Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary tourbillon perpetual calendar – Planetaria Watch Review
The Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary tourbillon perpetual calendar – Planetaria is a one-of-a-kind Grand Complication. Its functions include a perpetual calendar, retrograde date, day and month, moon phases in Northern and Southern hemispheres and a double-axis armillary tourbillon. Packed with an array of technical highlights, this pièce unique, is beautifully finished. Mark McArthur-Christie shares his thoughts in his own distinctive style.
Vacheron Constantin Manufacture – patience is essential
Sitting outside in the Plan-les-Ouates sunshine, what do Vacheron’s top watchmakers talk about over their lunchtime sandwiches? Bear in mind these are the craftsmen who spent 8 years putting together the utterly and wonderfully barking Reference 57260 Masterpiece, a watch so complicated it can tell you the time before it even happens.
Do they deconstruct Descartes’ arguments over a ham and cheese roll? Recompose a couple of Bach fugues on the back of a napkin while they’re enjoying their coffee? Work out the torque of Harrison mainsprings as they stroll back to their benches? Their output is so utterly boggling that it’s almost impossible to conceive them chatting about what’s good on Netflix or debating FC Basel’s chances against Neuchâtel Xamax FCS at the weekend.
Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon – 745 parts
And now they’ve produced the Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar – Planetaria. A watch with 745 components and a perpetual calendar that will only need adjusting in 2100. This is a show-off piece in the best possible sense and it’s taken even the top-flight watchmakers of Les Cabinotiers team four years to plan and make. Think about whatever you’ve been up to for the last four years and feel inadequate.
Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon – Calibre 1991
At the heart of the watch is the VC’s new Grand Complication movement, called the Calibre 1991 (presumably after the average IQs of the watchmakers who made it). And at the heart of the heart is the watch’s double-axis armillary tourbillon. This is intended to create the sense of a spinning celestial sphere using the tourbillon’s cage. First making its appearance in the 57-complicated ref. 57260, it has been carried over into the Planetaria.
Practically, like any other tourbillon, it minimises the effect of gravity on the watch’s balance by keeping the balance in a state of constant movement. One can argue that a tourbillon isn’t really necessary in a wristwatch; a watch on a wrist is usually stationary for only minimal amounts of time, barely long enough for gravity to get a look-in. But, at this level of watchmaking, it’s about what’s possible rather than what’s a necessity.
Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon – cylindrical hairspring
In the same way, this watch was never going to have a conventional, flat balance. What would be the challenge in that? Instead, the Planataria has a cylindrical balance-spring; invented in 1814 by Jacques-Frédéric Houriet, one of Breguet’s pals. Because the spring has no terminal curves, it gives the tourbillon a perfectly concentric beat (of 18,000 vph or 2.5 Hz in this case). So, not only is it beautiful to look at, it makes the movement more accurate too.
Likewise, the escapement on the Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar is not yer average pin-pallet set-up. It uses a silicon balance wheel and the lever’s pallets are diamond – all designed to reduce friction and do away with the watchmaker’s perpetual bane of lubrication. In most watches, oil begins with the best of intentions, lubricating moving parts and helping everything tick along smoothly. But then, over time, its knack of simultaneously becoming thicker as it dries and trapping dust and tiny particles turns it into an effective grinding paste. Getting rid of oil, especially in a watch escapement, is a good thing.
On either side of the armillary tourbillon are two, tiny, spinning half-globes each weighing around 0.12g. That’s, near as spit, half a gram less than the weight of a five pound note. One imagines the VC atelier swear box is well-funded as a single craftsman then has to painstakingly gold leaf the continents onto the surface of each minute semi-planet. And those continents aren’t just flat. Get your loupe out and you can see detail – proper detail. Just above the Indian sub-continent, there are the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Have a look down the middle of Russia and there are the Urals. A smoked half-crystal shrouding each hemisphere shows where night meets day on each. And their job? Simply to provide you with 24 hour time in the northern and southern hemispheres as well as acting as a day/night indicator.
Should you take your Planetaria travelling, just a few pushes of the button on the crown will advance the time, an hour with each press, keeping your world time up-to-date.
Then, behind the hour and minute hand on the time dial is another hemisphere with two gold-leafed representations of the moon. So why two? So that, just like the two half-Earths, you can see what’s going on, lunar-wise, in both northern and southern hemispheres.
Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon – no simple date window
Now, you didn’t expect the Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar to have anything as simple as a normal date window, did you? Oh no, the day, date and month all have a retrograde complication and are fully perpetual. Just to make things even more interesting, the date scale runs around the crown side of the dial edge. The day is on the northern hemisphere’s globe and the month on the southern hemisphere’s, er, hemisphere. Imagine the sheer watchmaking ability you need to make a perpetual day/date calendar that’ll adjust for every date change and leap year up to 2100. Imagine, then, the conversation that went on when someone said “You know what, we could have it in three different, independent places on the dial!” I wonder where they buried the body?
Where four o’clock would be on a conventional dial is a leap year indicator, powered by its own sub-mechanism. With this number of complications, you’d expect to spend as much time winding your Planetaria as looking at it, but no. The power reserve on the 95-jewel, manual winding movement is around 60 hours.
If one looks at the dialside of the movement, the complexity of the retrogrades is easy to see (if not to understand). You can see the indicators and their mechanisms, the plate around being chamfered to allow its free movement.
Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary Tourbillon – case
But the movement shouldn’t get things all its own way. The case is worth a close look, too. Yes, it’s 18-carat pink gold, brushed and polished, but take a look at the side opposite the crown. There’s a small, rectangular sapphire porthole that lets you see the tourbillon do its work as it spins. Turn the watch over and the display back lets you see more tourbillon action.
And it wouldn’t have been sufficient just to make a watch that did all this. VC’s elite then had to finish it to the usual VC standards. You already know about the gold-leaf titanium hemispheres, but then there’s the circular satin finish 24-hour counters they rotate within. The date, day and month indicators are printed underneath the sapphire glass ‘seas’ that surround both. The time dial’s Roman numerals are polished gold appliques. The movement features anglage, polishing, snailing and graining.
It’s little wonder VC’s Les Cabinotiers team has only made a single Planetarium, although they would apparently not be surprised to receive a request for another. Given the finishing, the complications and the concept itself, those watchmakers deserve to enjoy their sandwiches whilst watching an eager queue form outside on Chemin du Tourbillon.
Further reading
https://www.vacheron-constantin.com
Technical specifications
- Model: Vacheron Constantin Les Cabinotiers Armillary tourbillon perpetual calendar – Planetaria
- Reference: 9820C/000R-B707
- Case: 18-carat pink gold 5N; diameter 46mm; height 20.20mm; exhibition caseback.
- Functions: Hour; minutes; small seconds; double-axis armillary tourbillon; perpetual calendar; retrograde date, day and month; moon phases in Northern and Southern hemispheres; Northern and Southern day/night and 24h indication
- Movement: Calibre 1991; hand-wound movement; frequency 18,000vph (2.5Hz); 94 jewels; power reserve = approximately 60 hours; 745 components
- Strap: Dark brown Missisppiensis alligator leather strap with alligator leather inner shell paired with an 18-carat pink gold folding clasp
- Price: Price on application
- Pieces: Pièce unique