We want a tourbillon… Let’s give it a try… our “Foolsday April 1st “ post was NOT a joke…

At HORAGE we are known to be in for the long game. We have been the guinea pig for the K1 movement and proved the world that it is possible to put an industrial level swiss movement into today’s world of watchmaking as a startup.

Ok… it took us roughly 7+3 years to get it done, but we made it. And since this project is now moving down the supply chain path into the realm of regular industrial manufacturing, we thought we should apply some of our freed engineering capacity to something new. Something where we can further hone our skills and something which is of outmost joy. Free of all the industrial do’s and don’ts the K1 project put upon us. Something more along the manufacture universe with a limited amount of quantity.

Lets tell a little story

Last year we had the chance to work on a special project for a very special customer from the middle kingdom – a tourbillon watch. Besides making this watch, the final shipment ended in a dramatic travel overkill. Why? Because it had to be in China before Chinese new year, the most important holiday in Chinese culture. It was by no means a cheap watch and the customer has paid down a significant amount of money and insisted that he needed to show it to his family during Chinese new year… So what happened: We flew the watch to HongKong, it was then hand carried to Shenzhen, then it was put on a private jet of a friend of the customer to fly it to a city somewhere in the Chinese North, where the Chinese customer had a big smile in his face, because it perfectly matched the red color of his red red Rolls-Royce. Perfect Chinese New Year… as mentioned for a special and wealthy customer. Why not making people happy 😉

We all loved this Tourbillon with its hypnotizing cage, but non of us has even a fraction of the financial resources to be able to buy Swiss made tourbillon. And since it is in our DNA to not take a No for a No… we though why not giving it a shot and try to put together a tourbillon watch with the help of the crowd. The success of Code41 and our own crowdfunding history gave us confidence that with the support and input of the crowd we could realize a “only done once” Tourbillon watch for us and for the people who join this trip.

Some first basics about a Tourbillon:

The first Tourbillon was developed around 1795. In other words, a technology which is over 220 years. But tourbillons are still arguably one the most difficult movements to make, and are sorted into the world of manufacture… more or less all done by hand….

Tourbillon translated from French into English means “whirlwind”… there is not so much wind rather than whirl going on in there.😉

Tourbillons were designed to correct the gravity influence in pocket watches which as the name says, sit in a pocket most of the time in the same direction, which means the gravity has influence on the balance spring. In order to avoid that Mr. Breguet came up with the Whirl… to turn the whole regulating unit around itself and thus compensate for that gravitational influence.

Since we are wearing our watches around the wrist and move our arms around in all directions all day long, this function is obviously obsolete from a technical standpoint of view. BUT we are humans and we have emotions and indeed from that perspective it is a very nice complication which will not only excite watch aficionados.

Since the scope of the project is limited we cannot do all this by ourselves, so we set out to mine the industry for suitable components and suppliers to build on existing and proven functionality and put such a tourbillon watch together.

During the project timeline, we will not only ask for your involvement on some of the design related matters, but also:

- explore details about the nature of this functionality and what characterizes a good tourbillon

- We will show you how tiny that stuff is.

- Why the cage must be very light

- We will explore the finish options we have

- And many other things…

…And why all this comes at a certain price however we think we will make it happen without braking neither your nor our own bank.

Here is our plan for the coming months until the “K-tou” project should culminate into a crowdfunding campaign on 19. 09. 2019!

01. April 2019: Announcement…, this was NOT a “fools-day joke” J

04. April 2019: We are sketching some first ideas

09. April 2019: Seriously coming out to the crowd (start the community)

01. May 2019: Product Spec. tourbillon (we are shooting for COSC)

27. May 2019: Decoration of skeletonized plates

05. July 2019: Prototype, Case in Stainless 904 or Titan 5?

08. August 2019: Finalization based on all input

19. September 2019: Start Pre-order - Crowdfunding

Let’s go with emotion to create an accurate escapement in a state of motion.