Richard Mille is never one to disappoint. Regarded as the father of futuristic mechanical watchmaking, Richard Mille constantly sets the bar higher with not only the watches from his eponymous brand, but also in the occasional side-projects of micro-mechanical engineering, like the Planetarium Tellurium (seen here on The Watch Quote) from a few years back and most recently, the Horloge Porte-Bonheur, also referred to as the “Quebec Clock” that was unveiled only two months ago. The man certainly knows how to grab out attention, and deservedly so.
With a group of journalists including my friends Simon Cudd from 0024watchworld.com, Frank Geelen from Monochrome Watches and David Bredan from aBlogToWatch.com, Richard Mille Europe organized an exclusive tour of Richard Mille’s production facilities, including a special detour to the well as a detour to the Cité des Microtechniques in the town of Porrentuy within the canton of Jura to check out this one one-of-a-kind mechanical work of art.
To give you some background on this incredible clock, the Republic and Canton of Jura and Richard Mille wanted to offer Quebec a unique gift to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the city of Quebec in 2008, and that’s when the project started. With a closer partnership between Richard Mille and the technical college of Porrentruy and the Neuchatel Haute Ecole Arc, it took 6,571 hours of research, 5,451 individual components and 3,952 hours of assembly and fine-tuning to make the Horloge Porte-Bonheur (which actually translates to “lucky charm clock”) a reality.
Looking beyond the featherweight materials, unusual movement architectures and F1-inspired aesthetics found in the brand’s watches, it would be pretty difficult to mistake the Horloge Porte-Bonheur clock for anything but a Richard Mille. Sure, it stands at 3.5 meters tall and weighs just shy of 2’000 Kg, but once you get over the sheer size of it, it’s easy to appreciate it as another avant-garde creation from Richard Mille in a new, unique format.
The most recognizable feature is the dial with it’s exposed movement. It’s all there: the retro Atari-inspired Arabic numerals printed on the underside of the anti-reflective treated glass, the matte black baseplate, the raised flange with sunken applied 5-miute markers and the satin-brushed skeleton hands. They even included the dashboard-style yellow small seconds hand!
The movement itself will also appear familiar, with several elements from Richard Mille watches, such as the bridges from RM003 and RM055, the barrel details from the RM003 and RM020 pocket watch, and the F1 engine-inspired baseplate from the RM005. But this is far from being just a supersized Richard Mille movement.
The movement boasts several complications, the most significant being the constant force mechanism, implemented as a remontoir d’egalité. This compensates for the negative influences on timekeeping stemming from the weight of the hands and the variations in energy transmission through the gears. A cam mechanism releases and blocks the force of the daily weight transmitted by two big wheels. As a result of the constant force mechanism, the minutes hand advances one “step” every 30 seconds.
Besides the constant force mechanism, the Horloge Porte-Bonheur includes another rare complication, the equation of time. A slow-moving driving weight operates as a mobile slide-contact along a sinuous red line etched on the glass panel on the left hand side of the clock to display the equation of time, where a scale is engraved on the weight (here missing the “0”, but not to worry as the clock will be disassembled and corrected before it heads to its permanent home in Quebec), with the red line indicating the variations in minutes between “apparent solar time” and “mean solar time” throughout the year.
On the opposite right glass panel, the clock provides a second time zone set to the canton of Jura in Switzerland, the home of Richard Mille. Like the equation of time, the second time zone is indicated on a driving weight, with a 24-hour scale on the glass.
The other major complication is a perpetual calendar (in French, obviously!), with the date displayed on rolling bars. Notice how the gears are cleverly revealed to serve as visual separators between the different indications.
And besides the mechanical accomplishments, it wouldn’t be a Richard Mille without all the hand-finishing that goes into this piece of haute horlogerie, such as satin-brushed surfaces, polished edges and bead-blasted components.
Our readers in Quebec definitely have something to look forward to this summer, when the Richard Mille Quebec Clock will be installed in its permanent home in the Jardins de l’Hôtel de Ville in Quebec.
A special thanks to the team at Richard Mille Europe for organizing this awesome experience.
More information on www.richardmille.com
