a.lber.to
2357
Back from Basel!
Hello everyone.
I am now back from basel (got in last night), and am planning on processing the couple of thousand pictures I took over the weekend, to distill them into the usual report Alex and I do.
In the meantime, I will share some thoughts with all of you about what I saw. I have also decided to be entirely frank, at the risk of upsetting some people... though please understand that my opinions are purely, entirely and 100% personal and subjective.
Well, the main things people were talking about in Basel as far as Breguet was concerned were: the double tourbillon, the WG tradition, the automatic tradition, and the new movement with the silicium hairspring.
I liked the automatic tradition quite a lot - they replaced the power reserve with a retrograde seconds indication in the front, and put an oscillating mass on the back which looks like those of the old ALB pocket watches. Though I personally would have made this look a little thicker, and would have made it a bumper-automatic as opposed to making the mass rotate 360?, this is still a very good looking watch, and a very interesting alternative to the "classic" Tradition.
The WG tradition was, for me, a bit of a disappointment. I was expecting a "classic" YG movement in a WG case, and instead was shown a WG movement in a WG case, with blued screws and blued parachute, but yellow gears. I suppose it is the latter that shocked me visually, more than the WG plates and bridges. I suppose that if all of the movement had been white, with just the blue accents, this would have worked visually for me, but I found that the mix of colors did not work for me. Of course, your mileage may wary... and I hope for Breguet that it will!!! 
The two watches they introduced with the new movement were really nice. The movement is very interesting (I will go into the merits of this later, in a separate post), and I especially liked the model with the guilloch? dial. They have gone back to the warmer, almost champagne-like color, and this - with a date ring of the exact same color - looks REALLY good. They have also done a very nice basket-type guillochage in the center of the dial with is really nice.
As per the big technical novelty this year, well, what can I say... in my opinion, this should never had had Breguet on the dial! From a technical perspective, the watch is very interesting: it's two tourbillons, with two sets of differencial gearings (from memory one regulates even power flow to the two tourbillons, while the second averages the impulses which go to the hands). The two tourbillons are mounted on a plate which turns upon itself once per 12-hour period, this making the bridge of one of the tourbillons become the hour hand, and allowing the wearer to see the two escapement rotating around the dial as time passes. The problem, for me, was that the watch was way too thick (something like 20mm, though I do not recall the exact figure at the moment), the dial, though guilloch?, does not work aesthetically with the rest of the watch, and the back... well, it is engraved with star and sky motifs which reminded me of the illustrations of Jules Verne's books. You will be able to see the pictures soon, and form your own opinion of this watch.... I was speaking to some dealers at the fairs, and I know they ordered it, so the watch will work for Breguet, but to be perfectly frank, I am really not sure why they chose do do this watch. It wasn't even an in-house project (I understand they bought it from Ruchonnet), so I am really perplexed at why they felt that they had to give in to the multiple-tourbillons fad... time perhaps will tell.
That's all for now - I will be interested in hearing the comments of those who have seen the watches, and I promise to post some pictures very soon!
