Independents

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.

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