IWC Ocean 2000 TiCon Coating History

HSTE delves into the fascinating history of IWC's TiCon coating, a lesser-known innovation from the late 1970s and 1980s. His detailed post, featuring the IWC Ocean 2000, uncovers the technical challenges and eventual discontinuation of this unique blackening process. The discussion highlights the rarity and collector appeal of these specialized IWC references.

So, let me reveal the mystery on yesterday's "teaser": this is going to be a geek entry about the late 1970ies, about a company concentrating back then on technical innovation, about a collaboration with Porsche Design.

When IWC started its collaboration with Porsche Design back in 1978, the company was not only pushed to new limits in terms of design and use of materials (Aluminium, Titanium) but also in terms of coatings. Very early on it was a wish from Porsche to have for example black watches. (continue further below)

The first model out of this collaboration hitting the market was the Compass Watch reference 3510 coming to market in 1979. The watch was from Aluminum and available with black coating or olive coating. This coating was PVD coating. The disadvantages of this coating became very soon obvious with the color just flaking off, on the watch but more severely on the bracelet. This is why IWC very soon replaced the aluminum bracelets by plastic (Delrin) bracelets. The two models below are mint condition, both with the very sough after aluminum bracelets.

With the advent of the Porsche Design watches made in titanium (the Titan Chrono ref 3700 and the Ocean 2000 ref 3500) IWC started to experiment with coatings for these new titanium watches. And it was obvious that it could not be PVD. (continue further below)

So, it was in 1985 where for the first time - and to my knowlege based on all the historic catalogs that I have - also the last time, that the world came to see the IWC Ocean 2000 and the IWC Ocean 500 in black color (catalog 1985). The coating applied was called "TiCon" and was the result of long experiments with two goals: having the watch in black color and also to harden the surface of the titanium. (continue further below)

The process to "TiCon" the watches proved to be a very complicated and fairly costly process but in 1983 they succeeded with an in-house process to nitrocarburate the titanium. The titanium was hereby hardened 40 micros into the surface at a heat of 1060 degreed Celcius and bombarded with various gases. "TiCon" amalgamates the following factors: titanium carbide, titanium oxyde and titanium nitrate. This entire process of blackening titanium is described in the doctoral thesis of David Seyffer, the IWC museum curator on pages 234 to 242.

You can see below the two "TiCon versions at the left and the "normal" versions at the right. Given the fact that the coating is only a few micros into the surface means that with wearing the watch it will over time turn from a fairly concentrated black into lighter black to turn - eventually and in the extreme - back to "normal" titanium color. And this was another reason for IWC to stop selling TiCon coated watches: they realized that the coating wears off, it was also clear that you could not "re-coat" the watch and hence they decided that this did not live up to the quality standards that they had on themselves.

IWC only produced very few Ocean 2000 and Ocean 500 watches in TiCon. Whilst I was quite fast successful in finding a TiCon Ocean 500 for my wife, the hunt for a TiCon 3500 was really tough. I have only ever seen one in the public market (very recently...) over the past 10 years. By chance I had found a guy owning one but it required me working on him for years to get it. And it came with the Certificate of Authenticity from IWC. Both IWC 3500 that you can see below in the middle are very early models in totally original configuration. The "normal" one is from May 5, 1984, the TiCon one is from February 2, 1985. Interestingly though, their 7-digit case numbers are only 254 pieces apart from each other.

Cheers, HSTE