Hands-On: Live Long And Prosper! Urwerk’s New Watch Comes Straight Off The Starship Enterprise
As you might imagine, the UR-120 is host to a pretty wild mechanical operation. There’s a total of three revolutions that are pretty much continuously taking place. First, each carousel arm spins on a central axis. Then, on the individual displays, once the two parts of the arm begin to splinter, the now-separated rectangular studs spin on their own axis to eventually take the form of an upcoming hour. Once the split-up hour reaches its apex, a harp-shaped spring (that’s manufactured in-house by Urwerk) forces the closure of the separated studs. Finally, Urwerk says that each satellite also has to counter-spin in order to remain upright and legible.
The new movement that controls this unique sequence of events is the UR-20.01, a self-winding caliber that’s built around past Urwerk developments and that runs at 4 Hz with a 48-hour power reserve and features the company’s proprietary, extra-efficient Windfänger winding system (which can also be found on the UR-100 series of watches).
