Review: Chopard L.U.C. Tech Strike One

For the true watch connoisseur—I’m talking the big bucks collector here, the kind of guy who has a separate room for his luxury watches—there are three pillars of interest that make up a true high horology watch. One, provenance, two, quality and three, complication. You want those things, you’re going to pay a pretty penny for them. A watch that chimes from Patek Philippe, for example? You’d better sell your house, because you’ll need all that and possibly a little bit more to fund it. But what if there were a shortcut, a hack if you will, to get you those three pillars for the cost of, say, a Rolex Daytona?

Provenance

Can you tell me when Patek Philippe was founded? 1839 you say? (Buzzer sound) Wrong! Antoine Norbert de Patek—a Blackadder-esque name if ever I heard one—first tried out watchmaking with a fellow called François Czapek first, who went full Stuart Sutcliffe and left the band in 1845. Looking for a new sound, Patek finally met his Philippe in 1851—one Jean Adrien Philippe, to be exact—having seen the man’s keyless winding and setting system in action at the Paris Exposition.

Why am I telling you this? Because just nine short years later, Messrs Patek and Philippe got a little bit of competition in the form of Louis-Ulysse Chopard. Remember his initials. They’ll come in handy later. Stories like this usually come with a sting in the tail, however, a depressing journey of bankruptcy and change as the modern world takes its toll, only for the name to be reanimated by the Umbrella Corporation to mechanically recover any last vestiges of profit to be had from a dead man’s name—but no.

Chopard was, is and continues to be an independent brand, equipped to the gills with watchmaking ability, the likes of which would be fit for the very best brands in the world. Case-making facility? Check. Electrical discharge machines? Check. Its very own foundry where it smelts gold in-house? Check.

It’s not all whizz-bang technology and raging cauldrons of molten metal, however. Chopard continues to acknowledge the traditions of old within its L.U.C. collection—points if you remember what that stands for—employing a group of top-notch watchmakers to hand-finish and assemble its highest grade of movement.

But before we get into that, there’s the elephant in the room that needs addressing: how does Chopard afford to have all this fancy equipment and top-notch capability if, really, we know full well it doesn’t sell watches in anywhere near the number a company like Patek Philippe does? Well, it’s quite simple: Chopard doesn’t just make movements for itself, it offers those service to other watchmakers looking to do the same. Got to have business smarts if you’re going to keep at it in 2021!

Quality

So, what’s this fancy pants facility all about then? Well, since 1996, it’s been quite specifically all about the Calibre 96. Cute name. I’ll set the bar high: Philippe DuFour—know him? He’s basically a legend in high-end movement manufacture—called the Calibre 96 one of his favourites. That’s like Pablo Picasso giving your drawing a like on Instagram. Or you subscribing to our YouTube channel.

The Calibre 96 is a no-holds-barred approach to making a base movement to the highest standards watchmaking allows. How does one do that? By enlisting the expertise of fellow watchmaking mastermind Michel Parmigiani of Parmigiani fame. He too has a facility that makes very fancy movements for other very fancy companies, so who better to give you a few a pointers?

The stats: the Calibre 96 has two mainsprings, stacked one on top of the other, for 65 hours of evenly metered power. They could have had one big mainspring, but then you get problems with uneven torque throughout the wind, and that’s no good for accuracy. There’s a micro rotor, that’s in 22-carat gold so its diminutive size doesn’t impact winding ability. And then there’s the finishing.

When you talk about Patek Philippe, what you’re really talking about is finishing. Movements aren’t made the way they used to be, hand-wrought from raw metal; now, every part is first whittled by machine into its most basic form, from which a skilled watchmaker turns it into a jewel. It’s the same at Patek Philippe, it’s the same at Chopard. Only the most hardcore go at it by hand from scratch.

So here you get the polishing of screws, countersinks and bevels, the striping of bridges and the turning of plates. But I say that a lot, and really it doesn’t mean much when you gloss over it like that. Machines can do it to a certain degree, but that’s not the case here. This is the work of veteran human hands, and when you get in unreasonably close, you can tell. The mirror finish isn’t just shiny, it’s got that wet gloss look like a freshly waxed car. The striping creates three-dimensional waves that are nothing more than a trick of the light. The forty-five–degree bevelling around the perimeter of the bridges is so fine you can almost feel the tediousness it took to do it. The Calibre 96 isn’t just a movement—it’s a masterpiece.

Complication

Written somewhere in the holy text of all things watchmaking, it is said that the minute repeater is the finest complication known to man. Probably. I mean, the minute repeater’s legendary status is well deserved, because it is not only one of the most difficult and complex mechanisms in a watchmaker’s lexicon, requiring extreme skill and experience to build, it’s also the complication that takes time the furthest. What do I mean by that pretentiously cryptic sentiment? Well, a chronograph lets you capture time, control it; a double chronograph lets you splice it in half; a perpetual calendar lets you hold the solar system in the palm of your hand. There’s one thing that’s consistent here: it’s all visual.

A minute repeater takes time and converts it into an entirely different format for an entirely different sense—with nothing more than gears, levers and springs. Chiming mechanisms have been in existence so long—and digital versions are so commonplace—that I think the mind-boggling concept of the minute repeater is easy to gloss over. But never mind that: the logical side of a minute repeater’s grandeur is nothing compared to the emotive. Hear the chime and you’ll be smitten.

But as has already been mentioned, a minute repeater is not a cheap thing and this is supposed to be about high horology on a—relative—budget. The cheapest minute repeaters already cost as much as a Porsche and the most expensive are, well—they won’t tell me how much they are. Need to know, and I certainly don’t.

But there’s a compromise. It’s not the full might and glory of a minute repeater, but it’s a wonderful taste of it: the hour strike. Just like the Casio you had as a kid, this Chopard L.U.C. Tech Strike One will alert you once every sixty minutes that the hour has struck—but in a purely mechanical way. And Chopard lets you enjoy that on every level: the sound of course, but the visual complication, too. A litany of parts exposed at the top of the 40mm titanium case, culminating in the familiar hammer and gong, are exposed to enjoy with your eyes as well as your ears, elevating the watch into the realms of true high horology—and for no more than a Rolex Daytona. The best bit? If the strike gets annoying, you can simply push the button and the indicator will switch to the off position. Could you ever figure out how to make your Casio do that?

If you want to beat the system, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. The Chopard Tech Strike One is an unusual, incredible watch that, quite simply, nobody knows about. It wears well, it looks great, it impressed one of the very best watchmakers of this generation, it’s beautifully finished and contains a complication in touching distance of the ultimate. How do you say no to that?

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