I love true purpose-built watches. I also love the fact that if you are willing to open up your wallet quite a bit, high-end Seikos with Spring Drive movements are basically some of the best watches money can buy. It’s understandable that if you’re looking to spend six figures, a brand readily available in your local mall might not be the most alluring choice, but I do wish we could live in a world where it’s accepted that some of the stuff coming out of Japan is not only on par with the Swiss counterparts, but in some cases go far beyond.
The Spring Drive movement, appearing on the market about ten years ago in Seiko’s high end brand Credor, is an impressive engineering feat, combining their rich heritage in mechanical watch making with the accuracy of a quartz movement (at a second per day, give or take). To a layman, the most interesting thing you will notice about a Spring Drive is the fact that the second hand sweeps. And no, not like an automatic, which beats a certain number of times per second, merely giving the impression of a sweep.
Seiko Spring Drive GMT on YouTube.
The reason we here at JamesList would like to bring this up is the news that a Seiko Spacewalk, Seiko’s foray into the manufacturing of purpose-built space watches powered by the Spring Drive, was sold for $45,600 at a recent Antiquorum event. The watch, used 12 day Space Mission “Soyuz TMA-13″ and worn by “private space explorer and renowned video game designer, Richard Garriott” (one day I would like to be able to call myself a private space explorer), is a limited edition 49mm behemoth of a watch (although the case is made of titanium, making it slightly more wearable) which is designed to be worn outside a space suit. It features a bullhead design, something Seiko made famous back in the day (with the chronograph pushers on top of the case rather than to the right). It’s big, bold and dare I say it, beautiful. High-end Seikos are really, really underrated by watch snobs.
Everybody and their grandmothers own a Speedy these days. Get something different! Seems that only six were made though, which is a shame. Rumour has it that a commemorative limited edition is due for release in 2010, so let’s see how that goes.
