The world's least practical chronograph?

[mlcor]

True confession--although I love Breguet, I'm not a big fan of their Tradition series, which always seemed to be an uneasy compromise between skeleton and non-skeleton, and I felt the industrial style finishing was not in keeping with Breguet. However, on a more tool-ish watch like a chronograph, it could work. But this one, the new Tradition Chronographe Indépendant 7077, while interesting, seems kinda impractical. Why? I'll get to that in a minute.



It's 44mm in diameter and 13.95mm thick, so not too huge. The pushers at 4 and 8 start and reset the chronograph, respectively. Interestingly, you can see that there are two separate power trains--one for the time, one for the chronograph. Even more interestingly, the watch's time power train runs at 21,000 vph, but the chrono runs at 36,000. How do you keep track of the chrono time, you ask? Ah, there's the rub. The central second hand does the chronograph seconds (for which there are no numbers, as you can see). Then, the retrograde dial on the left (the one on the right is the power reserve for the watch) keeps the minutes. "But wait," you say, "it only goes to 20!" Yup. You can time anything you like, as long as it doesn't go longer than 20 minutes. Hmm.

The reason is that the main barrel doesn't drive the chrono, instead, when you push the "reset to zero" pusher, it flexes a blade spring that powers the chrono. Unique, perhaps, but it causes the very short power reserve for the chrono. Keeping the chrono separate from the regular time would otherwise require a second barrel, and there's really not room for that.

Another fun fact--in order to keep the symmetry of the watch, the balance wheel of the chrono (on the left) is made of titanium, which, being lighter, allows it to be a larger size so that it can be the same size as the balance wheel for the time, even though they run at different frequencies.



There's a very cool video on the Breguet site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl6A...ature=youtu.be

What's that? Price? If you have to ask... Around $80,000.