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At Esquire
Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire’s weekly column that presents you with the most important watchmaking events and news from the watchmaking world since March 2020.
Grand Seiko’s growing popularity in America continues with the launch last week of the USA GS9 Club, a community created by the brand for owners of Grand Seiko watches – meaning you can’t get in unless you have one. already purchased one from a Grand Boutique Seiko or authorized Grand Seiko dealer. With the launch of the US Community Component, initially launched as a physical meeting point for Japanese owners, the US GS9 will operate online for the time being as an effectively private e-commerce site for Grand Seiko collectors – although even non-members can purchase some of the GS9 store offers.
Once you have your first Grand Seiko and sign up, members will receive exclusive access to events (currently virtual, but post-pandemic it will be in person), launches, and limited editions. The site also functions as an archive of everything Grand Seiko related. The good news is that it’s backdated to 2017, so if you already own a Grand Seiko purchased on or after March 23, 2017, you can register online with a picture of your watch and a copy of the sales receipt.
At the time of the launch of the GS9 club in the USA, Grand Seiko also announced a new sports watch, available now for pre-order: the Grand Seiko Eagle GMT Limited Edition with a brown dial (the brown is inspired by the plumage of a eagle). While the exterior is cool, the interior is downright fascinating. That’s because it contains the company’s ingenious Spring Drive movement.
It’s relatively breathtaking even for watching nerds, so please indulge me. The movement is mechanical, driven like all high-end watches by a rotor which loads a mainspring. OK, so there is no battery. Spring East battery. It’s when its power is transmitted to the powertrain that things get weird. The release of this repressed power in fully mechanical watches is via the escapement (the ticking part) which is also a mechanical affair. Not in Spring Drive. There, the mechanical power of the mainspring generates electrical energy generated through a tiny rotor connected to the gear train. This tiny charge passes through a quartz oscillator that vibrates at 32,768 Hz, a precise frequency that is then converted into mechanical energy to advance the second hand with greater precision than any mechanical watch. Still with me?
The advantage of this hybrid, besides the greater precision, is that a mechanical movement also generates more torque than a quartz movement, which means that the hands can be larger and longer. It is only when you lean deeply into the watches that you realize that even the microscopic weight of a second hand has to be taken into account.
Basically, the Spring Drive is a mechanical watch with a regulated quartz escapement, but that doesn’t do much justice, so read more here. It is precisely this level of boffinry, combined with very high standards of workmanship, that makes Grand Seiko something of a unicorn in the watchmaking world – and the new limited edition Eagle GMT such an exciting release.
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