Ressence TYPE 3 EE Eucalyptus Green Watch Review
The Ressence Type 3 EE Eucalyptus Green is the latest creation from the team of geniuses based at the brand’s Antwerp HQ. Founded by industrial designer Benoît Mintiens, the company stunned the watch-collecting community when it unveiled its inaugural oil-filled watch back in 2010. Having amassed numerous awards, the brand continues to excite horophiles with its unique expressions of Haute Horlogerie. Mechanically curious Mark McArthur-Christie, a man who regularly tinkers away in his garage with a spanner and can of 3-in-One oil close to hand, shares his thoughts on this new model.
Ressence Watch Review
A few years ago, as a project, I filled one of my watches with oil. It’s not the sort of watch I’m allowed to talk about here because it was quartz, digital and cost less than a tenner (sorry Boss – I used the Q word). But I wanted to test a theory that a cheap watch was as good as an expensive one when it came to diving. I’m talking about ‘good’ in a purely utilitarian sense.
I found some silicone oil, got out my screwdrivers and set to work. Every time I thought I’d finished and nipped off to make a coffee, I’d get back and there, laughing at me, would be another bubble behind the display. It took four hours, a lot of swearing, ten metres of kitchen roll and a bench swimming in the stuff to achieve a bubble-free case and a slightly bemused and oily dog.
The perils of making an oil-filled watch
Having smugly put my newly-filled, depthtastic watch on, I drove to the office, only to find my shirtsleeve almost as oily as the dog. The wretched thing had leaked as the liquid inside expanded. It wasn’t a cheap shirt, either.
Completely undeterred by my own stupidity, I tried doing the same thing with an old analogue Swatch. The dial, because of the lack of refraction from the oil, looked fabulous. The watch, on the other hand, stopped dead.
To be fair, my £10 digital survived the 120m saturation diving tests a kindly ex-Royal Engineer diver subjected it to, but it was to Haute Horlogerie what Greggs is Haute Cuisine. The Swatch, on the other hand, hasn’t worked since.
I shan’t be asking for a job at Ressence. Your business is safe, Mr Mintiens.
Ressence – masters of the oil-filled watch
These two experiments were firmly at the opposite end of the scale from Antwerp’s latest offering. Or, for that matter, any Ressence at all. With the Type 3 you won’t get bubbles (for reasons we’ll explain later) and you can wear your best Turnbull & Asser without any need to worry. Not only that, you’ll have one of the most unusual and mechanically interesting watches you can buy.
Ressence Type 3EE – how does it work?
First things first. People often ask “So how does a watch filled with oil even work?!” After all, balance wheels are designed to spin in air, not oil. To get a balance to run effectively in a liquid as dense as oil you’d need a mainspring putting out the torque of the Ark Royal’s engines and a gear train to match. The Type 3 EE – like the rest of the Ressence range – uses a neat two-part case. The top, dial-side half contains the oil; 37.57 ml of it. The bottom half is oil-free (apart from the usual minuscule amounts of lubricant) and contains the movement – the two halves are completely separate.
This then raises the question of how power gets transmitted from the oil-free movement side of the case to the oil-filled dial side. Surely you’re going to get the stuff everywhere including over the dog. The answer? Magnets. Using only the minute gear, the magnets transmit the power of the movement to the discs positioned dial side. The discs tell the time, amongst other things. The two halves of the watch are separated by a Grade 5 titanium case that also carries the lugs.
But heck, that just raises the question of how the movement stays free from being magnetised. More cleverness. The magnets that drive the time-telling discs in the upper case are wee – just 1 mm in diameter and 0.5 mm thick. They’re mounted as far away from the balance and balance spring as possible, at least as far as possible within something measuring just 15 mm in height. Then, Ressence has used internal conductors to stop magnetism from reaching the balance, so, in effect, the movement sits inside the equivalent of a Faraday cage. Sadly, you won’t ever see all this. That’s a shame because even the tiny magnetic gearbox and transmission that transfers power from the engine to the dial side are things of engineering beauty.
Ressence TYPE 3 EE Eucalyptus Green – a new colour
So far, so Ressence. Mechanically, the Type 3 EE is identical to its fellow Type 3s. The difference comes in its use of colour – very different indeed from the high contrast design of its stablemates. The firm calls this version “Eucalyptus Green”, almost a khaki. It’s a colour that would look washed out on most watches, but the refractivity of the oil-filled top case makes it appear richer. The shade of the usual red, blue and yellow highlights is toned down too, to match. Having a 44 mm diameter case to play with just adds to the impact. And the hour disc now has the hour markers for every two hours – a little simpler than the original, although no one was complaining.
Ressence TYPE 3 EE Eucalyptus Green – the dial
It’s difficult to describe a Ressence dial, simply because the usual ‘at 12 o’clock’ stuff doesn’t work – the whole face of the watch constantly changes. The date wheel runs around the outside of the dial with its indicator fixed at 6 o’clock. Everything else runs on convex Grade 5 titanium discs. The 12-hour subdial (subdisc? Is that even a thing?) is simple enough to spot, and it rotates inside the minute disc, with the minute ‘hand’ pivoting around the dial’s centre. That all means you read the time as you would on a regulator – hours and minutes on separate indicators.
Image – Angus Davies’ wrist (measuring 19cm in circumference)
Then there are three non-time subdiscs – the day of the week, oil temperature and the runner/shock absorber (the smallest disc).
You have to do a bit of work to tell which day it is – Mondays to Fridays are white with the weekends highlighted in red, there’s nothing as everyday as ‘Mon’. Oil temperature doesn’t give you any numbers, but shows you relatively speaking, how warm or chilly the oil inside your watch is thanks to a minute bimetallic strip expanding and contracting behind the disc. Then the running indicator (one revolution every 180 secs) is the nearest you’ll get to running seconds, but this disc also acts as a fluid, rather than mechanical, shock absorber. That’s why you’ll see it move if you give the watch a bit of a shake.
It all sounds horribly complicated but it’s surprisingly quick and simple to get used to.
Ressence TYPE 3 EE Eucalyptus Green – closing thoughts
Now, remember my shirt cuff from my own oil-filled watch experiment? You won’t get that happening with a Ressence even though the firm fills their watches at a downright nippy -5° C. That’s because Benoît Mintiens is clever and I’m not. Within the Type 3 there is a tiny set of bellows inside the case that extends or compresses to allow for the way the oil expands and contracts. You’re fine anywhere between -5° and +55° C. In other words, in the real world, you can wear your Type 3 pretty much anywhere.
But when you wear it, you’ll find yourself taking it off and simply holding it. This is a tactile, satisfying watch to handle as well as to look at.
Perhaps because of the sheer thought behind all the complexity, everything is usable – the user interface is about as simple as it could be. And all this powered from the very un-haute ETA 2824/2, even though the engineering and adaptation is Ressence’s equivalent of a Cosworth version of a Ford engine. If ever you wanted proof that watches aren’t about movements but what you do with them, this watch is it.
Ressence has pulled off that rare thing in Watchworld – a watch that looks simple but with enough complication and sheer difference behind the dial to make even the most cynical of watch people do a double take. Unfortunately, it’s a watch that hides its complexity almost completely. Personally, I’d love to see a skeleton Ressence that affords sight of all this cleverness at work.
Further reading
Ressence TYPE 3 EE Eucalyptus Green – technical specification
- Model: Ressence TYPE 3 EE Eucalyptus Green
- Case: polished Grade 5 titanium, diameter 44 mm, height 15 mm, water resistance 1 ATM (10 m), sapphire crystal to the front and solid case back.
- Functions: runner 180″, minutes, hours, days of the week, date, oil temperature
- Movement: patented ROCS3 – Ressence Orbital Convex System driven by a customised ETA 2824/2 calibre, frequency 28,800 vph (4 Hz), 47 jewels, power reserve 36 hours
- Strap: honeycomb strap with titanium ardillon buckle
- Price: CHF 38,200 excluding taxes (RRP as of 23.8.2023)