Horological Meandering

Escapement by magnetic repulsion; everything else mechanical; photos

 

I've not had the chance to handle the Sonniere but I have 5 Spring Drives. Essentially it is a mechanical watch but instead of a pallet fork and balance wheel metering out the spring power with tic-toc, instead it has a "glide wheel" which revolves at a designated rate of 8 revs per second.

At the same time it functions as a tiny generator that powers a speed-measuring & regulation chip. If the glide wheel goes too fast, the chip adjusts a magnetic field that repulses (puts magnetic drag) onto the wheel to slow its rate.

Other than those components, it's a mechanical watch all back up the line. No battery, capacitor, quartz oscillator crystal, etc. It is an automatic - most of them are anyway - and you can see the level of finishing and the rotor. This is on roughly a $5000 watch.

These are my favorites from my collection:

This is the Credor Spring Drive Moon Phase with mother-of-pearl and blackened silver moon (no grimace on the moon though)

Here is the back of the Credor Spring Drive; the glide wheel is at 9 o'clock

This one is nick-named the Snowflake; it has date instead of the moon but is basically the same movement

Glide wheel at 3 o'clock

I believe this is the first Spring Drive that was publically sold, in a run of 500. I owned this one for awhile but sold it - mostly because it was 36 mm. Notice the architecture of the movement differs, as the power reserve is at 10 not 8 as in all the others. It has a bit of the VC 222 styling (did Gerald Genta do this too?)

Notice that it is manual wind, not an automatic. Nice finishing but not pristine.

Here's a shot of an early watch showing the internal circuitry. This is from about 5 years ago.

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