Smooth Operator: The Ice Queen Romance Of The Platinum Spring Drive 8 Day

Seiko’s Spring Drive movements have been around for almost a quarter century (the first Spring Drive watches were released in 1999) and in all that time the technology that they represent has, with only one exception of which I’m aware, remained exclusive to Seiko and Grand Seiko, as well as to the ultra-niche high end Credor brand.Spring Drive models, in the Credor Eichi and Eichi II. The use of Spring Drive in the Eichi watches essentially rebranded the technology as something that was not just a technical innovation, but an expression of a uniquely Japanese expression of watchmaking and it was essential to Spring Drive being seen as a powerful artistic and even philosophical relationship about the human experience of the passage of time.

The Grand Seiko Spring Drive 8 Day was announced in 2016 and it was at the time, and still is (if you ask me) one of the most unabashed statement pieces Grand Seiko has ever created. Grand Seiko watches had for most of the time that collectors outside of the Japan domestic market been aware of them, been watches which were perhaps most famous for the degree to which they overdelivered on quality for the price. While they were not, as a rule, watches that were made with lavish hand finishing to the movements, they were nonetheless of extremely high quality in case polishing, dial furniture, and hands and the diamond polished markers and hands became kind of a qualitative signature of Grand Seiko’s approach to quality. After the international launch of Grand Seiko in 2010, however, it became clear (especially after the introduction of the Credor Eichi watches) that there was plenty of room for further refinement.

Much of this happened at the Micro Artist Studio, at Seiko Epson’s facility in Shiojiri, Nagano Prefecture. The first time I visited the Studio it was still in its original home, which was – you can’t make this stuff up – installed in a large storage space under a flight of stairs in the factory, and there were just three watchmakers working there. When I visited them again, in 2017, they’d moved to larger quarters, and I noticed for the first time that there was a picture of Philippe Dufour up on a wall overlooking the workshop. Dufour famously advised the Micro Artist Studio watchmakers on the finer points of movement finishing, and his influence can still be seen today in the higher end Grand Seiko watches, which represent some of the finest hand-finishing of movements on the planet – including the 8 day power reserve movement inside the Grand Seiko Spring Drive 8 Day.

The caliber 9R01A 2 is at first, an almost forbiddingly austere movement. The eye of most connoisseurs is trained to expect the multiple bridges of classic Swiss calibers, but the 8 day Spring Drive movement is essentially a full-plate design, with only the small border to the upper right providing any punctuation to the vast expanse of the upper bridge, which is itself a canvas for the movement jewels, blued movement screws, and 8 day power reserve indicator opposite the crown. The movement design seems almost completely abstract, but if you let your imagination loose, you might notice that the shape of the upper left border of the bridge is a stylized volcanic cone. This is intentional; it’s meant to represent, says Grand Seiko, Mt. Fuji.

While the movement finishing doesn’t make use of the Geneva stripes you might expect, the subtle horizontal brushing is I think much more representative of the characteristic Grand Seiko aesthetic, and of its evolution in recent years. There’s a beauty to the almost uninflected evenness of the brushing, which gives the movement jewels and screws the effect of clean footprints across an almost unbroken field of freshly fallen snow.

On the dial side, there is nothing – not even, and especially not even, a date guichet, to distract the eye from the smooth, silent movement of the seconds hand.

That smooth movement is something that no other watch on earth can exactly duplicate. You can get an impression of a smoothly sweeping seconds hand from a standard mechanical watch, or even from some high frequency quartz watches but in both of these cases, the seconds hand is actually moving forward in minute, incremental jumps.

In a Spring Drive watch, however, the seconds really does flow smoothly forward, and in this sense mirrors our intuitive perception of time, which we feel flowing smoothly from past to present to future. A Spring Drive movement, it bears repeating, has no battery. Spring Drive calibers are powered by mainsprings, and have completely conventional gear trains, right up to the point where you’d usually find the escape wheel, lever escapement, and balance. Instead, the Spring Drive going train ends in a glide wheel, whose rotation generates a tiny trickle of electricity. That power is used to run an integrated circuit and quartz timing package, which feeds energy back into an electromagnetic brake that controls the rate at which the glide wheel turns. The movement is very precise, at about ±10 seconds variation per month (which I think, although I’d have to research this, is a precision record for an electromechanical movement) and of course, you get that hypnotic flowing motion of the seconds hand to boot.

This is one of the most wonderfully minimalist pieces of watchmaking in the world but it is also, in its own way, an exercise in maximalism as well. The eight day power reserve’s one example, of course, but a couple of others are the very finely grained dial (which echoes the restraint of the straight grained finishing on the movement bridge and plate) and another example is the massive platinum case. I can never think of platinum without thinking of the fact that the creation of platinum can only happen under the conditions of incredible heat and pressure found in stellar events like the collision of neutron starts – to wear platinum on your wrist is to be in direct physical contact with the residue of some of the most cataclysmically violent events in the universe, and for a watch that is all about a pure expression of the nature of time, a metal that is a direct expression of the unfathomable depths of time represented by the birth, life, and death of the stars themselves, seems especially apt.

Recently, A Watch A Week took a look at the Homage to Walter Lange, which is at first glance (and maybe even at second or third glance) a bit of an oddball in the Lange collection – its independent center deadbeat seconds hand seems a strangely anachronistic complication, especially after the tour-de-force achievements of the Double and Triple Split chronographs. On consideration, though, I thought – and it took me a while to get there – that it might be the most quintessentially Lange of all the watches Lange has ever produced.

I feel, I think, the same way about the Spring Drive 8 Day. At 43mm, and with all that platinum, it might seem like a watch that goes in the opposite direction you’d want from Grand Seiko, which is reproached, if it’s reproached with anything, for the thickness of its watches. However, the sheer mass of the watch is an essential part of its character, and paradoxically makes some of the greatest virtues of Grand Seiko – especially its ability to reduce a watch design to its most basic, while losing nothing of what makes a watch beautiful – even more apparent. The Grand Seiko 8 Day is a watch, sure, but it is also a piece of monumentally scaled minimalist sculpture, self-assured and unapologetic in its titanic impact – in many respects, the last word in what a watch can be both as a timekeeper, and as an expression of the nature of time itself.

See it here