While it isn’t glitzed up with new technology or a fancy story, the new Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy is most certainly a sleeper hit of Baselworld 2016 with an attractive dial, good-looking and useful movement, and all-around decent price in three new steel-case models.
Arnold & Son isn’t shy about saying that the Eight-Day Royal Navy is their own personal entrant into the “marine chronometer-inspired” wrist watch arena. This segment isn’t super crowded, but other brands like Ulysse Nardin tend to have more years of experience in producing watches like this. With that said, if you look at the minor details, then you’ll notice that Arnold & Son is indeed bringing its own unique marine chronometer-style watch to the table with the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy.
One of the most impressive things from an exclusivity standpoint is that Arnold & Son still produces under 1000 watches per year (about 800, last I heard) – and yet they are able to continually come out with new and interesting movements. This is, of course, due in part to their ownership by movement maker La Joux-Perret (which in turn is owned by Citizen). This gives Arnold & Son a unique access to people and machinery to do all kinds of crazy stuff like make a huge variety of movements, each in relatively small numbers – something most other brands of this size cannot enjoy.
At 43mm wide (water resistant to 30 meters) in a deceptively complicated (yet refined) steel case, the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy is also just 10.7mm thick with an expansive sapphire crystal caseback window showing off the new in-house-made manually wound movement (more on that in a moment). The dial layout is typical “marine chronometer” with the main dial for the time and a symmetrical layout for the power reserve indicator under 12 o’clock, and a subsidiary seconds dial over 6 o’clock.
What makes the dials really special is machine guilloche engraving which is then lacquered for color. The “squiggly line” style pattern (I’m certain that is how the French-speaking horologers of old would refer to them – “le squiggelle!”) are lovely and the dials of the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy watches are offered in either blue, black, or silver… along with good-looking matching calf leather straps.
For Baselworld 2017, Arnold & Son unveiled yet another masterfully skeletonized watch which conveys the brand’s conceptual DNA forward. The Arnold & Son DBG Skeleton is the most recent addition to the DBG (Double-Balance GMT) set which we reviewed the original, non-skeletonized variant of in larger detail back in 2013. For all those unfamiliar with this particular piece, it’s essentially two motions which share a winding platform, housed in one watch. Skeletonized, this watch looks incredible and is the perfect illustration of Arnold & Son’s relentless progress.First, a tiny bit more about Arnold & Son’s DBG system. Every time screen is powered by its barrel, with its equipment train, escapement, and equilibrium, while sharing a single winding system. While this isn’t necessarily unprecedented, because of the offsets of these shared elements when compared with the individual parts, it isn’t always pretty, and seldom skeletonized. But with all the DBG Skeleton, we see virtually perfect symmetry on the dial and caseback.The unusual nature of the in-house A&S1309 movement allows for some additional mechanical and functional advantages. For instance, due to the separate socket, gear train, and escapement/balance, the GMT purpose comprises a “minutes” hand instead of the conventional 24-hour counter only. Each time zone screen from the Arnold & Son DBG Skeleton can be set to incremental quarters of this hour. So for some Indian, Australian, and Canadian time zones which are off by half-hours, for example, the watch can account for this. Additionally, the Equation of Time display at 12 o’clock determines the difference between each display, as well as whether it is night or day in the next time zone. The A&S1309 beats at 21,600bph and comes with a 40-hour power reserve.
Legibility and sexiness is high on the dials which have, in my opinion, the right mixture of class and sophistication, as well as a tendency to grab attention. Strong yet traditional-looking hands add a sense of masculine purpose, and Arnold & Son was even able to insert a date indicator window into the mix (in the subsidiary seconds dial).
Powering the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy watches is the newly developed Arnold & Son caliber A&S1016 manually wound movement. At just 4.7mm thick, the movement offers a full eight days (192 hours) of power reserve (between two barrels) operating at 3Hz (21,600bph).
Arnold & Son is good about offering a lot of visual appeal to their movements, combining polished decoration as well as color through liberal use of blued-steel screws, gold chatons, and large synthetic ruby jewels. For the most part, the bridges are also “palladium-treated.” For the money, there is a lot of value here in terms of both visual design and functionality (not to mention that element of exclusivity I discussed previously).
As a dressier or business watch, the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy says a lot of good things about the wearer and given the versatility of the dial designs and strap colors, I think that Arnold & Son will do very well with these watches. There isn’t a lot of hidden details, meaning that what also is good about the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy collection is that consumers need only a few minutes to understand what they are getting. Arnold & Son matched the reference 1EDAS.U01A.D136A watch with the blue dial to a blue strap, and the reference 1EDAS.B01A.D134A gets a really cool matching gradient gray strap. The reference 1EDAS.S01A.D135A comes on a cool gradient (ahem, “hand-aged”) brown strap. Price for each of the Arnold & Son Eight-Day Royal Navy watches is $12,950 USD. arnoldandson.com