Angles watches are doing something unique on Kickstarter and it seems popular with over £60,000 spent backing the Three Kings watch. Here’s the word on this wandering hours watch design;
At Angles, our watches are all about showcasing to the world that we bring to market more watch at higher quality and lower cost than competitors. Even a new watch enthusiast recognizes something special is strapped to their wrist when it is an Angles timepiece. Revealing time through novel and often exclusive-to-us complications is a central feature that sets Angles apart from others. Our creations are not the exclusive baubles of the ultra-rich, yet an Angles watch will impress at every price-point.
The Three Kings is our latest creation to live up to these ambitions: triple rotating hour minidials are in-house designed and constructed as a wandering hours module while using a premium Miyota 9039 automatic as the base movement. Only the right-hand hours dial presents the current time with a tip pointing to the minutes. As that dial spins clockwise past the minute scale, the dial behind it will cue up the correct number for the next hour. These constantly rotating hours dials are surprisingly easy to read yet will captivate those who have never seen such a watch.
Liberated from needless details, only the Three Kings offers such wandering hours with a clean elegance not to be found elsewhere. Three Kings owners benefit from Angles’ mature understanding of the interplay of complexity and simplicity. Free of distractions, the Three Kings bear an extremely accurate gift of time if you become one of its rare owners (only 100 examples in each colour will be manufactured for its first edition).
The Three Kings is powered by a Miyota 9039 automatic movement that registers at 28,800 beats per hour and has a power reserve of 36 hours. The Three Kings Dial comes in 6 incredible choices: Red, Green, Dark Blue, Light Blue, Light Brown and Black. These are really vivid, fume style dials by the way, with Superlume markers.
The Angles brand is based in Hong Kong, so the price is competitive at about £330 on the early bird offer, or £590 for two. Delivery expected in June 2021.
WHAT THE HECK IS A WANDERING HOURS WATCH?
The wandering hours complication is very old. Traditionally, it’s attributed to the Campani Brothers, who are thought to have made one as a commission from the Pope, in the mid-1600s. Despite its age and history, it is something of a rarity in modern watchmaking; if not all, cost more…a lot more. We prefer to trying to make extreme quality and special watches at less cost to our customers.
The Northern Watch Co would sum up wandering hours as a sort of contra-rotating balance shaft assembly, a bit like the inside of a car or motorcycle engine where weight is placed in an opposing orbit to something like a piston or crankshaft. In a Honda CBR1100 Blackbird that means vibration is smoothed out as the engine revs at high speeds, as a balance weight turns the other way. Obviously in a watch you don’t have that 11,000rpm problem, but the principle is the same. Ultimately all engines, including watch movements, are about a balance of power, so if you imagine one wheel turning a dial that tells the minutes, then another spins the other way to tell the hour, you have the gist of the Three Kings watch.