Ulysse Nardin Fires Up its Collection with the Blast, a Skeletonized Self-winding Tourbillon
Ulysse Nardin is one of 17 haute horlogerie watch brands participating in this week’s Geneva Watch Days, an exhibition of new timepieces taking place throughout the Swiss city. The Le Locle-based manufacture is taking the opportunity to introduce an entirely new collection, called Blast, whose attributes include a new, self-winding, skeletonized caliber with a flying tourbillon, a sculpted, multifaceted case design inspired by the lines of stealth aircraft, and a newly designed, “one-click” folding clasp.
Blue Blast
The flying tourbillon rotates inside an X-shaped cage.
The Blast continues in the vein of predecessors like the Executive Skeleton X, with its heavily skeletonized movement architecture on display behind a sapphire dial. Its flying tourbillon is ensconced in an X-shaped cage and the hour and minute hands are centered in the dial’s “shape-within-shape-within-shape” architecture: a large “X” framed inside a rectangle, framed inside the circle of the bezel. The movement, Caliber UN-172, is an evolution of the existing Caliber 171 that powered the first Executive Skeleton Tourbillon models, and adds a major upgrade: a platinum micro-rotor, visible from the front at 12 o’clock, which winds the silicon mainspring automatically to amass a three-day power reserve. (Caliber 171’s manual-winding design allowed for a seven-day power reserve.) Impressively, the movement achieves this complexity despite be...
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