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L’Epee Double Flying Tourbillon Clock Produced With Vincent Calabrese

Publié le 3/07/2014 – Forbes
Par Ariel Adams

L’Epee Double Flying Tourbillon Clock Produced With Vincent Calabrese

The luxury “collaboration product” isn’t anything new, but amongst the more boutique high-end watch and clock makers, we have seen this phenomenon return and flourish with gusto. Why does this happen and who benefits? In a sense, everyone does. Two companies get to leverage their own respective audiences and marketing powers in order to produce and promote a product that combines both their talents but wouldn’t be possible coming from just one of them.

So is the case with this new Double Flying Tourbillon Clock produced by Swiss L’Epee and watchmaker Vincent Calabrese. Each of these personalities is known for their past collaboration projects with other esteemed artisans, and this new highly complicated and artistic clock is a truly impressive creation, set in spherical housing with exposed mechanics.

Of course when it comes down to it, consumers are really those who win the most, as they get to enjoy the product of such collaborative products. L’Epee is known for their intricate clocks, while Vincent Calabrese is known for his complicated timepieces. Combine those two worlds and you get an intricate, complicated desk clock. Yet despite all that, neither of the two brilliant companies could come up with a good name for the unique clock series. Even the clock itself cannot agree on what it is named, as it says both “Flying Tourbillon by Vincent Calabrese” and “Two Hands Flying Tourbillon 175th Anniversary.”

According to L’Epee, the clock collaboration with Vincent Calabrese was done in honor of the brand’s 175th anniversary, which was no doubt easy to gleam from the previous sentence. Interestingly enough, there will only be two clocks produced. One will be made from mostly titanium, while the other will be produced from brass, which is then plated in gold.

So what is a double tourbillon? Well, a tourbillon is an escapement assembly that rotates on its own axis. It was developed a very long time ago in order to help alleviate the damaging effects that gravity has on clock and pocket watch accuracy over time. By rotating an escapement in different positions the idea is to “average out” the pull of gravity. While most tourbillons today are found in wrist watches and not clocks, the latter is a much more appropriate place for a tourbillon to be installed. Why? Well only on more stationary objects like clocks do they really help improve accuracy.

A double tourbillon in this case means that the tourbillon moves on two axis points. You’ll notice that the tourbillon is placed on the minute hand of the clock, which is rather uncommon. The tourbillon itself rotates once each 60 seconds, which makes up the first axis. The second axis is actually the movement of the minute hand itself, so it is able to make another full rotation each 60 minutes. This is the mechanism produced by Vincent Calabrese and why the clock can faithfully be said offer a double tourbillon.

The purely mechanical movement in the L’Epee Double Tourbillon Clock must be hand-wound using a key and when full, offers power for an impressive 40 days. The clocks are said to be rather massive in size, with the titanium version weighing 35 kilograms – which is pretty large. The brass and gold version weigh a hefty 70 kilograms. The unique design of the spherical case is further decorated with black enamel painting.

L’Epee and Vincent Calabrese only produced two of these piece unique creations in each of the materials. This type of rarity is not uncommon among such special creations, especially as L’Epee is one of Europe’s last luxury clock makers.

lien: http://www.forbes.com/sites/arieladams/2014/07/03/lepee-double-flying-tourbillon-clock-produced-with-vincent-calabrese/#469c5cb86499