MoonWatchMan shares his exciting journey of co-designing bespoke time-only watches with independent watchmaker Torsti Laine, a winner of the Lange Watchmaking Award. His post highlights Laine's unique approach to craftsmanship and customization, offering a glimpse into the collaborative process of creating personalized high-quality timepieces. This article explores the appeal of independent watchmaking and the distinctive features of Laine's Gelidus models.
Friends,
My fellow purist and I are excited to share our passion of Laine watches to this community. My dear friend and I started a journey with Torsti Laine to co-design bespoke dials that we always wanted on a time-only piece.
Why
Torsti? We liked the dial work he was doing, his openness to creating
new dials and allowing our input, and we are big fans of the winners of
the Lange Watchmaking Award. Torsti is the winner from 2014.
Laine
is a humble watchmaker based out of Le Locle, Switzerland and along
with the Lange award, he's a graduate of the Finnish school of
watchmaking and he's worked alongside with Kari Voutilainen. You can see
a bit of Kari's influence in his work.
So which dials to choose? Well, I could not pick - so I ordered 2!
The
first was inspired by some of my favorite vintage Patek dials, the 12
dot 2 dot 4 dial layout. The yellow gold fume on this dial is
absolutely gorgeous and with the grainy texture this is a unique
offering amongst the sea of watches out there. I truly think it is the
best fume dial out there. I simply have not seen a YG fume dial with
this grainy texture! This dial is made entirely in-house and by Laine himself, and is sand blasted and circular grained by hand.
Here is a "glamour shot" of my actual watch.
The case is stainless steel and sized at 40.5mm with frosted edges. The
manual wind movement is a delight to look at, and laid out well. As with
Keaton Myrick and Pascal Coyon and others, the movement takes
inspiration from the Unitas base, making it quite robust. There are
hundreds of ways to make such a movement and I am a big fan of how
Torsti made his. The movement is red gold plated with hardened and
tempered steel bridges for balance wheel and the escapement wheel. He
has different plating options to choose from, but the RG plating was the
most striking to me. Screw and jewel sinks and bridge chamfers have
been polished by hand with Black polish on screw heads, adding a nice
artisanal touch to the movement.
The second dial I chose
was one I always wanted - a "partial roman dial" with only the numerals
XII - III - IX. And along with his great in house fume dials, he mades a
lovely almost grainy single color dials. I picked blue. Laine
and I went through a few iterations on whether to use hour dots or
index sticks, but in the end I was happy with the hour sticks. I love
how the grainy blue just pops, and with the hand made blue strap, that
is a killer combo for anybody who is into blue dials.
Overall, I am pleased with the journey to have built a custom watch with Laine
and my good friend. It is such a fun process to design a watch to fit
my preferences as well as receive a top quality independent piece in the
process. I will receive the watch soon and my next post will have some
wrist shots to share with all of you! A big thank you for Torsti Laine
for doing what he does - spectacular made to order watches that one can
customize in a way that usually means the price is beyond reach, all
for a reasonable price tag. And dealing with Torsti is a real pleasure,
too.
Let me know what you think, love to hear your comments.
