You know me and my watch fetish. Well, there’s one rarified section of the watch industry where mere mortals dare not tread. While you and I can’t “go there,” MB&F certainly went, producing the Horological Machine #3, a dual read-out crazy clock with a large date wheel and an odd inverted power transmission system using bearings and disks.


What does that mean in Swatch terms? It means this is a piece of real innovation in a market saturated with the same old same old. Watchmakers like MB&F are kind of the funny car builders of the watch world: they strip everything out and then put it back together in odd ways and then make them belch fire.

MB&F will make 25 of these next year and they will, without a doubt, be purchased by men of some means. You and I will never see these and, sadly, we’ll probably never see the innovations within. But they sure are pretty.

HM3’s twin cones indicate hours and minutes respectively, with the hour cone capped by a day/night indicator. An over-sized date wheel – the wheel is actually a larger diameter than the movement - allows for large, clearly legible numbers, with the date indicated by a neatly engraved triangle.