Ball Engineer Hydrocarbon Spacemaster Orbital Watch: Some Watch!

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Friday, June 18th, 2010


ABlogtoRead posted a little bit on the Ball Engineer Hydrocarbon Spacemaster, a mouthful of a watch with some of the most striking styling I’ve seen in a while.

I got to see this piece back at JCK and was extremely impressed. Ball is famous for their gas tube lume and they cover their watches with the stuff. The expected life of the lume is about 25 years, at which point you can have a watchmaker replace it.

This watch, however, has another trick up its sleeve. There is a small rotor on the bottom that you can turn to lock the internal automatic counterweight? Why? Well, maybe you’re chopping wood, punching a wall, or pummeling a side of beef with your fists. Regardless, you can simply turn the rotor to lock the internal mechanism so it doesn’t spin out of control and destroy the movement.

The rest is pretty standard – GMT, date, chrono – but trust me: this thing shines like a National guitar at night. It will be about $4,000 and they’re making 999 of them.

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