Don't miss the next drop
Wind the crown at four and you have started the watch. Wind the crown at two and you have started something else: a second mainspring, coiled in a barrel of its own, that does no timekeeping whatsoever. Its only job is to store enough force to swing a hammer. A mechanical wrist alarm is two watches sharing one dial, and a vintage example can keep perfect time and still never make a sound, because somebody wound one of them and never the other. This Gruen Precision Alarm still has both.
Setting it is a ritual learned once and kept. The crown at two winds the alarm barrel, then pulls out so the arrow-tipped hand can be walked round to the chosen hour, read against the inner scale printed on the dial. Push the crown home and it is armed. What follows is not a chime. The hammer delivers a rapid run of strikes against a fixed post, and the steel back of the case becomes the diaphragm that turns them into sound, which is why these buzz rather than ring. A bedside alarm can afford a proper gong. A watch this size has to borrow its own case to be heard at all.
The movement is Gruen’s caliber 950 CA, stamped 950SS CA on the movement itself, and those two extra letters point to the sweep seconds hand. It sits on an A. Schild 1568, the alarm caliber A. Schild arrived at by taking its 1475 and adding a date at three. Both of those are on the dial in front of us, a thin central seconds hand and a date window, and behind it sit seventeen jewels, 18,000 beats per hour, and the two barrels doing their separate jobs.
The dial says Gruen Precision Alarm, and the middle word is worth being straight about. Gruen had spread Precision across its Swiss-movement catalogue by this point, from ladies’ dress watches to automatics, so it marked a range rather than certifying a grade. The movement makes the same admission itself: it is stamped UNADJUSTED, in plain letters, where only a watchmaker would ever look. We like it better for that.
The case is 35mm of stainless steel, round and 43.5mm lug to lug, with sharply faceted lugs and a domed acrylic crystal standing proud of the smooth bezel. The silver dial has kept its sunburst, light speckling out toward the minute track, applied faceted markers still catching the light. The hands and the centre stack have darkened, which on a dial this bright reads as depth rather than damage. There is a small chip at the edge of the crystal near four to five o’clock, fine scratching across the crystal and the case flanks, a caseback that has taken its share of scratches, and grime settled in the case opening where the back seats. We would rather list all of it than quietly polish it away.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, paired on a powder blue Italian suede strap with our signed buckle. Wind them both. One spring keeps the time, the other makes certain you notice it.
