New JLC Online Catalogue!

[Ikemi]

http://www.jaeger-lecoultre.com/ecatalogue/en/#/0

It's just page after page of pure watch porn ...

I can't seem to find the MC Chrono though? Has it been dropped from the line in favour of the MC Chrono 2?

[cyberface]

Ikemi said:

http://www.jaeger-lecoultre.com/ecatalogue/en/#/0

It's just page after page of pure watch porn ...

I can't seem to find the MC Chrono though? Has it been dropped from the line in favour of the MC Chrono 2?

First impressions?

Argh. Flash. Duff design. My Mac spits on your proprietary, unstable plugin.


Second impressions?

I'm forgetting all the BS in the recent FT 'concept watch' issue and sticking to my guns. JLC are the number ONE manufacture, to me, and have merely reinforced their position with a quick scan through those insane Hybris chiming watches - 1300 components? FFS - the Extreme Lab stuff is geek-tastic, but the Westminster chime watch is more impressive to me… even though it's not a complication I lust after, the bds have just delicately thrown a tourbillon into the back of the movement on top of the 1000 parts already required for the *mechanical* programmable musical instrument (for that is what it is, surely?) - presumably just to cheer *me* up. Thanks, JLC.

Now given the cross-section of the watch… it's running a series of cams which control their fancy 'trebuchets'. Now there'll be a resonator for each note in the Westminster chime sequence, and potentially the trebuchets are shared for efficiency… but if not, and each 'note' is individually struck by a 'trebuchet' (sounds much cooler than 'hammer', no?) - surely all you need is a different cam profile (or stack of cams), and you can have a different 'tune' played by your watch.

Of course, the type of person who owns a piece like this is likely to be a traditionalist and stick to the Westminster chime rather than 'I'm a Barbie girl, in a barbie world' etc. or some other irritating tune, but having manufacture-replacable cam-stacks to enable different tunes - wouldn't that be brilliant?

Has anyone done it before?


Perhaps my love for JLC has something to do with the fact that they're the only 'big three / four' manufacture that I can afford to own a complicated piece from and we all like to defend our personal choices. But blimey they're really showing off with that catalogue. No resting on laurels or resorting to pure marketing (à la Rolex). Patek seem to have entirely unadvertised 'proper' complications but just how advanced they really are is left for those in the 'circle' - the public face of Patek is the crass, 'buy yourself class' vulgarity of their nouveau-riche targeted magazine adverts. Really, really odd. And apart from the tiny cutting-edge ateliers who probably only make tens or maybe 100 max of any particular watch, who else is making mechanical complications as utterly amazing as this in volumes over finger-counting?

Probably Patek. But they won't tell anyone - well people like *me* don't get to hear I know they're using silicon escapements now as a joint advanced-materials thing with Rolex (IIRC) but whether their evergreen perpetual calendar now has space-age materials inside or not, I couldn't tell…


I'm still chuckling at the idea of JLC engineering the 'extreme sonnerie' watch to make the cam-stack a simple-replacement drop-in part, allowing different tunes at ease… would be very silly but hilarious. Actually it would be very Franck Muller and not JLC at all