Franck Muller Vanguard 7 Days Power Reserve Skeleton

Watchmaking is about the long game and this year, at the Geneva presentations, we see more and more watchmakers address longevity in both the way the watches look and feel and, perhaps most importantly, how long they run. One of the biggest draws for people as they take their first steps into the world of high-end watchmaking is the fact that there are no electronics here.

The question of how a watch keeps working without a battery often motivates people to look beneath the dial. This is certainly true of everyone who works at WOW! More broadly speaking, given that everything in our lives is powered by something — fossil fuel in most cases. The idea that something could function on nothing more than kinetic energy is fascinating.

Franck Muller, famously known as the Master of Complications, certainly recognises this very basic aspect of falling in love with your watch. The Vanguard 7 Days Power Reserve Skeleton picks up on this passion and goes deep with it. Here, not only will the watch simply keep going, seemingly by way of mysterious mechanical magic, but the entire presentation is transparent — thanks to the heavy skeletonising evident in Calibre FM1740. The idea here, in our view, is to encourage a relationship with the watch because it is literally powered by the wearer — this is a manually wound calibre, so one will have to wind it via the crown.

On a more practical level, the Vanguard 7 Days Power Reserve Skeleton defies the reputation of mechanical watches for needing constant attention, as it literally keeps on ticking for seven days (on a full wind). When winding up the watch, one can see how the gears respond to the action from the crown. Unfortunately, there is no power reserve indicator here, with the marker on the balance actually being the regulating index.

Having such a long power reserve is useful because one could go through a few different watches in a week before returning to the Vanguard 7 Days and still find it keeping the correct time. On a more fun note, if one is so inclined, one can attempt to overwind the mainspring and see how the movement responds. Seriously though, winding the watch up to the max is really the best thing as it will deliver the best performance when the mainspring is at or close to maximum torque.

On that note, as is clearly obvious here, and par for the course when it comes to the Vanguard, the skeletonising is of the contemporary sort. Another thing to note is that the transparent seconds track at six o’clock is in sapphire, but this depends on the case material. There are actually five versions of the Vanguard 7 Days Power Reserve, in five different materials: white gold, pink gold, stainless steel, carbon, and titanium. We shot the titanium version, which has an interesting white PVD treatment.

Specifications

Movement Manual-winding Calibre FM1740

Power Reserve Seven days

Case 44 millimetres x 53.7 millimetres in white gold, pink gold, stainless steel, carbon, and titanium; water resistant to 30 metres

Strap Rubber and nylon with deployant buckle

Price S$55,619

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