to be displayed side-by-side. The result is a clean, easy-to-read system that hides its underlying complexity. Each time the date changes, a little energy is stored by the quick-action switch, so at the end of each month there is just the right amount to change is month. And, as you might expect at this point, a little energy is stored each time the month changes, so on December 31st all three displays (date, month, and leap year) can change simultaneously.

To top this all off, there is the 12-hour chronograph, with the minutes and hours displayed on one register at 12 o’clock and a flyback mechanism. With this system, you read the elapsed time just like you typically read the time on a watch, making the chronograph a little more intuitive and easy to read on the fly.

While the interior of this Ingenieur is impressive, the exterior is equally exciting. The robust Ingenieur case is rendered in titanium aluminide and the pushers, crown, crown guards, and bezel screws are zirconium oxide, both alloys typically found in Formula One cars. All of this is held to the wrist with a black rubber strap with stitched leather inlays. The result is an extremely wearable, modern take on the classic perpetual calendar chronograph. The Ingenieur Perpetual Calendar Digital Date-Month is quintessential IWC.

Hodinkee for IWC Schaffhausen

Here at IWC Schaffhausen we talk a lot about craftsmanship and quality, because we believe if you create something it should be the best. We share this idea through updates about some of our favorite timepieces: the Portuguese Minute Repeater, Portofino Automatic, and many more.

But it is especially satisfying to hear others describe our watches – and this week Mr. Angus Davies did just this for the renowned watch blog Escapement. Mr. Davies provided an in-depth look at a very unique and limited edition piece, the IWC Ingenieur Automatic.

A particularly exclusive version of the IWC Vintage Ingenieur

As pointed out in his post, this particular version comes with a brown face and band, setting it apart from the more commonly seen white face and black band. In fact Mr. Davies compares the watch’s hue to cocoa, a rich and textured color and with only 500 pieces produced worldwide, not one that will be often seen.

The rich brown hue that Mr. Davies likens to cocoa

With its inclusion in the Vintage collection, this timepiece “harks back to the mid 1950’s and the brown dial has an endearing personality with an understated appeal.” It also includes “delicate dots to indicate minutes” which perhaps due to their contrast with the deep brown face “look like miniscule diamonds, twinkling with a comely brilliance.”

Mr. Davies goes on to celebrate the proportionally sized case of this Vintage Ingenieur, respecting tradition and sophistication. However tradition marries innovation with the inclusion of the 80111 calibre, providing improved shock absorption and technical acumen from the original model.

A peek at the modern innovation included in the Vintage Ingenieur

In describing the way in which the components come together we read: “This watch is a rarefied timepiece with a restrained persona. It is not garish or brash, but is the reserved sartorially suited gentleman in the corner of the room in quiet conversation.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.